ore--damp-smelling barrels, brass lanterns, dilapidated ships'
figureheads, cosy but uncleanly drinking places, and sailors.

And of all the sights save one which Tom Slade ever beheld, the one
which most gladdened his heart was a neat new sign outside a stone
building,

Office of United States Quartermaster.

Several American army wagons were backed up against the building and
half a dozen khaki-clad boys lounged about. There was much coming and
going, but it is a part of the dispatch-rider's prestige to have
immediate admittance anywhere, and Tom stopped before this building and
was immediately surrounded by a flattering representation of military
and civilian life, both French and American.

To these he paid not the slightest heed, but carefully lowered _Uncle
Sam's_ rest so that his weary companion might stand alone.

"You old tramp," he said in an undertone; "stay here and take it easy.
Keep away," he added curtly to a curious private who was venturing a too
close inspection of _Uncle Sam's_ honorable wounds.

"What's the matter--run into something?" he asked.

"No, I didn't," said Tom, starting toward the building.

Suddenly he stopped short, staring.

A man in civilian clothes sat tilted back in one of several chairs
beside the door. He wore a little black moustache and because his head
was pressed against the brick wall behind him, his hat was pushed
forward giving him a rakish look which was rather heightened by an
unlighted cigar sticking up out of the corner of his mouth like a piece
of field artillery.

He might have been a travelling salesman waiting for his samples on the
veranda of a country hotel and he had about him a kind of sophisticated
look as if he took a sort of blase pleasure in watching the world go
round. His feet rested upon the rung of his tilted chair, forming his
knees into a sort of desk upon which lay a French newspaper. The tilting
of his knees, the tilting of his chair, the tilting of his hat and the
rakish tilt of his cigar, gave him the appearance of great
self-sufficiency, as if, away down in his soul, he knew what he was
there for, and cared not a whit whether anyone else did or not.

Tom Slade paused on the lower step and stared. Then with a slowly
dawning smile supplanting his look of astonishment, he ejaculated,

"M-i-s-t-e-r _C-o-n-n-e_!"

The man made not the slightest change in his attitude except to smile
the while he worked his cigar over to the other corn