The Major's Daughter by J. P. Francis Page B

get cut off by a reporter, a thin, serpentine man who wrote for one of the Boston papers.
    â€œYou said yourself, Major, that there has already been an escape. It’s a bad precedent to have German prisoners on our soil. This war should be fought on European soil, not here,” the reporter, a man named Whipple, or Whittle, Major Brennan couldn’t remember, said from his position near the fireplace of the Heights’ magnificent home. The reporter held a drink in his hand that threatened to slosh over the rim.
    â€œWe didn’t have a choice in it,” said Elman Thorne, one of the town fathers from Stark. He was a large, stolid man, with a farmer’s neck and heavy shoulders. “Washington gave the orders and we followed. They play the music and we dance. . . .”
    â€œDid the escaped German . . . did he make it very far? Are the reports accurate that he got stopped on his way to Boston?” the reporter asked.
    Major Brennan could not accommodate them all. Everywhere he went these questions bombarded him, and he knew without doubt that no answer he gave would satisfy them. They spoke to hear their own thoughts; they spoke to top one another, to prove their insight into the war was greater than the next man’s. It fatigued him. He had known as soon as Sherman Heights had invited him into his study, abandoning his daughter to the care of Heights’s wife, Eleanor, that he had stepped into the lion’s den. The men, huddling to smoke and drink in Sherman Heights’s luxurious study, had fallen on him as soon as he had stepped through the door. Major Brennan understood he represented the faceless authorities, the government, the military, for men who felt removed from the war. Their questions betrayed a hunger for involvement, for understanding, that he was powerless to provide.
    â€œThe escaped German did not get far,” Major Brennan said wearily. “Whatever you’ve heard to the contrary is mere rumor. He was not a—”
    â€œThe fact that he got out at all,” Thorne, the town father, interrupted, “is a travesty. I’m all for a humane treatment of prisoners, I am, but in this case . . .”
    â€œWhat I was going to say is that the prisoner was not what you would call an aggressive sort. He was a pretty timid boy, by all accounts. I think he was less on the warpath and more a simple case of homesickness.”
    â€œThat may be,” Whipple, or Whittle said, his drink going down too fast, Major Brennan saw, “but what about that next lad? Or the one after that? They’re threats to the community and to the country at large.”
    Happily Eleanor Heights tapped on the door, then breezed in to tell her husband that he had run off with half of the party. She was a tall, handsome woman with a nose too large for her face. Yet the nose worked; it gave her a Roman dignity, a face not typical in Maine. Major Brennan watched Sherman Heights push out of his wingback chair, his cigar emitting a cloud above his head. He laughed and shrugged, giving in to his wife immediately.
    â€œCake is being served,” Eleanor Heights announced. “You’ll miss out if you don’t come directly. And as it’s a cake for me, I’m going to insist you men break this up immediately and come along.”
    Major Brennan followed his hosts out to the party proper. The last daylight washed the large living room in quiet grays. A maid had apparently delivered a three-tiered cake to the large dining room table, and she now busily lighted the candles that bristled from the top. The room lights had been lowered to add to the atmosphere.
    â€œI’m fifty years old today,” Eleanor Heights announced to the group around the table. “I know a woman is supposed to hide her age, but what’s the use? I’m proud to be fifty. I have much to be grateful for, and I’m well aware of it. With luck, I may have