“Fair enough,” answered Tom laughingly. But before they were half through telling him of their experiences of that evening, and all they had been through since he had last seen them, Buck was sitting up wide awake and plying them with interested queries upon this and that phase of their harrowing escapes and thrilling captures and adventures. “Say!” that energetic youth finally ejaculated. “I’d have given a whole lot to have been along.” “Wish you had been,” said Ollie, with deep sincerity. “There were times when we certainly needed you.” “It means certain and early promotion for all of you, of course,” Buck went on, “and promotion is certainly worth striving for; but it isn’t that so much as just having been through such things.” The other three lads nodded in silent assent. “Just imagine, Tom,” Buck Granger went on, with increasing enthusiasm, and turning toward the newly-made sergeant, “just imagine the yarn that will make for a little snoozer you’re joggin’ on your knee when you’re a grandfather, eh?” “Say, look here,” Tom interjected, in a startled tone. “Oh, that’s all right,” Buck went on. “You expect to be a grandfather some day, don’t you, if you get through this all right?” “Your mind certainly can cover great distances in a short stretch of time,” Tom objected again. “Yes, but that story will make any kid proud of his grandpap,” Buck continued, while George and Ollie chuckled at Tom’s evident discomfort. “Why, that would make any youngster wish he had been living in the days of the taming of the Boche, just to have knocked off a few of them himself. Yes-sirree!” And when Ollie knew by the sound and regular breathing on either side of him that both Tom and George were sound asleep, and he himself was about dozing off, he heard Buck mutter, in a self-accusing tone, “By gosh, I’m an unlucky guy; nothing like that ever happens to me.” Then Ollie slept. It could not have been long thereafter that Buck Granger also drifted off into the land of sleep, to have this rest interrupted with vivid dreams of personal participation in all the incidents that his three friends had so modestly related to him. What wakened Buck he could not tell, but he knew it was hours later and that the rain was still falling and that it was yet dark, although probably beyond the hour when, had it been clear, dawn would have been breaking. But it was not the mystery of what had wakened him that bothered Buck so much as it was that terrible feeling that possessed him—that unexplainable, indefinable feeling that we all have at times, when for some unknown reason we feel certain that something is wrong and we know not what, or why we feel it so keenly.