So as a dough-boy he went to Camp Meade, but in three months wore the stripes of a sergeant. Radiant, he tumbled in at home a week later, such a joyful lad that he sputtered ecstasy and slang. Tremendous he looked in his uniform, fresh colored from cold barracks and constant exercise and in an undreamed pink of condition.
“I never considered you a delicate person,” the woman spoke up to the six feet two of him, “but now you’re overpowering, you’re beefy.”
“Couldn’t kill me with an axe,” assented Dick cheerfully, and back in her brain a hideous, unformed thought stirred, of things that were not axes, that could kill easily even this magnificent young strength.
They were as gay together as if all the training and the uniform and the stir and panoply of war were merely a new and rather thrilling game. She saw to it that there were theatres and dances and girls doing, and the lad threw himself into everything with, however, a delicious grumble after each party:
“I don’t get a chance to see you at all.” That was music.
And then the short, gay leave was done and Dick back at Meade again. The winter months went, with letters thickly coming and going. And late in May he wrote that he had leave once more for two days, and instantly he was there. There was no word as to what the sudden leave meant, but they knew. When it was possible our soldiers due to sail were given this short flying visit to their homes. Transports were going all the time now; great ship followed great ship till it seemed as if the Atlantic must be brown with khaki. And not the nearest of any must know when his time was, for this was one bit of the national patriotism, to guard the knowledge of sailing ships from the enemy. So the boy told nothing, but his eyes embraced her with a burning word unspoken. And her eyes met them with certain knowledge.
“Let’s cut out the girls and balls this time,” he said. And one day, apropos of nothing: “You’re a peach.”
She smiled back cheerfully as women were smiling at boys all over the United States at that date. “I couldn’t bear it if you weren’t in the service,” she said.
In a few minutes—it appeared—the two days were over. “Run across for one second and say good-by to Lynnette,” she suggested, when the racing hours were within three of their end. Lynnette was the girl next door who had grown up in the shadow of Dick’s bigness, a little thing two years younger, shy and blunt and not just a pretty girl, but with luminous eyes and a heart of gold. Dick had to be prodded a bit to be nice to Lynnette.
“I don’t want to miss one second of you, honey,” he objected.