she said. "I told him to dig a
shell hole, not a cellar." Here she stood up and felt her pulse. "If
I've burst anything," she announced a moment later, "it's a corset
steel. That boatman is a fool, but at least he has given us a chance to
see if we are of the material which France requires at this tragic
juncture."

"I can tell you right away that I am not," Aggie said tartly. "I'm not
and I don't want to be. Though I can't see how biting my tongue half
through is going to help France anyhow."

But Tish was not listening. She had lifted three shovels out of the car,
and we could see her dauntless figure outlined against the darkness.

"The Germans," she said at last, "are over there behind that chicken
house. The machine is stalled in a shell hole and contains a wounded
soldier. We are being shelled and there are those what-you-call-'em
lights overhead. We must escape or be killed. There is only one thing to
do. Lizzie, what is your idea of the next step?"

"Anybody but a lunatic would know that," I said tartly. "The thing to do
is to go home and make an affidavit that we never saw that car, and that
the hole in this road is where it was struck by lighting."

"Aggie," Tish said without paying any attention to me, "here is a shovel
for you."

But Aggie sniffed.

"Not at all, Tish Carberry," she observed. "I am the wounded soldier,
and I don't stir a foot."

In the end, however, we all went to work to dig the car out of the hole,
and at three o'clock in the morning Tish climbed in and started the
engine. It climbed out slowly, but as Tish observed it gave an excellent
account of itself.

"And I must say," she said, "I believe we have all shown that we can
meet emergency in the proper spirit. As for the hole, that driveling
idiot who dug it can fill it up tomorrow morning and no one be the
wiser."

I have made this explanation because of the ugly reports spread by the
boatman himself. It is necessary, because it appears that he became
intoxicated on the money Tish had so generously given him, and the milk
wagon which supplied us going into the hole an hour or so after we had
left he shamelessly told his own part and ours in the catastrophe. The
result was that waking the next morning with a severe attack of lumbago
I heard our splendid Tish being attacked verbally by the milkman and
forced to pay an outrageous sum in damages.

By September Tish had had the old body removed from her automobile and
an ambulan