He told me how Tom had left the Scouts to work on a transport; how his ship had been torpedoed and he had been taken aboard a German submarine and incarcerated in a German prison camp. From that point information about him was scanty and contradictory. He had escaped (so Mr. Ellsworth had heard) from the prison camp and somehow had made his way to France where he was next heard from as a motorcycle dispatch rider.
How and when he had got into the Flying Corps Mr. Ellsworth did not know, for he had been heard of as an aviator only a month or two prior to the shocking news of his heroic end.
For a week or two after the news came, the name of this heroic young scout was on every lip, but I must confess that when I went away the thought which lingered with me most persistently was not so much that of the young fellow whose career had been so varied and remarkable but of that comrade of his scouting days who took the young aviator’s loss home to himself with such a sense of personal bereavement. Stouthearted champion as he was of his friend’s prowess, I verily believe that the heart which beat under that trim scout regalia was still buoyed up with a forlorn hope that some belated report might yet prove the government’s authenticated announcement to be false. There was a kind of heroism in this challenge to careful and methodical old Uncle Sam which I am afraid appealed to me more even than did Tom’s exploits and noble sacrifice, and I felt that if I could only do the impossible and assure Roy that his friend still lived and would come home, it would afford me a keener joy than I had ever known.
I cannot for the life of me say what the reason was for Roy’s making a particular confidante and companion of me during the few days that I remained in Bridgeboro. Perhaps his memory of our stroll up the hill together the day the sad news reached town, and the fellowship of sympathy which then sprang up between us, made him regard me as in some special way his friend.
However it was, on the morning that I left home for the long journey which was to mean so much to us both, I found Roy swinging his legs from the railing of my porch waiting, so he explained, to help carry my luggage down to the station. In the stressful days to follow I always remembered him as he looked then—a roguish smile upon his face which had been so clouded with his brave grief, his scout hat on the back of his curly head and the scarf he always wore hanging loosely around his neck. I was quite taken aback by this undeserved attention.
“You said you didn’t know much about the Scouts,” he reminded me. “One thing about them is that a scout has to do a good turn every day, and I just happened to think this would be a good one.
“I hope I may be able to return it some day,” I said, quite overwhelmed.
“Then I’d only have to do another one,” he answered briskly. “You’d only make matters worse.”
“I see,” I laughed, letting him take one of my grips.
So we went down the hill together and I was glad to see that his accustomed buoyancy was gaining the upper hand at last. We did not speak of Tom until the train had actually come to a stop and he handed me my grip.