My chair went banging as I sprang toward him.  “Jim!”

And the general’s calm dignity suddenly was the radiant grin of the boy who had played and gone to school and stolen apples with me for a long bright childhood—­the boy lost sight of these last years of his in the army.  “Dave!” he cried out.  “Old Davy Cram!” And his arm went around my shoulder regardless of the public.  “My word, but I’m glad!” he sputtered.  And then:  “Come and have dinner—­finish having it.  Come to our table.”  He slewed me about and presented me to the three others.

In a minute I was installed, to the pride of my friend the head waiter, at military headquarters, next to Fitzhugh and the Frenchman.  A campact resume of personal history between Fitzhugh and myself over, I turned to the blue figure on my left hand, Colonel Raffre, of the French, army.  On his broad chest hung thrilling bits of color, not only the bronze war cross, with its green watered ribbon striped with red, but the blood-red ribbon of the “Great Cross” itself—­the cross of the Legion of Honor.  I spoke to him in French, which happens to be my second mother tongue, and he met the sound with a beaming welcome.

“I don’t do English as one should,” he explained in beautiful Parisian.  “No gift of tongues in my kit, I fear; also I’m a bit embarrassed at practising on my friends.  It’s a relief to meet some one who speaks perfectly French, as m’sieur.”

M’sieur was gratified not to have lost his facility.  “But my ear is getting slower,” I said.  “For instance, I eavesdropped a while ago when you were talking about your Huron soldiers, and I got most of what you said because you spoke English.  I doubt if I could if you’d been speaking French.”

The colonel shrugged massive shoulders.  “My English is defective but distinct,” he explained.  “One is forced to speak slowly when one speaks badly.  Also the Colonel Chichely”—­the Britisher—­“it is he at whom I talk carefully.  The English ear, it is not imaginative.  One must make things clear.  You know the Hurons, then?”

I specified how.

“Ah!” he breathed out.  “The men in my command had been, some of them, what you call guides.  They got across to France in charge of troop horses on the ships; then they stayed and enlisted.  Fine soldier stuff.  Hardy, and of resource and of finesse.  Quick and fearless as wildcats.  They fit into one niche of the war better than any other material.  You heard the story of my rescue?”

I had not.  At that point food had interfered, and I asked if it was too much that the colonel should repeat.