Frank did not seem to be worrying about such a remote possibility.
“No, I don’t think they’re numerous enough to risk an encounter with a dozen armed Tommies looking for trouble, just as Pudge here would look for his breakfast,” he observed.
“Now we’ve got the place all to ourselves,” said Billy. “There’s such a thing as being overcrowded, as the backwoodsman remarked when he heard that another family had started a clearing three miles away from his shack. But I’d like to have been down in Dunkirk when they sighted those gulls coming sailing along, ever so high up in the air.”
“Dories and dingbats, but I warrant you there was some excitement to the square inch,” Pudge insinuated.
Frank laughed as he stretched himself out on a bench to rest.
“You missed a grand sight,” he told them.
“Lots of people scared, I take it?”
“Well, they were fairly crazy,” he was told. “If a menagerie of wild animals had broken loose and come to town it could hardly have created more of a panic than when that cry sounded through the streets: ‘The Germans are coming!’ Men, women and children all ran this way and that. Some dodged down into cellars, while others crawled under front door-stoops, as though that would save them in case a bomb burst close by. It was a panic, all right, and I never saw anything like it in all my experience.”
“They must have felt silly after they found out what it really was?” Billy went on to say.
“Oh, not so very much,” he was told by the one who had been on the spot, and was in a position to relate things at first hand. “You see a good many started to make out they knew the dots must be birds, and said they had just been carrying on in that excited way for a lark.”