“Do you know where our boys are—what part of it?”
“Yes, I know, but I’m not going to tell you,” Mr. Conne laughed. “You’d like to be there, I suppose.”
For a few moments Tom did not answer. Then he said in his old dull way, “I got a right to go now. I got a right to be a soldier, to make up for—him. The next time I get back here I’m going to join. If we don’t get back for six weeks, then I’ll be eighteen. I made up my mind now.”
Mr. Conne laughed approvingly and Tom gazed, with a kind of fascination, across the pleasant, undulating country.
“I could even hike it,” he repeated; “it seems funny to be so near.”
But when finally he did reach the front, it was over the back fence, as one might say, and after such an experience as he had never dreamed of.