Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/357

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

a portion of that city's morning milk supply; and not only commandeered it, but personally conducted it, to the spot where it was needed. Yet it was doubtful if one of the townspeople, so intent with hurrying this distribution of the milk, recognized that nondescript figure standing beside the driver's seat of the foremost of these trucks, while his eyes surveyed again the smoking field of destruction. He might have been a hobo who had bummed a ride, and now was staring in mere curiosity.

Actually, his survey was swift and business-like. It had a military significance, and as he concluded it there sputtered up an army side-car, with its bathtub empty. At the same moment there appeared winding out of the green of the channel road, another and a longer line of trucks, dun-painted things this time, with men in khaki at the wheel.

The bedraggled man leaped down and stepped into the side-car which, quite as if it had come there for him, turned and sputtered back to meet this other column of trucks. These big dun-colored carriers were pyramided high with what might have been bricks, or tiles—odd-looking round, high-domed tiles. The man in the side-car waved these trucks one by one, out toward the bordering area where incipient camps sprang up and into the smoldering residence districts where hungry refugees knotted and grouped.

"Bread! It's bread!" shouted excited voices. A cheer was raised: "Bread! Hurrah for bread!" In a minute or two these jolly khaki fellows atop the trucks were tossing spinning loaves to hundreds of eager hands upraised to catch. The air was full of bread; and then all at once everybody's hands were full of it. Women