Then, as he was not on active duty for the moment, he drew aside under a big tree out of the line of fire, sat down, and lighted his pipe. The boy dropped with a full sigh of content at his feet. “The real work is done. You and your drum can take a little holiday,” said Dad. “All these two regiments and the battery are to do is to keep up some sort of fire on the village, and pretend, if necessary, to rush it. Just to keep those fellows on the defensive till the rest of our line is well past. “One of those is an Ohio regiment, by the way. It joined our corps only yesterday. I’ve been wanting to ride over to its quarters, about three miles from ours. Because it was recruited at Columbus, and may have some of our Ideala boys in it.” He had been speaking lightly, for several officers were loitering within earshot. Now, as the last of them passed out of hearing, Dad laid his hand lovingly on his grandson’s shoulder. “Jimmie, lad,” he said, “tell me about everything. I’ve wanted so to know. And it’s the first minute when we’ve been alone together and that I’ve had the right to ask. First of all, how do you happen to be here and not in the Ideala high school where you belong?” “I stood it for a couple of months after you left,” began Jimmie. “And--say, mother was as mad as wrath about your going. I told her, after a while, that you’d enlisted. But I don’t quite think she believed it. Mother said she was going to Europe for a year, now that there was nothing to hold her at home; and she fixed it for me to board with Uncle Cyrus and go to high school while she was gone. And--and--” “I see,” murmured Dad, readily visualizing the lonely boy’s plight and his yearning to desert such a humdrum, boresome existence as had been mapped out for him in favor of joining the excitement at the front. “I wrote to you,” said Jimmie, “a lot of letters. But they all came back to me. I didn’t know what department or regiment to address. I wasn’t even sure you’d taken the name ‘James Dadd’ that I’d picked out for you.” “Why, _I_ wrote to _you_, son. A dozen times. Telling you--” The boy flushed uncomfortably. “I--I s’pose mother has a right to do whatever she likes with letters that come to our house,” he mumbled. “It’s _her_ house, you know. And after she left--well, I wasn’t there either.” “Yes. Yes. It’s all right. No one’s to blame. Go on.” “Two fellers on our block, only a year older’n I was, went away to Columbus to enlist,” pursued Jimmie. “They were pretty big. And they swore they were eighteen. So they got accepted. That was too much for me. Nobody needed me at Uncle Cyrus’s. And I missed you such a lot. And all the time I could hear the war whispering and calling to me the way you said it always does to men who love their country. So--I ran away to Columbus, the way the other fellers had, too.” “Yes? But you weren’t even fifteen yet, let alone eighteen. How could--”