Jimmy and Sammy found themselves drinking wine and other liquors with many strange men. The password to good-fellowship was “_Finee, la guerre finee_,” and when the liquor began to assert itself in the blood of the men who acclaimed the Allied triumph on the streets of Verdun good-fellowship reached its zenith. That night the men of Jimmy’s section were gathered around a cheery-looking beer keg in a comfortable barrack at Thierville hashing over the _guerre_ and its swift dramatic dénouement. The flight of the Kaiser and the downfall of his military empire had dwindled into a meaningless fact before the expanding idea of an early departure for home. “Home! Great Lord, it ain’t possible!” ejaculated one man as he looked wistfully into the blazing fire that roared up a great open fireplace. A bit of silence followed on the heels of his remark. Then Limy Mills and Vine started singing the chorus of “There’s a Long, Long Trail Awinding.” Twenty throats, unsteady from an emotion that was new and yet old, joined in the singing. Jimmy McGee, sitting in a far corner of the room, looked up from the letter that he was writing to Mary O. D. and listened while a strange yearning for something that the song suggested mastered his feelings. Four days later Jimmy McGee’s outfit rolled down the “Sacred Road” of France. No officer or enlisted man knew its destination. All that any man could be certain of was that he was headed for the rear. Jimmy, lacking a roll and stripped of sundry equipments that he had carried over the same road three months before, followed behind his Betsy. “What outfit, buddy?” asked an engineer who leaned on his shovel to watch the decrepit parade pass. “Twenty-sixth division,” answered Jimmy. “You guys are goin’ home _toot sweet_, ain’t you?” questioned the engineer. “So they tell us, buddy,” responded the Yankee veteran as a man does who speaks from another world. His thoughts were four thousand miles away, they stretched across the ocean and reached a certain, slender somebody who answered the name of Mary O. D. in the thoughts of Jimmy McGee. “Gee! It sure will be tough tryin’ to tell her and her mother ’bout O. D. I wonder what Mary’ll think of me,” and Jimmy McGee trudged along to accept the future, even as he had accepted the _guerre_. THE END Transcriber’s Note In this book, text shown in italics as originally published is enclosed in underscores _like this_. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of What Outfit Buddy?, by T. Howard Kelly