the sea was no longer discernible. On
they rushed with a fine disdain for poor little Charos, whose village
steeple appeared and disappeared like a flash of lightning. The road was
broad and level and _Uncle Sam_ sped along amid a cloud of dust, the
bordering trees and houses flying away behind like dried leaves in a
hurricane. The rider's hair was fluttering like a victorious emblem, his
eyes fixed with a wild intensity.

"We'd get arrested for this in America," he muttered; "we--we should
worry."

It was little _Uncle Sam_ cared for the traffic laws of America.

Around the outskirts of Teurley they swept and into the broad highway
like a pair of demons, and a muleteer, seeing discretion to be the
better part of valor, drove his team well to the side--far enough, even,
to escape any devilish contamination which this unearthly apparition
might diffuse.

They had reached a broad highway, one of those noble roads which
Napoleon had made. They could not go wrong now. They passed a luxurious
chateau, then a great hotel where people haled them in French. Then they
passed an army auto truck loaded with mattresses, with the bully old
initials U. S. A. on its side. Two boys in khaki were on the seat.

"Is the _Texas Pioneer_ in?" Tom yelled.

"What?" one of them called back.

"He's deaf or something," muttered Tom; "we--should worry."

On they sped till the road merged into a street lined with shops, where
children in wooden shoes and men in blouses shuffled about. Tom thought
he had never seen people so slow in his life.

[Illustration: DOWN THE HILL COASTED UNCLE SAM BEARING TOM FURIOUSLY
ONWARD.]

Now, indeed, he must make some concession to the throngs moving back and
forth, and he slackened his speed, but only slightly.

"Dieppe?" he called.

"Dieppe," came the laughing answer from a passer-by, who was evidently
amused at Tom's pronunciation.

"Where's the wharves?"

Again that polite shrug of the shoulders.

He took a chance with another passer-by, who nodded and pointed down a
narrow street with dull brown houses tumbling all over each other, as it
seemed to Tom. It was the familiar, old-world architecture of the French
coast towns, which he had seen in Brest and St. Nazaire, as if all the
houses had become suddenly frightened and huddled together like panicky
sheep.

More leisurely now, but quickly still, rode the dispatch-rider through
this narrow, surging way which had all the earmarks of the
sh