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"Yes, yes I do, sister."

She chattered on about the sparrow and the clouds and the flowers as they approached the school, and Joe gave up answering her.

The woods above the school seemed still and empty.

But then Joe saw a massive brown man, naked to the waist and wearing a pistol, step from the trees. The man drank from a canteen, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, grinned down on the world with handsome disdain, and disappeared again into the twilight of the woods.

"Sister!" gasped Joe. "My father—I just saw my father!"

"No, Joe—no you didn’t."

"He’s up there in the woods. I saw him. I want to go up there, sister."

"He isn’t your father, Joe. He doesn’t know you. He doesn’t want to see you."

"He’s one of my people, sister!"

"You can’t go up there, Joe, and you can’t stay here." She took him by the arm to make him move. "Joe—you’re being a bad boy, Joe."

Joe obeyed numbly. He didn’t speak again for the remainder of the walk, which brought them home by another route, far from the school. No one else had seen his wonderful father, or believed that Joe had.

Not until prayers that night did he burst into tears.

At ten o’clock, the young nun found his cot empty.

Under a great spread net that was laced with rags, an artillery piece squatted in the woods, black and oily, its muzzle thrust at the night sky. Trucks and the rest of the battery were hidden higher on the slope.

Joe watched and listened tremblingly through a thin screen of shrubs as the soldiers, indistinct in the darkness, dug in around their gun. The words he overheard made no sense to him.

"Sergeant, why we gotta dig in, when we’re movin’ out in the mornin’, and it’s just maneuvers anyhow? Seems like we could kind of conserve our strength, and just scratch around a little to show where we’d of dug if there was any sense to it."

"For all you know, boy, there may be sense to it before mornin’," said the sergeant. "You got ten minutes to get to China and bring me back a pigtail. Hear?"

The sergeant stepped into a patch of moonlight, his hands on his hips, his big shoulders back, the image of an emperor. Joe saw that it was the same man he’d marveled at in the afternoon. The sergeant listened with satisfaction to the sounds of digging, and then, to Joe’s alarm, strode toward Joe’s hiding place.

Joe didn’t move a muscle until the big boot struck his side. "Ach!"

"Who’s that?" The sergeant snatched Joe from the ground, and set him on his feet hard. "My golly, boy, what you doin’ here? Scoot! Go on home! This ain’t no place for kids to be playin’." He shined a flashlight in Joe’s face. "Doggone," he muttered. "Where you come from?" He held Joe at arm’s length, and shook him gently, like a rag doll. "Boy, how you get here—swim?"

Joe stammered in German that he was looking for his father.

"Come on—how you get here? What you doin’? Where’s your mammy?"

"What you got there, sergeant?" said a voice in the dark.

"Don’t rightly know what to call it," said the sergeant. "Talks like a Kraut and dresses like a Kraut, but just look at it a minute."

Soon a dozen men stood in a circle around Joe, talking loudly, then softly, to him, as though they thought getting through to him were a question of tone.

Every time Joe tried to explain his mission, they laughed in amazement.

"How he learn German? Tell me that."

"Where your daddy, boy?"

"Where your mammy, boy?"

"Sprecken zee Dutch, boy? Looky there. See him nod. He talks it, all right."

"Oh, you’re fluent, man, mighty fluent. Ask him some more".

"Go get the lieutenant," said the sergeant. "He can talk to this boy, and understand what he’s tryin’ to say. Look at him shake. Scared to death. Come here, boy; don’t be afraid, now." He enclosed Joe in his great arms. "Just take it easy, now— everything’s gonna be all-1-1-1 right. See what got? By golly, I don’t believe the boy’s ever seen chocolate before. Go on— taste it. Won’t hurt you."

Joe, safe in a fort of bone and sinew, ringed