“He needn’t heap it on to me!” he exclaimed. “He’s going back, too, after having been gassed and sent across the pond to get well. And, you see, he got to be a lieutenant for bravery.” “You both seem to be very young, too,” remarked the eldest nurse. “Hardly through school yet; are you?” “No, ma’am; we are both students, junior year, at Brighton Acad----” “Brighton? Well, I declare! Why, my brother is a teacher there; Professor Carpenter.” “Oh, hurrah! He’s a dandy! The fellows all like him immensely!” Don shouted. “It’s fine to meet his sister over here, Miss Carpenter,” Herbert said. “It is indeed a pleasure to know you both,” said the lady, and proceeded to formally introduce the other two nurses. Then they were on the road once more and two hours later had safely landed the women at a Red Cross headquarters on the way, a few miles north of Paris. The boys parted from their gentle passengers with real regret; then sped on again, headed for the Army General Headquarters. CHAPTER III STARTING A BIG JOB LIEUTENANT Herbert Whitcomb stood for a long half minute watching the slowly disappearing Red Cross ambulance. The car merely crept on down the long, straight road, as though the driver were loath to leave his companion of the last twenty-four hours, as indeed he was, for these old Brighton boys, meeting thus on a foreign shore and bent on much the same business, had become closer friends than when at school. “I wish,” Herbert was thinking, “that Don would get into the army service and could get assigned with me. He’d make a crackerjack of a scrapper; the real thing. But I suppose they’ve got him tied to hospital work.” Then, after saluting the guard and saying a word or two to an orderly who was waiting to receive or to reject visitors, mostly the latter, the young lieutenant passed inside. Ten minutes later he emerged again with a happy smile on his face and, accompanied by several other men who had also returned to duty after the healing of minor wounds, Herbert Whitcomb led the way to a waiting motor car and presently was speeding away to the fighting front, all of his present companions being assigned, with him, to the Twenty-eighth Division and to a company that had suffered serious depletion because of many violent attacks against the stubborn Hun resistance in the drive beyond Rheims and on the Vesle River. Herbert was far from being disappointed over the fact that he was not to rejoin his old battalion. Both his major and his captain had been invalided home and could never lead the boys again; several of his comrades-in-arms, among them three old Brighton boys, had been killed or pitiably wounded; there had been such a thinning out of their ranks that nothing but a skeleton of them remained, which must indeed be only depressing, saddening as a reminder. Moreover, this division had now been put in reserve where the American sector joined that of the British and was doing no fighting.