“I’m tellin’ ye now, James,” one voice rose sharply, “’e’s nothin’ more nor less than a bloomin’ Jerry. ’E’s a spy, that ’e is.”
“Aw now, Danny,” the other admonished, “you know what old John told you ’e is. ’E’s ’Ollander, no more, nor no less. ’Is papers they is all in horder.”
“I know. I know,” Danny agreed petulantly. “But that don’t make it so. You know as well as I know ’ow easy as nothin’ it is fer a Jerry to git papers fixed to suit ’is own self.
“Now look, Jimmy.” Danny’s voice dropped. “Ye mind the last war. There were our castle, Warmington Castle, as fine an hedifice as there be in all Hengland. An’ what ’appens? Ramsey, over at the farm, ’e ’ires ’imself a Jerry, a prisoner of war ’e was. ’e treats ’im like a long-lost brother, Ramsey does. An’ what ’appens? I asks you, what ’appens?”
“It weren’t never proved that it were this Jerry that signaled to the bloomin’ airplane that come over an’ blasted the castle,” James protested.
“I know—I know. But who would doubt it?”
And so the argument ended. Dave finished his coffee, then wandered out into the chill of falling night. Danny and James had given him fresh food for serious thought.
Cherry was booked for a return to her subway studio on the following evening. Dave spent the greater part of that day teaching her a new song. He knew the tune and could pick it out for her on the piano. By great good fortune he found the words written out in longhand on a scrap of paper in his Sunday clothes.
“It’s not a new song,” he told her. “In fact, it’s more than twenty years old. An orchestra leader named Orrin Tucker dug it out of the file and gave it to his little five-foot singing doll named Bonnie Baker. It’s gone across America like a Nebraska cyclone. This is it:
“Oh! Johnny! Oh! Johnny!