“Oh, what a shame!” he exclaimed. “The Germans dropping bombs on Paris! Infamous!”
“Paris! How can they? Oh, Edwin, Judy and Kent both there!”
CHAPTER XVIII.
CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE.
When the teller of a tale has to fly from one side of the ocean to the other in the twinkling of an eye, as it were, at any rate between chapters, and the persons in the tale have no communication with one another except by letters that are more than likely to be tampered with on the high seas, it is a great comfort to find that all the characters have at last arrived at the same date. On that morning after the dropping of bombs when Judy, dressed in her sad mourning garb, was selling spinach and tarts to the hungry occupants of the Montparnasse quarter, Molly, allowing for the difference in time, was oversleeping herself after a wakeful night and the college girls were quietly cleaning her living room. Kent and Jim Castleman were stretching themselves luxuriously in the not too comfortable beds of the Haute Loire preparatory to making themselves presentable, first to find Judy, and then to find the general who, no doubt, would be glad to have the Kentucky giant enlist in the ranks, even though his letter of introduction and credentials had gone to the bottom with the Hirondelle de Mer. Jim Castleman’s appearance was certainly credential enough that he would make a good fighter.
A bath and a shave did much towards making our young men presentable. Kent with a needle and thread, borrowed from the chambermaid, darned the knees of his trousers so that they did very well just so long as he did not try to sit down; then the strain would have been too much. Jim’s were hopelessly short.
“Nothing but a flounce would save me, so I’ll have to go around at high water mark; but I’ll soon be in a uniform, I hope.”
They had breakfast in a little café where Kent had often gone while he was a student at the Beaux Arts, and there Jim Castleman astonished the madame by ordering four eggs. She couldn’t believe it possible that any one could eat that much déjeuner and so cooked his eggs four minutes. His French was quite sketchy but he plunged manfully in with what he had and finally came out with breakfast enough to last until luncheon. Kent was willing to do the talking for him but he would none of it.
“Let me do it myself! I’ll learn how to get something to eat if I starve in the attempt.”