His companion turned and looked at him. He was a little white, too. There was a growing horror in his face. Peter wondered and then realized the reason for the curious look. Somehow it cheered him enormously to find terror in another. The man had shamed him by sticking to the card room and looking for the yellow chip. Now Peter could pay him back. Even the huskiness was gone from his voice. "Yes," he said slowly, "aces and eights. That was queer, wasn't it? The dead man's hand." The beanpole never did come up again and now in the year 1919 there would be none in this pleasant glassy ocean and yet Peter couldn't look at it very long without seeing black stakes rise up against him. In the twenty minutes of watching which followed the remark about aces and eights Peter planted firmly and deeply in himself another abiding fear. He wondered idly now whether the man who stood with him, the name was Bentwick, would ever enjoy ocean travel again. Peter found that it was not physically possible to be afraid of everything which he encountered in the war. Everybody had his pet fear. Peter specialized on submarines, which was convenient since, after arriving in France, he saw nothing more of warfare on the water. He never liked shells, particularly the big ones, airplanes or machine guns and yet he could stand them well enough to do his work. Before going he had assumed that he would be unable to endure the strain of getting under fire. Indeed he told Miles, "You mustn't expect a lot of stuff from me about how things look in a front line trench." Miles had said, "All right. Give us the news and we won't kick." The news had been enough to take Peter into hell and keep him there. Miles had been smart. Dying for his country might very likely have been an insufficient ideal for Peter, but there never was any place he refused to go to get a story for the Bulletin. He never knew why. There wasn't any person on the Bulletin whom Peter idolized. The owner lived in Arizona and Peter had never seen him. The paper itself was a person. That was what Miles had seemed to say that afternoon in the office when he asked Peter to go over as a war correspondent. "I think you ought to go for the paper," he said. First, of course, he teetered back and forth on his chair three times. "Sport don't look so important now," he began. "This thing is much bigger than baseball. It's going to get bigger. The syndicate's selling you to one hundred and ten papers now but that doesn't make any difference, Neale. There's no good waiting for the bottom to drop out of a thing. We've got to beat 'em to it." "I don't know anything about war," suggested Peter. "We don't want war stuff. I wouldn't give a damn for the regular war correspondent stuff. You can humanize all that. You've got a light touch. Some of this is going to be funny. Most of the papers are overlooking that. And mark my words, by and by we're going to get in it." "Maybe it won't be so funny then," said Peter.