“No business driving alone that hour of the night.  Girls nowadays—­” He looked around the garage.  “Work here, I suppose?”

“Yessir.”

“If there’s anything I can do for you?  Over at the mill.”

“Guess not,” said Chug.

“Treat you right here, do they?”

“Fine.”

“Let’s see.  Who owns this place?”

“I do.”

Old Man Hatton’s face broke into a sunburst of laugh-wrinkles.  He threw back his head and went the scale from roar to chuckle.  “One on me.  Pretty good.  Have to tell Angie that one.”

Chug walked to the street with him.  “Your daughter, she’s got a lot of nerve, all right.  And that girl with her—­Weld.  Say, not a whimper out of her and the blood running down her face.  She all right?”

“Cut her head a little.  They’re both all right.  Angie wouldn’t even stay in bed.  Well, as I say, if there’s anything—?”

Chug flushed a little.  “Tell you what, Mr. Hatton.  I’m working on a thing that’ll take the whine out of the Daker.”

Old Man Hatton owned the Daker Motor plant among other things.  The Daker is the best car for the money in the world.  Not much for looks but everything in the engine.  And everyone who has ever owned one knows that its only fault is the way its engine moans.  Daker owners hate that moan.  When you’re going right it sounds a pass between a peanut roaster and a banshee with bronchitis.  Every engineer in the Daker plant had worked over it.

“Can’t be done,” said Old Man Hatton.

“Another three months and I’ll show you.”

“Hope you do, son.  Hope you do.”

But in another three months Chug Scaritt was one of a million boys destined to take off a pink-striped shirt, a nobby belted suit, and a long-visored cap to don a rather bob-tailed brown outfit.  It was some eighteen months later before he resumed the chromatic clothes with an ardour out of all proportion to their style and cut.  But in the interval between doffing pink-striped shirt and donning pink-striped shirt....

No need to describe Camp Sibley, two miles outside Chippewa, and the way it grew miraculously, overnight, into a khaki city.  No going into detail concerning the effective combination formed by Chug and a machine gun.  These things were important and interesting.  But perhaps not more interesting than the seemingly unimportant fact that in July following that April Chug was dancing blithely and rhythmically with Elizabeth Weld, and saying, “Angie Hatton’s a smooth little dancer, all right; but she isn’t in it with you.”