I didn’t know where he was now, but he’d surely get in touch with Auntie sometime soon, no matter where he was, and then she’d tell him what he must do—unless she passed out from the shock before that. Leon must stay away from Wakeham; even Vyvy must think he’d gone overseas. In my letter to him I promised to send her a few lines of love and kisses now and then to keep her happy. I told him I’d write to him at Booneville—that was far enough away from home and far enough back in the woods to be a safe place for him to rusticate and hide for a while, until he could do something about me. He could lose himself in New York easily enough, but then he might get picked up somehow and made to enlist or do something. I suggested that he take the name of Leonard Lane, and stay at Booneville for a while. Auntie would have to let it leak out that I was down South or out West, doing war work of some kind, like entertaining in the camps. Anyone who knew me would accept that story easily. My letters to her would, of course, be censored—unless I could manage to get them okayed by the General. If censored, I’d have to send instructions to Leon in onion juice: write a letter and interline it with other sentences written in onion juice, then when he or she held it near heat, the invisible onion-juice letters would be made visible. I knew it worked: we used to do it when we were kids. So far so good: but how was I going to get out of this? There was the big problem, and the only answer I could see from here was for Leon to get a passport, if necessary, and get over to France by hook or crook, even if he had to work on a cattle boat or an oil tanker—anyway to get there. The rest would be easy: we would switch and I’d come back in his place.... Sounds reasonable in theory; I only hoped it would work out in practice. It depended, of course, upon how eager Leon was to get there—but—oh, hell, when that factor entered in, I might as well give up, for he never was eager to do anything that might be hard work or uncomfortable. As far as I could see now, with everyone all packed up and waiting for the C. O. to appear with the final word, my fate was lying helpless in the lap of the gods. Which reminds me that I just by grace of God remembered what Mark Twain or somebody like him said about telling the difference between a girl and a boy: the General tossed a packet of papers to me and I instinctively spread my legs to catch it in my lap—and there wasn’t any lap there; but I saved the day by catching it with my hand instead. I don’t suppose the General would have noticed such a thing anyway. No reason why he should—but then I couldn’t be too careful. I certainly had to watch my step.