I tried to cheer the man up, but he was scared stiff.

“Mark my words,” he says.  “She’ll pull a bloomer!  If that woman could go into an innocent hotel kitchen, where every care is taken to keep things right, and poison off twenty-three people till they picked at the covers and had relatives wondering what might be in their safe-deposit boxes, think what she’d do in the great unsanitary outside, where she can use her imagination!

“There’s but one salvation for me; I must have trusted agents in the crowd when that stuff is auctioned off, and they got to collar every last bottle of it, no matter what the cost.  I have to lay down like a pup on the next bond drive, but this is my only hope.  For the Lord’s sake, don’t you go there and start bidding things up, no matter who she gets for auctioneer!  Don’t you bid—­even if Woodrow Wilson himself comes out.”

That’s the impression Genevieve May had made on her own daughter’s husband, who is a clear-seeing man and a good citizen.  And it looked like he must secretly buy up her output.  She not only come to town with her canning outfit and her summer’s stock of strange preserves, all beauteous in their jars, but she brought with her to auction off this stuff a regular French flying man with an honourable record.

She’d met this French officer in the city and entertained him at the palatial Popper home; and mebbe she’d hypnotized him.  He wasn’t in good shape, anyway.  First place, he’d been fighting in the air for three years and had been wounded in five places—­including the Balkans.  Then, like that wasn’t enough for one man, he’d been sent over here to teach our men to fly when they got a machine; and over here he’d fell out of a cloud one day when his brake or something went wrong, and this had give him a nice pleasant vacation on crutches.

Genevieve had fastened on him at a time when he probably hadn’t the steely resistance Frenchmen been showing on the West Front.  Or, being in a strange country, mebbe he didn’t know when politeness to Genevieve May Popper would become mere cowardice.  Anyway, he could talk English well enough; and Genevieve May brought him to town and made a big hit.

First thing she done was to set up her stock of canned goods in a section they give her in Horticultural Hall.  Them three hundred bottles took up a lot of room and showed up grand between the fancy-work section, consisting of embroideries, sofa cushions, and silk patch quilts, and the art section, consisting of hand paintings of interesting objects by bright pupils in the public school.  Then she put in her canning outfit, with a couple of hired natives to do the work while she lectured on the science of it and tried to get weak-minded patriots to taste things.

Genevieve May had a good time at these demonstrations, speaking in tones of oratory and persuasion and encouraging the tasters to take a chance.  She certainly had discovered some entirely new flavours that the best chemists hadn’t stumbled on.  She was proud of this, but a heap prouder of her French flying man.  When she wasn’t thinking up new infamies with rutabagas and watermelon rinds, she’d be showing him off to the fair crowds.  She give the impression when she paraded him that the French Army would of had few flyers if she hadn’t stepped into the breach.