“How strange it seems, Jack, that we should meet two persons in one day who have known Frank. The tattoo business tells the story good enough for me; but p’raps I’d better flash that picture out, and make dead sure.”
When the Red Cross nurse had taken one look she nodded her head.
“That’s certainly the Frank Bradford I met,” she told Amos, “though of course he looks older than in this picture.”
Amos was wearing a broad smile now. It seemed to him all things must be working together for their benefit, and that before a great while he would meet this brother face to face, when he could tell him how the cloud had been magically removed from his name at home, and with what deep anxiety his father was waiting to welcome him and ask his forgiveness.
“What a lucky thing it was this old tire of yours had to go down and need fixing, Miss,” he said, with considerable feeling. “Only for that we wouldn’t have met you, or learned this bit of good news.”
“Get busy and finish your job, Amos,” said Jack. “Time is worth something to many a poor wounded Tommy Atkins lying out there on the field, where we saw them falling like ripe grain.”
“That’s a fact,” declared the other, again dropping down on hands and knees so as to continue his labors. “I was forgetting that others are concerned in this business besides myself. It’s nearly finished, and I think will hold as good as new. Jack, try and find out if you can where we’d likely run across Frank about this time.”
The nurse did not know, in fact she had not seen the air pilot since that time when she looked after his hurts, after his return from his long raid up along the fortified banks of the Rhine over Cologne and beyond.
“One thing you can depend on,” she did tell them, “wherever there is most need of a fearless aviator there you are apt to find him, whether it happens to be in Flanders, with the French along the Aisne, far over in the frozen mountain regions of the Vosges in Alsace, or even along the Dardanelles, where they have commenced to batter their way through to Constantinople.”
To hear such words said of his own brother must have thrilled Amos. He worked away, and soon arose, saying: