to learn he sought to tell them. He had himself
investigated Nat's story and he gave it all fully and freely. He spoke
in praise of Nat; of his friendly associations with the Ambulance men;
of his good nature and cheerful spirits; his popularity and ready
willingness to serve. People, one felt, had loved Nat over there.

He wrote of the preliminary duties in Paris, the preparations--of Nat's
final going to join one of the three sections working round Verdun. It
wasn't easy work that waited for Nat there. It was a stiff contract
guiding the little ambulance over the shell-rutted roads, with deftness
and precision, to those distant dressing stations where the hurt
soldiers waited for him. It was a picture that thrilled Luke and made
his pulses tingle--the blackness of the nights; the rumble of moving
artillery and troops; the flash of starlights; the distant crackling of
rifle fire; the steady thunder of heavy guns.

And the shells! It was mighty close they swept to a fellow, whistling,
shrieking, low overhead; falling to tear out great gouges in the earth.
It was enough to wreck one's nerve utterly; but the fellows that drove
were all nerve. Just part of the day's work to them! And that was Nat
too. Nat hadn't known what fear was--he'd eaten it alive. The adventurer
in him had gone out to meet it joyously.

Nat was only on his third trip when tragedy had come to him. He and a
companion were seeking a dressing station in the cellar of a little
ruined house in an obscure French village, when a shell had burst right
at their feet, so to speak. That was all. Simple as that. Nat was dead
instantly and his companion--oh, Nat was really the lucky one....

Luke had to stop for a little time. One couldn't go on at once before a
thing like that.... When he did, it was to leave behind the darkness,
the shell-torn houses, the bruised earth, the racked and mutilated
humans.... Reading on, it was like emerging from Hades into a great
Peace.

* * *

"I wish it were possible to convey to you, my dear Mrs. Haynes, some
impression of the moving and beautiful ceremony with which your son was
laid to rest on the morning of September ninth, in the little village of
Aucourt. Imagine a warm, sunny, late-summer day, and a village street
sloping up a hillside, filled with soldiers in faded, dusty blue, and
American Ambulance drivers in khaki.

"In the open door of one of the houses, the front of which was covered
with the tri-color of Fr