“Naow, haow is them kids goin’ ter hinder th’ reunion? That’s what I say. Poked away off in th’ grove right on ter th’ end of the grounds. But the ole major, he says they was nuthin’ but a lot uv loafers; wanted to know what good they ever done. Why, Lor’ bless me, if he’d a made friends with ’em they might uv helped in the reunion, mightn’t they?... Wall, I guess he wuz all piffed abaout the show not bein’ able to get there. Trams east of th’ Cross-roads is runnin’ all right, but out this way thar ain’t been a wheel movin’ in a week, ’cept express trains from the east. If I was you fellers I wouldn’ go a couple of dozen miles out of my way over a pile of rocks what they call by the name of a road, I wouldn’, jus ter do a favor for an old grizzly bear, I wouldn’. Not me.” Gee whiz, Mr. Abbington looked kind of anxious, because Harry just sat there on the seat whistling to himself as if he were thinking. The rest of us were all standing around. Brent said, “Well, as long as old Grump is a stickler on military training, what do you say we take Grumpy’s Cross-roads right under his very nose? We’ll make our approach from the west, with our dry-goods delivery van and three five-passenger touring cars. General Harris will have charge of the Commissary. First, the signal corps will communicate with the boy scouts of Grumpy’s Cross-roads and advise them that reenforcements are on the way—in a dry-goods van and three touring cars. The grove on the edge of the parade grounds will be in our hands before night. We’ll have the Civil War veterans down on their knees begging for an armistice.” “Yes, and maybe—maybe—old Major Grumpy will have to go and live in a castle in Holland, hey?” Pee-wee yelled. Honest, isn’t that kid a scream? X—THE SIGNAL CORPS AT WORK First, Harry asked if the telegraph office was open, but it wasn’t open. The reason was, because there wasn’t any there. If that place had been a little smaller we might have run over it without seeing it and punctured one of our tires. Then Brent said, “Well then, you don’t happen to have a nice hill handy, do you? We’ll return it in good condition when we get through with it.” They didn’t happen to have any hills in that village—they were out of most everything. Brent said he guessed hills were hard to get. So we started off again and hit into the road that went to Grumpy’s Cross-roads. Gee whiz, if Major Grumpy’s temper was anything like that road, _good night_! That was what we all said. But we should worry about the road as long as we had all our plans made. Harry said the Kluck car could eat up the miles all right, but, oh, Sister Anne, if one of them tried eating the miles on that road it would have indigestion, all right. Even Pee-wee couldn’t have eaten those.