But he was the friend, the inseparable associate and co-patriot of _Tom Slade, the Dispatch Rider_.
You will not like him any the less because of the noise he made in trudging up a hill, or because his mud-guard was broken off, or his tire wounded in the great cause, or his polished headlight knocked into a tin can.

You will not ridicule the old splint of a shingle which was bound with such surgical nicety among his rusting spokes.

If you do, then you are the kind of a boy who would laugh at a wounded soldier and you had better not read this book.
-- --------------------------------------------------------------------- TOM SLADE MOTORCYCLE DISPATCH-BEARER CHAPTER I FOR SERVICE AS REQUIRED Swiftly and silently along the moonlit road sped the dispatch-rider.

Out of the East he had come, where the battle line runs between blue mountains and the country is quiet and peaceful, and the boys in khaki long for action and think wistfully of Picardy and Flanders.

He was a lucky young fellow, this dispatch-rider, and all the boys had told him so.
"We'll miss you, Thatchy," they had said.
And "Thatchy" had answered characteristically, "I'm sorry, too, kind of, in a way." His name was not Thatchy, but they had called him so because his thick shock of light hair, which persisted in falling down over his forehead and ears, had not a little the appearance of the thatched roofs on the French peasant's cottages.