He drew his knees up in the bed in a way he has of lying. “That place is wherre a Gerrman bomb came through,” he said. “I got one of those nails forr a souveneerr.”
I looked at the spot with more interest. “It killed two of the nurses, didn’t it?” I asked. “I heard about that. But surely, you couldn’t have been here then.”
“No, but my pill was—I mean my pal—fellerr by the name of Slade; he sworre——”
That was as far as he got, for one of the nurses, stepping right in range of his torrential volley of R’s, began her ministrations, incidentally telling him for the hundredth time to be quiet so that other patients might sleep.
You may suppose that I was greatly interested in what he was telling me and the good old upstate rumble of that word sworre lingered in my mind, for I had no doubt that he was referring to your friend Tom Slade, and that a lucky chance (or an unlucky one) had brought me to the very hospital mentioned in the newspaper account which you and I read together. Whether Slade was really his “pill” or pal, I cannot say, for he spoke of everyone as his pal, from General Foch down, but I hope to talk more with him tomorrow. He has just fallen asleep with the parting injunction to “wake me earrly, motherr, dearrrr.” And silence reigns supreme.
This is all I am allowed to write today, but tomorrow I’ll “recount the adventure,” as you would say, which brought me here.
Dear Roy:
My new acquaintance is out on our little veranda for a sun bath. His name, they tell me, is Archer—Archibald Archer—and that he has lately been in the Motorcycle Corps. I wonder if any motorcycle can make more noise than he!
I came here after taking the village of Pevy—though I did not take it all by myself. The village sits on high ground a couple of miles beyond one of the steepest, rockiest hillsides I ever saw—a place where you can measure real estate with a plumb line. Our boys took the road which verged around and up the west slope of the hill, as the retreating Germans had done, while I took the short-cut, or rather climb, up this precipitous place.