Tom followed. But Mr. Conne did not speak; he was still busy with the tune. Only now he was singing the words. There was something portentous in the careless way he sang them. It took Tom back to the days when it was the battle hymn of the transport: "And when we meet a pretty girl, we whisper in her ear, Oh, Boy! Oh, Joy! Where do we go from here?" CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE "NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON'T" The big transport _Texas Pioneer_ came slowly about in obedience to her straining ropes and rubbed her mammoth side against the long wharf. Up and down, this way and that, slanting-wise and curved, drab and gray and white and red, the grotesque design upon her towering freeboard shone like a distorted rainbow in the sunlight. Out of the night she had come, stealing silently through the haunts where murder lurks, and the same dancing rays which had run ahead of the dispatch-rider and turned to mock him, had gilded her mighty prow as if to say, "Behold, I have reached you first." At her rail crowded hundreds of boys in khaki, demanding in English and atrocious French to know where they were. "Are we in France?" one called. "Where's the Boiderberlong, anyway?" another shouted, the famous Parisian boulevard evidently being his only means of identifying France. "Is that Napoleon's tomb?" another demanded, pointing to a little round building. "Look at the pile of hams," shouted another gazing over the rail at a stack of that delectable. "Maybe we're in _Hamburg_!" "This is Dippy," his neighbor corrected him. "You mean Deppy," another said. And so on and so on. There seemed to be hundreds of them, thousands of them, and all on a gigantic picnic. "Which is the quickest way to Berlin?" one called, addressing the throng impartially. "Second turn to your left." Some of these boys would settle down in France and make it their long, final home, under little wooden crosses. But they did not seem to think of that. At the foot of the gangplank stood the dispatch-rider and the man with the cigar. Several other men, evidently of their party, stood near by. Mr. Conne's head was cocked sideways and he scanned the gangway with a leisurely, self-assured look. Tom was shaking all over--the victim of suppressed excitement. He had been less excited on that memorable morning when he had "done his bit" at Cantigny. It seemed to be in the air that something unusual was likely to happen. Workers, passing with their wheelbarrows and hand trucks, slackened their pace and dallied as long as they dared, near the gangplank. They were quickly moved along. Tom shifted from one foot to the other, waiting. Mr. Conne worked his cigar over to the opposite corner of his mouth and observed to an American officer that the day was going to be warm. Then he glanced up and smiled pleasantly at the boys crowding at the rail. He might have been waiting on a street corner for a car. "Not nervous, are you?" he smiled at Tom.