“He’s down in the camp hospital with scarlet fever. I met Dick Harley in town this morning and he told me.”
“Gee! That’s tough luck, isn’t it?”
“And it’s not the worst,” continued Cavvy. “Dick says they’re likely to get marching orders any day, and of course if they sail for France before Jack gets well, he’ll be left behind.”
McBride gave a long, expressive whistle. “That would be the extreme limit, wouldn’t it? It’s a shame. Jack’s one of the dandiest chaps I ever met. He’d be all broken up to have them go and—What’s the matter? See one?”
Cavanaugh shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he returned, his eyes fixed on the naked branches of some tall trees towering up above the smaller growth quite a distance from the road. “They look pretty good to me, though.”
“They don’t look bad,” agreed Micky, swinging the stout hickory stick he had cut and trimmed earlier in the afternoon. “Of course you can’t tell for sure at this distance, but they’re worth looking up. Wonder how you get in there?”
Cavanaugh was already pushing into the undergrowth that edged the road. “This is the only way, I guess,” he answered. “They can’t be so very far back.”
“I’ll bet they’re hickory or butternut,” grumbled Ritter pessimistically.
Nevertheless, he followed the others into the tangled wilderness of briers, bushes and young trees which seemed to extend indefinitely over this remote and unfamiliar section of Fairview County.
As he plodded along over marshy ground to which belated winter had brought only a thin crusting of frost, the stout chap wished fervently that he had found some excuse for evading the excursion this afternoon. It wouldn’t have been easy, for Cavvy had a way of keeping the fellows up to the mark, but he might have managed if he had only had the sense, and then all this unpleasantness would have been avoided.