“He might have——” Roy began in a kind of daze.
“No, my boy,” I told him, “we may as well face the fact. No man in the history of this world ever fell a thousand feet without having his life crushed out. Even if he landed on a haystack instead of a jumble of rocks, it would have killed him. Look here——”
I felt as if I were myself guilty of some form of brutal frightfulness as I pointed to the little supplementary notice upon the substance of which I supposed that the government had based its official confirmation of Tom’s death.
An official report to Washington states that a German aviator, flying over the American lines, dropped the cap which Slade had worn into an American camp. It contained the metal identification disk which the young flier had worn on a cord around his neck, and a small badge linked with it which is thought to signify some honor greatly prized in the ranks of the Boy Scouts of America. With these trinkets was a note in German saying that young Slade had been buried in the village of Pevy and that a cross with his name upon it had been placed over his grave.
I think neither of us spoke for fully a minute. I am sure that Roy could not have trusted himself to speak.
“So you see,” I finally said, “that even the Huns recognized his gallantry and his heroism.”
“They had to,” said Roy with a kind of pitiful defiance.
We strolled up the hill, neither of us speaking.
“You know what badge it was, don’t you?” he asked.
His earnest question and the evident struggle he was having with himself gave me a momentary pang of regret, almost of shame, that I had never taken a very lively interest in the Scouts and especially in this one who had died a hero.