and greatly beloved," we are told.

The hard-pressed Indian warrior knelt in the forest and besought that
life-long comrade, his bow, not to desert or fail him. King Philip kept
in his quiver a favorite arrow which he never used because it had
earned retirement by saving his own life.

What Paul Revere may have said to his horse in that stirring midnight
ride we do not know. But may we not suppose that he urged his trusty
steed forward with resolute and inspiring words about the glorious
errand they were upon?

Perhaps the lonely ringer of the immortal bell up in the Old South
steeple muttered some urgent word of incentive to that iron clanger as
it beat against its ringing wall of brass.

So I have made _Uncle Sam_, the motorcycle, the friend and companion of
_Tom Slade_. I have withheld none of their confidences--or trifling
differences. I dare say they were both weary and impatient at times.

If he is not companionable to you, then so much the worse for you and
for our story. But he was the friend, the inseparable associate and
co-patriot of _Tom Slade, the Dispatch Rider_.

You will not like him any the less because of the noise he made in
trudging up a hill, or because his mud-guard was broken off, or his tire
wounded in the great cause, or his polished headlight knocked into a tin
can. You will not ridicule the old splint of a shingle which was bound
with such surgical nicety among his rusting spokes. If you do, then you
are the kind of a boy who would laugh at a wounded soldier and you had
better not read this book.

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TOM SLADE

MOTORCYCLE DISPATCH-BEARER

CHAPTER I

FOR SERVICE AS REQUIRED

Swiftly and silently along the moonlit road sped the dispatch-rider. Out
of the East he had come, where the battle line runs between blue
mountains and the country is quiet and peaceful, and the boys in khaki
long for action and think wistfully of Picardy and Flanders. He was a
lucky young fellow, this dispatch-rider, and all the boys had told him
so.

"We'll miss you, Thatchy," they had said.

And "Thatchy" had answered characteristically, "I'm sorry, too, kind of,
in a way."

His name was not Thatchy, but they had called him so because his thick
shock of light hair, which persisted in falling down over his forehead
and ears, had not a little the appearance of the thatched roofs on the
French peasant's cottages. He, with a loq