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Show i j : ! Battle Jacket By EDWARD YEWDALL McClure Syndicate WNU Features. JOHNNY MULFORD'S first approach ap-proach to the girl was direct. He went straight up to her in the subway sub-way station and said, "Gee, you're the most beautiful thing I ever saw." The girl gave him a look that was (1) startled, (2) contemptuous and (3) mad. She said, "On your way." Perhaps if she had known Johnny's John-ny's long build-up before he found the courage to do what he did she would have been a little more receptive. re-ceptive. It was like this: He had come back from the wars and gone to work for the Mulcahy Contracting Contract-ing Company on his old drawing board, after two months' loafing. He couldn't get through his red head that this building stuff was of the slightest moment. He couldn't, at first, get back to work. He couldn't , get his mind on the beam. After wandering around the house, worrying Mom to death, picking books out of the bookcase and reading read-ing a page or two, then putting them face down on the coffee table, the piano, the floor; after whitewashing the cellar and pruning the trees, he finally gave up and went into the office. The battle jacket with the shoulder patch embroidered with the "1" and "Guadalcanal" hung In the closet. He had never worn it since the day he got home. He saw the girl the first day he went regularly to work. She boarded board-ed the bus at Poplar Street. She carried herself with a quiet dignity that became her blonde beauty; she was alone always. The girl's eyes reminded Johnny of the deep blue ' of the Pacific, and it seemed as if this was the girl he had been wait- ' ing for all his life. But the girl appeared to know nothing about that. After a few weeks of long-distance admiration Johnny met Kline Har-kins Har-kins and, wonder of wonders, Kline knew something about the girl! If Kline had only been acquainted, things might have been settled one way or another right then. But Kline only lived near the girl, and she wasn't given to distant noddings. But Kline had a lot of dope. Her name was Hermance Taylor, she was twenty-two and worked in the Great American Insurance Company's Compa-ny's office; her father was a dispatcher dis-patcher for the bus company. There was no boy friend in sight. Six weeks passed. Once Johnny had the opportunity to give Hermance Her-mance his seat in the bus. She said a cool "Thank you," and sat down. After that Johnny ceased to exist. After his rebuff in the subway station sta-tion Johnny braced Kline Harkins to try to meet the girl through neighbors neigh-bors on Poplar Street, but Kline was too diffident and bashful himself for that. Anyway, Johnny calculated, Kline would like to meet the girl on his own account. This seemed a cockeyed reversal of the "Why don't you speak for yourself, John?" Pocahontas Po-cahontas thing. Johnny just subsided into eyeing the girl, drinking in every detail of -her appearance, noting the sweetly grave expression in the deep blue eyes, the just-right details of her modest dress, the (Trapfifiil ,i,alL- qi-i superlative carriage. Things at the office didn't go so well. He couldn't concentrate on the layout of the Kilmer Radio Company's Com-pany's machine shop at all. Mr. Mulcahy was swell; he reminded Johnny that Rome was neither built nor destroyed in a day. "Take your time," he said. "This stuff will seem trivial for a while yet. Work only when you feel like it, Johnny. We're with you we know what you can do." "Wait till I meet Hermance," he said to himself. "Then I'll start to go to town. We'll see movies two nights a week, and we'll hold hands in the dark. On Saturday nights we'll go to the American Legion dances, and the boys will look at Hermance and gnash their teeth. After about a year I'll touch Dad for a loan and we'll think about buying a house, and from then on it'll be bills and mortgages and maybe a little Hermance and Johnny. And will I love it!" Early on Johnny's Saturday ofT, Mr. Mulcahy called him up. "Johnny," "John-ny," he said, "Mr. Henderson is here from Milwaukee. He wants to go over the machine shop layout with us, and I don't know a thing about it. Will you come in?" Well, Mother had sent his only civvy overcoat to the cleaners, and it wouldn't be back until night a special concession at that. Mother said, "Put on the battle jacket, John. It's mild out. You ought to be proud of it." Johnny hated to wear any part of a uniform somehow, some-how, but there was nothing else to do. It was too cold for his suit, and as yet he possessed no topcoat. He allied forth in the battle Jacket. Hermance hopped on the bus at Poplar Street. Her eyes passed Johnny with their cool impersonality and looked out the window. Something Some-thing brought them back again, and they settled on the shoulder patch of Johnny's jacket, on the "1" and the "Guadalcanal." In the subway station she came swiftly up to Johnny and said, "Pardon "Par-don me, but I always wanted to shake hands with a man from Guadalcanal. Guad-alcanal. I hope you won't think I'm forward." Johnny grinned and said, "No. I don't think you re forward. I think you're swell." |