For two days after their arrival, the guns kept up a furious racket night and day. Now and then they gleaned some word of the conflict from ambulance drivers or men who had come from the trenches on special errands. The Americans were grittily holding their own, it seemed. They had gone over the top on the very morning in which the Khaki Boys had arrived in rest billets. There had been a wholesale slaughter of Boches. Many machine guns and prisoners had been taken. The Hun's first-line trench had been blown up. The Boches had beaten a wild retreat to their second trench, and were now engaged in trying to hold it. Many Sammies had been killed or wounded, but the Germans had suffered more in casualties. All this and other news pertaining to the fight that still raged, the Khaki Boys heard. They gloried in the way "our fellows are putting it all over Fritz." Bob's first move after settling down was to get a pass and go to the village where Gaston was quartered at his expense. Finding that it was not more than twenty miles from their billet, and that he could reach it and return by train, he cordially invited his bunkies to accompany him. Jimmy and Ignace declined to go on the expedition, but Roger good-naturedly consented. "You need a friend on such a dangerous detail," he slyly remarked. It took the two a whole afternoon and evening to make the trip. Triumphantly returning with his pet just before Taps, Bob tied Gaston up outside the barrack, trustingly expecting him there in the morning. In the night, however, Gaston basely chewed his rope in two and deserted. Bob, being of the loyal opinion that Gaston was "no yellow deserter," but had been "pinched," he spent his leisure time the following day going from pillar to post savagely asking, "Who's got my goat?" Toward night he found the lost one in the backyard of a cottage, calmly feasting upon a linen tablecloth, which had appealed to his peculiar appetite. Bob and the owner of the tablecloth discovered Gaston at about the same moment. Gaston got a beating and Bob a wigging in French, both delivered by an irate housewife. It ended by Bob's going down in his pocket for the price of one linen tablecloth. Gaston, nobly resenting this outrage, charged upon the scolding woman, and thereby added to his master's difficulties. Bob finally roped him, and led him back to billets, sadly pondering as he went on the trials of being "foster-papa to a blamed old goat." In the morning Gaston had again taken French leave. This time he wandered gaily up to the schoolhouse where a platoon of 509th men were billeted. They received him with open arms, and promptly adopted him as a mascot. In due season Bob appeared, and just as promptly parted Gaston from his new friends. Next day they stole him back again. Bob's first four days in billet were largely spent in getting his goat, losing it, and getting it again.