“I know him!” barked Penoch O’Reilly suddenly. “Here’s a letter from him, in fact.”
“Enter into the sanctum, sirrah, and make him known to me,” the C. O. invited him spaciously.
Penoch strode in with ludicrously long steps. He was so short that he’d have to stand on a stepladder to kick a duck in the stomach.
I drifted in lazily, but my curiosity was alive. If I wasn’t wrong, the look on Penoch’s face, as he brooded over that letter, did not indicate ungovernable enthusiasm about the arrival of the new man.
“I knew him a little before the war,” O’Reilly stated in that deep bass voice of his.
Coming from his little body, that voice was as surprizing as it would be to get a brass band effect by blowing on a harmonica.
“He’s not so bad, I guess. Lived an eventful life, anyhow. Was a sergeant in the Air Service—in my outfit a lot of the time during the war—and learned to fly then. Got a commission in the reserve when the war was over. He’s a wonderful mechanic, and he can tell interesting yarns.”
“How well can he fly?” demanded Pop truculently. “With these bandits raising hell, and with scarcely enough crates to get flying time in on, we can’t afford to let amateurs spread D.H.’s all over the landscape!”
“Pretty good,” Penoch admitted grudgingly. “He was an automobile race driver at one time, a trick motorcycle artist at another, and all that.”
“Due in this afternoon,” remarked Pop, examining the orders in his hand. “Well, I hope he can play bridge.”