“So we are to do it for his entire army, I suppose!” Gale did an imitation collapse.
“It’s not really a big army,” Isabelle defended. “I don’t think there are more than twenty thousand. There’s a much larger army striking at the Japs from another direction, and—”
“And that’s the next spot on our barn-storming tour,” Gale exploded.
“I didn’t say that,” Isabelle replied quietly. “Truth is,” she admitted, “I too had my misgivings. Jan is such a clown! She’s—”
“Oh! I am, am I!” Jan exploded. “Just for that I’ll do the skit alone!”
“Indeed you’ll not!” Gale stormed. “There’s got to be a little dignity to our part of the outfit, even if we are a small group.”
“Here, you two.” Than Shwe held out steaming cups of coffee to Jan and Gale. “Drink these and quiet down. You know what the colonel wants he’s going to have. Besides, he brought you three WACS along when it was against the rules, and if you’re not nice little girls he can send you back.”
“That,” Gale agreed after burning her tongue on the coffee, “is the plain unvarnished truth.”
All of which meant that at one of the home talent shows given by army women at the Club for women only back there in India, the four jolly comrades, led by Gale, had dressed up in barber’s coats and slacks, with combs behind their ears, and had put on a Lady Barber Quartette stunt. Jan, who blacked her face and sang as the bootblack of the shop, had nearly stolen the show. It had been quite a success. The colonel had seen and liked it, so there they were, confronted with the prospect of doing their stunt all over again before thousands of khaki-clad boys from the old USA, a breath taking adventure if ever there was one.
“I’d rather go through a bombing,” Gale declared. “But what the colonel wants is what he’s going to get.”