Page:Air Service Boys Over Enemy's Lines.djvu/55

Rh of their own apartment to the general sitting-room, where the tired pilots gathered to smoke, talk, play games, sing, and give their opinions out every topic imaginable, including scraps of news received in late letters from home towns across the sea.

"Do you know, Tom," Jack said unexpectedly, "I'd give something to know where Bessie Gleason is just at this time. It's strange how often I think about that young girl. It's just as if something that people call intuition told me she might be in serious trouble through that hard-looking guardian of hers, Carl Potzfeldt."

Tom smiled.

Bessie Gleason was a very pretty and winsome girl of about twelve years of age, with whom Jack in particular had been quite "chummy" on the voyage across the Atlantic, and through the submarine zone, as related in "Air Service Boys Flying for France." The last he had seen of her was when she waved her hand to him when leaving the steamer at its English port. Her stern guardian had contracted a violent dislike for Jack, so that the two had latterly been compelled to meet only in secret for little confidential chats.

"Oh, you've taken to imagining all sorts of terrible things in connection with pretty Bessie and her cruel guardian. He claimed to be a