Page:Air Service Boys Flying for France.djvu/175

170 interest. It was, in the first place, perfectly amazing, as well as appalling, to see what a desert that once fair land had become, after the tidal wave of modern warfare had swept across it.

"Why!" Jack was wont to exclaim, "it must be heaps worse than the Sahara; for there the sand always was and always will be, while here there once nestled lovely little French villages, and every bit of the ground, they tell us, was taken up with gardens, fields and orchards."

"Yes, everything is gone," Tom would continue, looking around at the desolate picture, with some crows the only living thing in sight. Now, let's talk of something more cheerful."

"About—well, Bessie, for instance?" suggested Jack, with a sly grin.

Tom had to laugh at his chum's way of bringing the subject around to something he had evidently been thinking about lately.

"You're still wondering whether you'll ever run across that pretty little Gleason girl, I see," he remarked.

"Well, I took quite an interest in her, as you happen to know," admitted Jack candidly. "But it was partly on account of her having such a hard time of it with that guardian of her's. I didn't like Potzfeldt's looks for a red