“It'll be two years and a half before you have to consider that problem.”
“I read that they're thinking of lowering the draft age. So if you don't want me in, you'd better get busy and fix up an alibi.”
“We'll think about it,” replied the father; and added, with a smile: “It would make something of a hit with the president of Budd's!”
Midsummer-Night Dream
I
EXAMINATIONS came at St. Thomas's, and Lariny passed with good grades, and checked off his list several subjects about which he would never have to think again.
He had now spent fourteen months in Connecticut; and during that period more than a million Americans had been ferried across to France. Jerry Pendleton and fifty thousand other sergeants were ready to try out the idea that German machine-gun nests could be wiped out by baseball players throwing Budd hand grenades. During the fourteen months' period the plants had been working day and night without let-up. Smoke billowed from their chimneys, the workers toiled like swarms of ants, and the products were piled by the million in warehouses in France and behind the fighting front. The doughboys had had a sort of tryout at the battle of Cantigny, and now were being moved into position to stop the German advance on Paris.
Such was the news in the papers when Lanny sat down to discuss with his father the problem of how to spend the summer. He still wanted to go into the plant; and when Robbie asked his ideas, he said: “Why shouldn't I take a job like anybody else, and see how it feels to put in an eight-hour day?”
“Beginning at the bottom of the ladder?” smiled the father.
“Isn't that the accepted way?”