“Oh, it wasn’t so badly cracked,” he laughed. “I washed off the blood, tied my handkerchief about my bean and stumbled along until a native in a canoe caught up with me. The native liked the looks of my knife, so I traded it with him for a lift back to civilization. And, so, here we are.”
“That,” she said, “was a happy ending.”
“Jimmie,”—she leaned forward—“You’d be interested in what Dad said to me when I went away.”
“I’m sure I would,” Jimmie grinned.
“He said, ‘Gale, you’re going to war. You’re not the sort to choose the soft and easy way. Sooner or later you’ll find yourself in a foxhole. They say there’s a lot of religion in foxholes. Maybe so but I never saw much of it in France during the first World War, and I was in lots of foxholes,—Chateau Thierry, Belleau Woods, the Argonne’.
“He said that, Jimmie.” Her eyes were shining. “Then he said, ‘I’ve never been so strong for the kind of religion you get in big buildings with steeples and towers. It’s all right, I guess, but for my part I stand alone with God.
“‘Yes, I believe in God’. He said that, Jimmie. ‘That’s not all,’ he said, ‘I trust God, just as I have trusted my fellow men. They’ve treated me fairly well. I expect God to be as good to them, or even better. When my work’s done here, if I discover there’s another world after this one, I expect God to give me a square deal and a real interesting job over there, and that’s all I ask.’
“Jimmie,”—there was a glint of tears in her eyes, “Wasn’t that a strange speech for a father to make when his only daughter was going to war?”
“Pretty swell, I’d say!” Jimmie brushed his forehead. “Makes me think I’d like to meet him.”
“Perhaps you will meet him, Jimmie,” she whispered.