Did these boys like it? Some, she knew, were raring to go and some would have been glad to stay for they were, after all, very human.
“What they want doesn’t matter now,” she thought grimly.
At the Major’s dance held in the big dining hall at Harbor Bells, she had enjoyed their lively fun. Working shoulder to shoulder with them in the Sea Tower, she had come to know them better than she knew her fellow WACs.
Yes, she would miss them. One consolation was that Sergeant Tom McCarthy was not leaving. He had serious work to do here for, in the narrow harbor, between docks, was a seaplane called “Seagull.” In this plane Sergeant Tom did patrol duty, and, if occasion demanded, could do his bit at hunting out an enemy plane, to shower its pilot with machine-gun fire, or drop a bomb on a prowling sub.
Today, however, since it was Saturday and she had an afternoon off, she was planning a land adventure, none other than obtaining by hook, crook, or downright house-breaking, the film showing the Spanish hairdresser. Little wonder then that, try as she might, she missed the exact spot in her chart for a reported plane and got her ears not too playfully boxed by Sergeant Tom.
In the end, however, Tom gave her an A rating and she was all ready for the big step forward, a WAC in the active service of her country.
It was a bright, brisk day. An inch of snow had fallen the day before. Cars had swept the snow from the roads. The night before it had frozen hard. In the bright sunlight the valleys, hills, trees, and forests were all aglitter.
“A grand day for taking pictures,” Norma exclaimed as she and Betty hurried home for lunch. “I’m going for a long, long bike ride.”
“Wish I could go with you,” Betty sighed, “but I just must catch up with my letter writing. I have a hunch that I’m going to be sent over to Black Knob for a while. There, getting off letters won’t be so easy.”
“I’d be glad to have just such a hunch myself. I like that little girl and her grandfather,” was Norma’s reply. “And the bad Gremlins!”