So Elliott stayed. Laura's pleasant voice, a bit strained at first, grew steadier as the reading proceeded. Henry sat whittling a stick into the coal-hod, his lips pursed as though for a whistle, but without sound, and still with that odd sober look on his face. Priscilla, all the jumpiness gone out of her, stood very still in the middle of the kitchen floor, a kind of hurt bewilderment in the big dark eyes fixed on Laura's face. Nobody laughed, nobody even chuckled, and yet it was a jolly letter that they read first, full of spirit and life and fun. High-hearted adventure rollicked through it, and the humor that makes light of hardship, and the latest slang of the front adorned its pages with grotesquely picturesque phrases. The Cameron boys were obviously getting a good time out of the war. Bob had got something else, too. The letter had been delayed in transmission and near the end was a sentence, "Brought down my first Hun to-day--great fight! I'll tell you about it next time if after due deliberation I decide the censor will let me." "Some letter!" commented Henry. "Say, those aviators are living like princes, aren't they! Mess hall in a big grove with all the fixings. And eats! More than we get at home. Gee, I wish I was older!" "So you could come in for the eats?" smiled his sister. "So I could come in for things generally." "You couldn't work any harder if you were a man grown," she told him. "Huh!" said Henry, "a lot I hurt myself!" But he liked the smile and the praise, wary though he might pretend to be of it. Sis was a good sort. "You're some worker, yourself. Let's get on to the next one." The second letter--and it too bore a date disquietingly far from the present--told of the fight. It thrilled the four in the pleasant New England kitchen. The peaceful walls opened wide, and they were out in far spaces, patrolling the windy sky, mounting, diving, dodging through wisps of cloud, kings of the air, hunting for combat. Their eyes shone and their breathing quickened, and for a minute they forgot the boy who was dead. "Why the Hun didn't bag me, instead of my getting him," wrote Bob, "is a mystery. Just the luck of beginners, I guess. I did most of the things I shouldn't have done, and, by chance, one or two of the things I should--fired when I was too far off, went into a spinning nose-dive under the mistaken notion it would make me a poor target, etc., etc., etc. Oh, I was green, all right! He knew how to manoeuver, that Hun did. That's what feazes me. How did I manage to top him at last? Well, I did. And my gun didn't jam. Nuff said." "Gee!" said Henry between his teeth. "And Ted Gordon had to go and miss all that! Gee!" "If he had only got to the front!" sighed Laura. "Anything from Pete?" asked the boy. "No." "Sid?" She shook her head. "We had a letter from Sid day before yesterday, you know." "Sid lays 'em down pretty thick sometimes. Well, I must be getting on. This isn't weeding cabbages."