Down the hill coasted Uncle Sam, bearing his rider furiously onward. A fence along the wayside seemed like a very entanglement of stakes and pickets. Then it was gone. A house loomed up in view, grew larger, and was gone. A cow that was grazing in a field languidly raised her head, blinked her eyes, and stood as if uncertain whether she had really seen something pass or not.

They were in the valley now and the sea was no longer discernible. On they rushed with a fine disdain for poor little Charos, whose village steeple appeared and disappeared like a flash of lightning. The road was broad and level and Uncle Sam sped along amid a cloud of dust, the bordering trees and houses flying away behind like dried leaves in a hurricane. The rider's hair was fluttering like a victorious emblem, his eyes fixed with a wild intensity.

"We'd get arrested for this in America," he muttered; "we—we should worry."

It was little Uncle Sam cared for the traffic laws of America.

Around the outskirts of Teurley they swept and into the broad highway like a pair of demons, and a muleteer, seeing discretion to be the better part of valor, drove his team well to the side—far enough, even, to escape any devilish contamination which this unearthly apparition might diffuse.

They had reached a broad highway, one of those noble roads which Napoleon had made. They could not go wrong now. They passed a luxurious chateau, then a great hotel where people haled them in French. Then they passed an army auto truck loaded with mattresses, with the bully old initials U. S. A. on its side. Two boys in khaki were on the seat.

"Is the Texas Pioneer in?" Tom yelled.

"What?" one of them called back.

"He's deaf or something," muttered Tom; "we—should worry."

On they sped till the road merged into a street lined with shops, where children in wooden shoes and men in blouses shuffled about. Tom thought he had never seen people so slow in his life.

Now, indeed, he must make some concession to the throngs moving back and forth, and he slackened his speed, but only slightly.

"Dieppe?" he called.

"Dieppe," came the laughing answer from a passer-by, who was evidently amused at Tom's pronunciation.

"Where's the wharves?"

Again that polite shrug of the shoulders.

He took a chance with another passer-by, who nodded and pointed down a narrow street with dull brown houses tumbling all over each other, as it seemed to Tom. It was the familiar, old-world architecture of the French coast towns, which he had seen in Brest and St. Nazaire, as if all the houses had become suddenly frightened and huddled together like panicky sheep.

More leisurely now, but quickly still, rode the dispatch-rider through this narrow, surging way which had all the earmarks of the shore—damp-smelling barrels, brass lanterns, dilapidated ships' figureheads, cosy but uncleanly drinking places, and sailors.

And of all the sights save one which Tom Slade ever beheld, the one which most gladdened his heart was a neat new sign outside a stone building,

Office of United States Quartermaster.

Several American army wagons were backed up against the building and half a dozen khaki-clad boys lounged about. There was much coming and going, but it is a part of the dispatch-rider's prestige to have immediate admittance anywhere, and Tom stopped before this building and was immediately surrounded by a flattering representation of military and civilian life, both French and American.

To these he paid not the slightest heed, but carefully lowered Uncle Sam's rest so that his weary companion might stand alone.

"You old tramp," he said in an undertone; "stay here and take it easy. Keep away," he added curtly to a curious private who was venturing a too close inspection of Uncle Sam's honorable wounds.

"What's the matter—run into something?" he asked.

"No, I didn't," said Tom, starting toward the building.

Suddenly he stopped short, staring.

A man in civilian clothes sat tilted back in one of several chairs beside the door. He wore a little black moustache and because his head was pressed against the brick wall behind him, his hat was pushed forward giving him a rakish look which was rather heightened by an unlighted cigar sticking up out of the corner of his mouth like a piece of field artillery.

He might have been a travelling salesman waiting for his samples on the veranda of a country hotel and he had about him a kind of sophisticated look as if he took a sort of blasÉ pleasure in watching the world go round. His feet rested upon the rung of his tilted chair, forming his knees into a sort of desk upon which lay a French newspaper. The tilting of his knees, the tilting of his chair, the tilting of his hat and the rakish tilt of his cigar, gave him the appearance of great self-sufficiency, as if, away down in his soul, he knew what he was there for, and cared not a whit whether anyone else did or not.

Tom Slade paused on the lower step and stared. Then with a slowly dawning smile supplanting his look of astonishment, he ejaculated,

"M-i-s-t-e-r C-o-n-n-e!"

The man made not the slightest change in his attitude except to smile the while he worked his cigar over to the other corner of his mouth. Then he cocked his head slightly sideways.

"H'lo, Tommy," said he.