Jim was whistling cheerfully in the kitchen.

He turned his head and laughed when Ford went in.
"I found a dead soldier behind the sack of spuds," Jim announced, and produced an empty bottle, mate to the one Ford had thrown into the gully.

"And Dick didn't seem to have any appetite at all, and Mose is still in Sleepytown.

I guess that's all the news at this end of the line.

Er--hope everything is all right at the house ?" "Far as I could see, it was," Ford replied, with an inner sense of evasion.