“Brighton.” Don just managed to pronounce the word.
“Don! Brighton! Oh--you didn’t tell me that before. Brighton--was my school, too, Don. Class of--1915. And you--Don--too! Well the good old school will have reason to be proud--of you!”
“Perhaps so, if--if I could have--lived--gone on doing things--tried to be--Don, ask the nurse to come here--or the--Major. I guess--I guess--”
The boy’s face had suddenly grown whiter, if that were possible, and a deathly pallor came over it. Don went quickly to do as Billy asked. The nurse came to the bedside of the young man. She bent over him for what seemed a long while--a minute or more. Then she turned to Don.
“Going,” she said. “He called your name again. Perhaps he can hear you.” The nurse made way.
“Billy, dear Billy, I--I’m here,” Don said, his lips close to his pal’s ear. A faint smile came over the patient’s face and then it became rigid. With a light heart Billy Mearns “went West.”
Don Richards’ new helper on the Red Cross ambulance was an under-sized, red-headed Irishman by the name of Tim Casey. He was a month or two short of nineteen winters and, as he expressed it, an undetermined number of summers, but judging by the bleached-out color of his hair, which he assured Don was originally as black as a nigger’s pocket, there must have been a long siege of sunny months. County Kerry was his birthplace and his native village was noted for its big men, his own father being almost a walking church steeple and his numerous brothers all six-footers. Tim was the only short one--“the runt in the litter,” he called himself.
“But if yez are proper anxious to know an’ ye look loike ye couldn’t survive the day out wid not knowin’ all o’ me fam’ly histhry, Oi’ll tell yez this: Phw’at was left out o’ me body was put in me head, do yez moind? for by the holy Saint Macherel, Oi’m the smartest o’ the bunch. Me faither’s poorer than whin he was born, an’ me brithers couldn’t foind pennies if they growed on the grass. But me? Faith, if wan o’ these here boche zizzers don’t have me name wrote on it, thin whin the war’s over Oi’m goin’ to America an’ make a million pounds, loike me friend Mike McCarty did!”
“Good for you! That’s nearly five million dollars. Hope you get it,” said Don.