"I'm glad you didn't," said Dick, honestly. "I'm feeling fine now, and if you'll give me some breakfast I'll tackle my weight in wildcats! But if I'd had five minutes less sleep it wouldn't have been enough! I don't believe I was ever tired enough to sleep through a bombardment before."
"This isn't much of a bombardment," said Stepan, contemptuously. "I don't believe there'll be much damage done. Come on out--though I'll see that you get some breakfast first. I think I'll have something interesting to tell you before long."
"All right. But why don't you tell me now?" asked Dick.
"Bad luck to talk about things until they're done," said Steve, with a grin. "Don't you know that in America?"
"All right," said Dick. "But just when are you going to know?"
"Pretty soon--but that's no sign that you'll know it as soon as I do, you know. How would you like to go back to Semlin?"
"That's just what I'm afraid I won't be able to do. That is, it would be a whole lot better if you didn't know."
"Oh, all right! I don't care, anyhow! I've enlisted for the war. By the way, what's happened to your scout troop? I thought perhaps there'd be some good work here in Belgrade for it to do."
"There will be, only there isn't any troop any more. About everyone in it is with the army, except the very little chaps. I think they'd have let me fight this time if there wasn't other work for me to do. You see we lost so many men against Turkey and Bulgaria that we haven't really enough men to fill the ranks. We have regiments that aren't half filled--or we did have until this started. By this time, though, I think there aren't many short battalions left. The old men and the boys will fight, and they say that some of the country regiments have a lot of women in them."
"Women? Fighting with the men? That's not allowed, is it?"
"How can you stop it?" asked Steve, with a shrug. "You don't know much about us yet, Dick, my friend. You don't know what it is to have lived with the Turks for centuries. I have read about your American women on the plains, in the times when the Indians went on the war-path. Most of them could handle a rifle, couldn't they? And they were pretty good shots, too!"
"Not so very different. I don't believe your Indians were ever worse than the Bashi-Bazouks. They hated us Servians, you see, because we were infidels and Christians. And so for hundreds of years they harried us, burned our homes, carried off our women, killed our men. That sort of thing gets into the blood after a time. For centuries we Serbs have stood between all Europe and the Turks. They never wiped us out, though they beat us by sheer weight of numbers. But here, and in Bosnia, that the Austrians stole, and in the Black Mountains--Montenegro--a few Serbs have always held out.