XX HOME AGAIN!

That same day, in the evening, I was tendered a banquet at the Hotel Savoy by a fellow-officer who had bet three other friends of mine that I would be home by Christmas. This wager had been made at the time he heard that I was a prisoner of war, and the dinner was the stake.

The first intimation he had of my safe return from Germany and the fact that he had won his bet was a telegram I sent him reading as follows:

Lieutenant Louis Grant:

War-bread bad, so I came home.

Pat.

He said he would not part with that message for a thousand dollars.

Other banquets followed in fast succession. After I had survived nine of them I figured that I was now in as much danger of succumbing to a surfeit of rich food as I had previously been of dying from starvation, and for my own protection I decided to leave London. Moreover, my thoughts and my heart were turning back to the land of my birth, where I knew there was a loving old mother who was longing for more substantial evidence of my safe escape than the cables and letters she had received.

Strangely enough, on the boat which carried me across the Atlantic I saw an R. F. C. man—Lieutenant Lascelles.

I walked over to him, held out my hand, and said, "Hello!"

He looked at me steadily for at least a minute.

"My friend, you certainly look like Pat O'Brien," he declared, "but I can't believe my eyes. Who are you?"

I quickly convinced him that his eyes were still to be relied upon, and then he stared at me for another minute or two, shaking his head dubiously.

His mystification was quite explicable. The last time he had seen me I was going down to earth with a bullet in my face and my machine doing a spinning nose dive. He was one of my comrades in the flying corps and was in the fight which resulted in my capture. He said he had read the report that I was a prisoner of war, but he had never believed it, as he did not think it possible for me to survive that fall.

He was one of the few men living out of eighteen who were originally in my squadron—I do not mean the eighteen with whom I sailed from Canada last May, but the squadron I joined in France. He rehearsed for me the fate of all my old friends in the squadron, and it was a mighty sad story. All of them had been killed except one or two who were in dry-dock for repairs. He himself was on his way to Australia to recuperate and get his nerves back into shape again. He had been in many desperate combats.

As we sat on the deck exchanging experiences I would frequently notice him gazing intently in my face as if he were not quite sure that the whole proposition was not a hoax and that I was not an impostor.

Outside of this unexpected meeting, my trip across was uneventful.

I arrived in St. John, New Brunswick, and eventually the little town of Momence, Illinois, on the Kankakee River.

I have said that I was never so happy to arrive in a country as I was when I first set foot on Dutch soil. Now I'm afraid I shall have to take that statement back. Not until I finally landed in Momence and realized that I was again in the town of my childhood days did I enjoy that feeling of absolute security which one never really appreciates until after a visit to foreign parts.

Now that I am back, the whole adventure constantly recurs to me as a dream, and I'm never quite sure that I won't wake up and find it so.

THE END

Transcriber's Notes

The transcriber made these changes to the text to correct obvious errors:

p. 172, woulb --> would

p. 265, geting --> getting