“It was just like real,” the kid piped up.
“That point on the blaze made the roof. You can see things better if you half shut your eyes.”
“That’s the idea,” Harry said; “you’ve got to get kind of dreamy. You’re getting the hang of it all right. Over in France one night I saw the house I live in at home. There was a new chicken coop. Once I saw Teddy Roosevelt.”
“One good thing,” Brent said in that funny way he had; “the things you see in the fire don’t cost anything.”
Harry said, “Yes, but they’re going up like everything else. They go up in smoke.”
“Like everything else,” Gaylong said.
“There you go,” Harry said; “Hard Luck Gaylong, the boy grouch. How do you know when you may strike luck. Look at Charlie Collins over there on the west front; ran plunk into his own brother while he was on sentry duty; brother said, ‘H’lo Charlie’—just like that. Neither one knew the other was in France. You’ve been looking at maps and things and you believe everything the geography tells you. I’ve been all around this world and you can take it from me, it’s about the size of a cocoanut. Look how Stanley met Livingstone in South Africa. You take a tip from me and keep that newspaper picture.”
Brent said, “I’d paste it in a scrapbook only we haven’t got a scrapbook.”
“We haven’t got any paste either,” Willie shouted.
“Poor, but honest,” Gaylong said.