“Not a bit of it,” Will replied vehemently.  “Why, even their wounds weren’t serious enough to lay them up for long.  The last I heard of them they were coming over on a hospital ship and expected to be here almost as soon as we were.  For all I know, they may have landed by this time.”

“Oh,” said Amy, still too dazed to take it all in.  “Then all this time we have thought of them as dead, they were alive—­”

“Very much so,” said Will, with a grin, “and probably kicking too—­ just like us!”

CHAPTER XXI

 Out of the dark

It took the Outdoor Girls a moment or two to digest this rather startling information.  And when it did finally seep into their consciousness, their first feeling was one of joy for the poor professor whose sons would be restored to him after all.

But quick on the heels of this thought came another.  How could the sons be restored to their father, if the father were nowhere to be found?

“You say the old chap skipped out, decamped?” Will broke in on their meditations.  “That sort of complicates matters, doesn’t it?”

“Rather,” agreed Roy, frowning.  “It is going to be rather tough on those fellows, James and Arnold, to come home, expecting to be welcomed by a rejoicing parent, only to find said parent missing.”

“Humph, that’s the first time I’ve thought of the boys’ side of it,” said Betty.  “We have been too much occupied right along in being sorry for the poor old professor.”

“Well, if you had known the boys, you would have thought of their side of it all right,” said Frank seriously, “They are mighty good scouts, both of them, and they think a lot of their old dad, too, I can tell you.  Why, many a night”—­ his voice took on a reminiscent note and the girls felt once again that they were privileged in having a brief glimpse of the life “over there”—­ “when a surprise attack was scheduled for the next morning or we were waiting for some such manoeuvre from the enemy, Arnold would talk to me about his dad—­ that was the time when fellows got chummy, you know, and got to know each other’s souls—­ and once he gave me a note for the old chap and asked me to deliver it if I came through and he didn’t.  I think I have it about me somewhere.”  He fumbled about in his pockets while the girls waited silently.

Presently he drew forth a little slip of paper, muddy and worn and dust-stained from being carried about for a long, long time in a khaki pocket.

“He told me,” Frank went on, still holding the slip of paper in his hand but making no attempt to open it, “that his mother had died when he and Jimmy were young and that since then his dad had been father and mother both to them and that he had worked himself nearly to death to give them a chance for the college education that he had had.  He said that the one thing that had always threatened