Presently they started. The little truck, new, smooth-running and responsive, delighted the boy. His first duties as helper had been in a rattletrap machine, which ran only when it felt like it and in which they carried convalescents from the base hospitals to a place with terraced gardens and verandas two hundred miles farther south. Don’s new duties exhilarated him and as he turned his car northward he could have said, with Macduff, when that warrior sought to meet Macbeth, the master war-maker: “That way the noise is. Tyrant show thy face!” for, boy-like, yet with a thorough understanding of the situation, secretly desirous of taking some part--he did not know what--in fighting, he had smuggled a sporting rifle into his car, and he carried a long-barreled revolver in a holster on his hip. “You see,” he confided to Billy Mearns--they called each other by their first names almost from the moment of meeting--“we don’t know what we are up against, and I hope I may be hanged, drawn and quartered, as the old pirates used to say, if I let any blamed Hun sneak around me without trying to see if he is bullet-proof.” “Right-o!” agreed Mearns. “But, for goodness’ sake, don’t get too anxious and take some of our Yanks for Heinies! If you do and I’m along, me for wading the Atlantic right back home! They’d do worse than draw and quarter us; mebbe they’d even pull out our hair or tweak our noses.” “Pshaw! Anybody who couldn’t tell a Hun, day or night, ought to have--” “His nose examined, eh? Oh, you sauerkraut and onions!” CHAPTER VIII IN IT Ploof! Ploof! Bang! P-ssst, wam! Zing, zing, zing! T-r-r-r-r-r--rip! Ploooof! Something of this nature, if it can at all be conveyed by words, came in waves, roars and spasms of sound to the ears of Don and Billy, as their ambulance truck traversed part of the five or six miles of cross-road between the evacuation hospitals near the Amiens road, not twenty miles south of that shell-torn town, and the front line of the Allied army where American troops, newly arrived from training camps, were brigaded with the French soldiers; that is, a number of regiments of one nation were included with those of the other in the same sector, sometimes companies, even platoons, of Americans and French fighting side by side against the savage attacks of an enemy far superior in numbers.