“Now, young man, since we seem to be in your way, perhaps you will take us to some place to wait for my nephew.” Then seeing that he looked rather strange she added: “But perhaps you have never met. This is my nephew, Mr. Sands. If you will tell me who you are——”
“Williams is my name,” he said. “I—Major Williams. I—I’ve met your nephew—that is—— Private Sands, take these ladies to the Y. M. C. A. hut, and report back here in an hour.”
Tish did not like this; nor did I. As Tish observed later, he might have been speaking to the butler.
“He might at least have said ‘Mister,’ and a ‘please’ hurts no one,” she said. As for giving him only an hour when we had come a hundred miles—it was absurd. But war does queer things.
It had indeed strangely altered Tish’s nephew. We were all worried about him that day. It was his manner that was odd. He seemed, as Tish said later, suppressed. When for instance we wished to take him back to headquarters and present him to the colonel he said at once: “Who? Me? The colonel! Say, you’d better get this and get it right: I’m nothing here. I’m less than nothing. Why, the colonel could walk right over me on the parade ground and never even know he’d stepped on anything. If I was a louse and he was a can of insect powder——”
“Now see here, Charlie Sands,” Tish said firmly, “I’ll trouble you to remember that there are certain words not in my vocabulary; and louse is one of them.”
“Still, a vocabulary is a better place than some others I can think of,” he observed.
“What is more,” Tish added, “you are misjudging that charming colonel. He told us himself that he tried to be a mother to you all.”
She then told him how interested the colonel had been in the blankets, and so on, but I must say Charlie Sands was very queer about it. He stopped and looked at us all in turn, and then he got out the dirtiest handkerchief I have ever seen and wiped his forehead with it.
“Perhaps you’d better say it again,” he said; “I don’t seem to get it altogether. You are sure it was the colonel?”