"You are a one, Bill," said Higgins, quite in his ancient vein of fervent admiration.
Bill merely looked self-conscious. He felt that the tribute was no more than his due.
CHAPTER XVII THE FATE OF THE BUTTON
Neither of the two friends could have said with truth that he was sorry to see France once more.
Alf had a feeling that now, at any rate, his disastrous venture into high life and the public eye was really behind him. He could slip back thankfully into his old routine as an unconsidered cog in an enormous machine, and be lost in the friendly obscurity. The Button still hung from its string round his neck. He determined that it should continue to hang there; he was afraid to dispose of it, in case it should fall into the hands of some other man and be used for unimaginable evil. He had an almost fanatical determination that he himself should never again test the Button's supernatural powers; but in addition, he felt that he had a sacred charge to prevent anybody else from doing so. When he had left the Base and was already in the leave train and bound for the line, he realized that his best course would have been to drop the Button into the sea on his way across. But the idea came to him—as ideas generally came to Alf—too late.
Bill's feeling towards France was different. He had no love for the place in itself; but considered as a mere means to his great end, it had its uses. Now that he and Alf were back in the grip of the military life, where no man can avoid his neighbor without that neighbor's connivance—and sometimes not even then—he hoped and believed that he would find an early opportunity of obtaining the Button from its unappreciative owner; and then—good by forever to France and all that it stood for.
No reference to the Button was ever allowed to creep into his conversation now. The simple-minded Alf, if he noticed this at all, thought it meant that Bill had forgotten about it. But Bill had not forgotten. He was merely biding his time.
The battalion was in billets when the two men rejoined it. They reported themselves to C.S.M. French, who directed them to their own platoon.