t
before the end of the noon hour is Skip Martin, who helped win the war
by servin' the last two months checkin' supplies for the front at St.
Nazaire. He was relatin' an A. W. O. L. adventure in which a little
French girl by the name of Mimi figured prominent, when Budge Haley, who
was a corporal in the Twenty-seventh and got all the way to Coblenz,
crashed in heartless.

"Cheap stuff, them base port fluffs," says Budge. "Always beggin' you
for chocolate or nickin' you for francs some way. And as for looks, I
couldn't see it. But say, you should have seen what I tumbled into one
night up in Belgium. We'd plugged twenty-six kilometers through the mud
and rain that day and was billeted swell in the town hall. The mess
call had just sounded and I was gettin' in line when the Loot yanks me
out to tote his bag off to some lodgin's he'd been assigned five or six
blocks away.

"Maybe I wasn't good and sore, too, with everything gettin' cold and me
as a refugee. I must have got mixed up in my directions, for I couldn't
find any house with a green iron balcony over the front door noway.
Finally I takes a chance on workin' some of my French and knocks at a
blue door. Took me some time to raise anybody, and when a girl does
answer all I gets out of her is a squeal and the door is slammed shut
again. I was backin' off disgusted when here comes this dame with the
big eyes and the grand duchess airs.

"'Ah le bon Dieu!' says she gaspy. 'Le soldat d'Amerique! Entrez,
m'sieur.' And say, even if I couldn't have savvied a word, that smile
would have been enough. Did I get the glad hand? Listen; she hadn't seen
anything but Huns for nearly four years. Most of that time she'd spent
hidin' in the cellar or somewhere, and for her I was the dove of peace.
She tried to tell me all about it, and I expect she did, only I couldn't
comprenez more'n a quarter of her rapid fire French. But the idea seemed
to be that I was a he-angel of the first class who deserved the best
there was in the house. Maybe I didn't get it, too. The Huns hadn't
been gone but a few hours and the peace dinner she'd planned was only a
sketchy affair, as she wasn't dead sure they wouldn't come back. When
she sees me though, she puts a stop order on all that third-rate stuff
and tells the cook to go the limit. And say, they must have dug up food
reserves from the sub-cellar, for when me and the Countess finally sits
down----"

"Ah, don't pull that on us!" protests Skip