IX

"Charles of Burgundy Comes, Thirteen Fifty-Eight--"

"He's a boob if he comes here!"

"That don't mean comes, you nut," some scholar elucidated. "_Comes_

means Duke. Charles, Duke of Burgundy. He built the bridge."

"Wish t'ell he'd built it straight east and west." Don Mallet threw

down the thin stone tablet in disgust. It had landed a moment before in

the pit of his stomach. A German shell exploding a little distance on

the other side of the bridge coping had gently lobbed the stone plate

out of the wall where it had rested four and a half centuries and shied

it playfully at Mallet where he sat on the ground.

When Charles of Burgundy had his name cut in that stone tablet and

had it set in the bridge he did not foresee Mallet, nor the need of a

bridge running east and west.

But Mallet was here, and fifteen others, all heartily approving his

wish for a slight change in the alignment of the bridge, all except a

German machine gunner and an American corporal who lay head to head

close under the coping of the wall, with the body of a "pup" tent

stretched impartially over their heads, and who did not care.

This party, with a lieutenant in command, had crossed the river to the

north side before dawn. Behind them from the hills beyond the river the

American artillery, as fast as it could come up to the river brow, was

getting to work, firing high above this party and a score of other

parties that had crossed the river in the dark under orders to find

cover and stay.

In the dark they had stumbled into a machine gun position on this

little bridge over the dry bed of a creek. They had gone over the

five-foot coping on their bellies, their rifles with bayonets fixed

swinging free in their hands.

Of the five Germans who had been on the bridge only the man now lying

here unconscious had seen the dawn come down the valley a few minutes

later. For, as Patsy Murtha had remarked:

"That Kamerad stuff's all right when you can see what their hands are

doin'. But, in the dark--!"

With the coming of the light five of the men had put on the tunics and

helmets of those who had lately held the place and had stood about the

guns, to show enemy watchers on the slopes and in the gullies to the

north that things were quite as they should be, while the remainder of

the men hid themselves under the coping of the bridge.

But the ruse did not avail them long. And this was why Don Mallet was

dissatisfied with the direction of the bridge. If it had run more

nearly east and west they would have been invisible from a certain

wooded gully that cut down through the hill beyond the bridge and

which, as happened, lay directly in line with the bridge.

The full light had revealed the men in American uniforms strung along

under the coping of the bridge. What the German machine gunners in the

gully thought is not pertinent. A driving blast of wind swept across

the bridge propelled by a rain of machine gun bullets which cleaned the

bridge as swiftly as if a giant broom were sweeping ants off it.

The five men on the bridge came tumbling over the coping rolling the

machine guns with them and falling in grunting heaps among their

friends. It seemed that they were quite miraculously unscathed from the

blast which had driven them from the bridge. For when they had gotten

to sitting postures, the five, in prompt concert, ripped off the German

jackets, wadded them into the helmets and shied the whole over the bank

down into the dry bed of the creek below the bridge. That this action

was not merely a matter of sentiment was proven by the fact that the

five immediately pulled off their own clean American shirts and began

to shake and search them severely. These men had not now for weeks

lived in an established trench or dugout. From away beyond the Ourcq

to here, above the Vesle, they had come foot by foot, always in the

open, drifting and seeping, drifting and seeping, in and out among the

rear lines of a foe who always retreated yet who always kicked back

murderously. Sometimes they had fought as part of a battalion, creeping

in a long thin Indian file around a nest of machine guns, dragging

themselves prone through the grass or the standing grain, until the

line was near enough to spring yelling upon the surrounded foe. They

had fought and drifted, singly, in squads, going forward sometimes in

dozens, dribbling back through in twos and threes. They had learned to

sleep behind a fallen tree trunk with machine gun bullets sifting above

their noses. But for three blessed weeks they had lived in the open,

crossing running water every day--and they were body clean! The five

men were at that moment more afraid of German lice than they were of

the wind of death that was driving over their heads. All values are, of

course, relative.

Sergeant Jimmie Wardwell, his body well hidden by the deep foliage of

the tree in which he had taken his post, poked a long-nosed rifle out

across a limb. It was a hunting rifle that he had borrowed one day two

years ago from a Canadian named Bray Stewart, a long-limbed fellow with

a friendly grin, a gentle gray eye, and an unconquerable obsession that

this war was a deer hunt. Stewart was irrevocably convinced that if

"they" really wanted to win the war they had only to put enough North

Ontario farmer boys up in convenient trees and pot all the Germans on

earth, up to five hundred yards. He had a scheme for making salt licks

in No Man's Land.

But Stewart, Jock as they called him--all Stewarts are called Jock,

had been sent into the mud flats of the upper Lys, where there were no

trees, and where the best possible shelter was a ditch two thirds full

of water. And Jock, on the very day when in mere discouragement he had

lent the long hunting rifle to Wardwell--for what conceivable purpose

the rifle had either been borrowed or lent will never be known--Jock

that day inhaled some of the first poison gas which the progressive Hun

had used and Jock had lain face down in his ditch and drowned.

Wardwell had taken this as a personal and gratuitous injury. He had not

known Jock very much, for Wardwell had just come over from a training

camp in England and been filtered into Jock's company, while Stewart

had come over with the Canadian regiment almost in the beginning. Jock

was a veteran soldier of nineteen, while Jimmie was green and a Yank to

boot. But Wardwell had listened respectfully to Jock's lies about the

hunting in the hills far up on the road to Cobalt, where they saw snow

ten months of every year. And Jimmie had lied moderately and with good

judgment about the hunting in his own hills. They had respected each

other.

Since then Wardwell had kept the rifle by him, in violation of the

Articles of War, in more or less secret defiance of barrack sergeants,

against the expressed wishes of high and low command, and to the death

of many individual Germans who never saw him.

A tall German under officer strutted out from the woody shelter of the

gully between the hills and stood boldly out on the slope. Evidently he

thought that he was out of effective range and he saw that his own guns

were not reaching the men strung under the coping of the bridge. He

must get a gun out on the slope here where it could sweep the Americans

where they lay. His problem was as plain to his intended victims as it

was to himself. The boys were already swinging their captured machine

guns into line.

"Hold your cannon, till you need them," said the lieutenant, speaking

quietly from where he lay out in the grass half way between the men and

Wardwell's tree. "If Heine'll just hold that pose for another couple of

seconds, Wardwell will--"

Wardwell did. Jock's long rifle grunted once. The German put his hand

up sharply to his throat, turned half around, then gave a funny little

attempt at a jump sidewise, as though something had suddenly risen in

the path before him, and slid bumping down into the grass.

Two German privates came out of the cover and stood over the body of

the fallen man. Wardwell held his hand, while his companions below

waited, understanding. If these two had come out risking their lives to

drag a wounded officer to shelter he would not shoot.

One of the men leaned down examining the prone figure in the grass. He

straightened up almost immediately and made a deliberate kick at the

body. That officer was dead.

Not one man of those watching by the bridge offered a word of comment.

They had been daily, hourly, learning strange things about this enemy

as they fought and followed him. But they had come to no conclusions

except the one safe one that Wardwell presently punctuated.

The man who had taken a kick at the dead man now stood with his legs

straddled wide apart looking down at the bridge. He did not seem to

expect any danger, and since Wardwell was using smokeless powder and

there was plainly no firing from the men who could be seen it is quite

possible that the German thought the officer had been killed by a stray

bullet from his own side. When Wardwell fired again it seemed to the

boys in their eagerness that they could almost follow the bullet in its

course.

They could, in fact, only see that the man dropped vertically like a

stone dropping, but some one said excitedly:

"Eight hundred feet and over, and a clean drill between the eyes! that

aint luck, that's hate."

"You've got good eyes if you can see all that," drawled a Yankee boy

from northern New York. "But he does seem to have a kind of a prejudice

against the Beerheads, at that."

"He aint like us here," explained a philosopher from Glens Falls. "We

come here to fight 'cause the fightin's good here. But this Wardwell

gent, he's seen too much. He aint fightin' Germans now. He's executin'

them. He uses a rifle 'cause he can't get to 'em with a rope."

The remaining German had started running for the shelter of the ravine,

but Wardwell's chance shot at the moving target caught him in the hip

and he tumbled headlong down out of sight.

Wardwell had come far since a day long ago upon the hills above the

lake when he had drawn what he thought was a perfect sight on a

chipmunk's eyes at fifty feet and had ruined a perfectly good sap

bucket which hung forgotten a good six feet below where the chipmunk

had been.

Developments soon showed what the officer had had in mind when he came

out on the slope of the hill. Sand bags and stones began flying up out

of the ravine until they formed a respectable pile on the edge of the

hill. Behind these came loose dirt hastily shovelled over and beginning

to mark the line of a trench. The Germans were burrowing into the side

of the hill. They would quickly run a shallow trench out along the

slope of the hill to a point fifty feet or so in the open, from which

point, when they had dragged a heavy machine gun to it, they could

sweep the Americans from where they lay under the wall of the little

bridge.

The boys quickly trained the captured guns upon the moving line of

dirt where it seemed as though a big mole was nosing his way along the

face of the hill. But the elevation was sharply against them, and the

lieutenant saw that they were hitting nothing for there was no mark

above the dirt.

"Save your ammunition," he commanded, "and cover up the guns. They

might be handy if we had to come back this way in a hurry.

"Put the two wounded men under the bridge and take cover in the creek

bed."

The two men were quickly eased down into the dry water course under the

bridge and left as comfortable as was possible, while the lieutenant

called up to Wardwell:

"We'll have to depend on you for a lookout, Wardwell. They might try

to rush the creek from above or below. Though I don't think the outfit

across there is anxious to rush anything this way. Stay where you are

while you can. But if you think they've spotted you, make your rush for

the creek bed. Don't stay if it should become--useless."

"'Right, Sir,'" said Wardwell, smiling to himself among the leaves.

He knew that the young officer had started to say: "Don't stay if it

should become too hot for you." But he was getting used to the way

they thought of him and spoke to him. It had started with the boys.

They were Irish descent, most of these with whom he had been through

these weeks, and, what was worse, they had been brigaded in with an

old Irish regiment in the British army early in the summer. What their

own ready working imagination had not taught them, about war and its

superstitions and its queer and unreadable chances, the Irish had

supplied to them. One thing which the Irish had taught them came under

the category 'important, if true.' It was founded on the well known

fact that a man born to be hanged will never be drowned. Every man, it

appeared, had a certain number fixed to him by fate. It represented the

number of chances which were his against death, the number of times

that he might face death front to front and escape. Some men had only a

few chances, and a man might lose out on even the first of his chances.

Others had many. But every time a man went through a desperate action

he used one of his chances of escape. But there were certain men who

had used up all of their chances, who had reached the very last number.

And then, in this their last moment, by some queer stumble of fate,

they had been missed. After that they were not merely safe, they were

isolated. Death fled from them. They could hunt death, and some of them

did--so the Irish said, but they could not achieve it from human hands.

Wardwell, it was whispered among the boys with wise nodding of heads,

Wardwell was one of these. And they counted the tale of the numbered

chances that he had used, until he had, somehow, missed the last

unfailing one.

After that, they said, he had no chance. And they told of places where

he had put himself in the path of death, of how men had died in front

of him and behind him, how he had been shot through so many times that

now he hardly bled when wounded. This last was untrue, of course. Many

things that they told were over drawn, as they would be. Most of the

tales were inaccurate. And, again as would happen, many of the things

were only half told.

So Wardwell understood, and smiled when he felt his officer hesitate

about naming the word danger to him.

He was partly Irish himself, and he knew that some of the times when

he had escaped death it had been hardly short of miraculous. Also he

knew that there were other men in the armies who like himself had lived

through almost unbelievable numbers of chances and that these were

marked men who did not seem to be able to die in battle.

For himself, however, he had no need of the theory of chances which

explained these things to the men. He knew.

When the time should come, he would get his wound. And the wound would

bring death. But before death could come he would see Augusta.

It was all simple, and as it had been ordained from the beginning.

The trench along the face of the hill was all but complete now, and

at the end of it there grew a considerable rounded pile of sand bags.

There they were going to set the gun. He saw signs of a movement along

through the trench, and knew that they were dragging a heavy machine

gun out to its place. A head and part of a shoulder came up momentarily

above the line of dirt. Wardwell had his sight upon it but he did not

try the difficult shot. He must give them time to get busy with the

gun, and to grow careless.

No, there was nothing left to chance, or to any number of chances.

Everything that had happened, and that was happening and going to

happen, moved into place as the result of something that had gone

before, as inevitably as one pebble is moved by the pressure of another

pebble.

In his ignorance--it is only in ignorance that the fatal things

are done, malice is not cunning enough--he had committed the one

unforgivable sin. He had taken money from one woman to give to another.

He had not known at the time that it was the unpardonable sin. He had

not, as he remembered it now, thought of anything except that he could

not stand Augusta's grief for the loss of her horse. To get her pet

back for her at that time he would have taken money from anybody.

It was true enough that the other woman had owed him the money in an

entirely business-like way. He had loaned her the money at a time when

she needed it.

Afterwards she had married a wealthy man. Several times when they had

met she had laughingly tried to pay him back his loan, but he had

always talked her around the matter, and later he had dropped out of

her sight into the seclusion of Rose Wilding's house to make his fight

for his book and a reputation.

That morning when he had seen Augusta grieving in the empty stable, and

after he had talked with Jethniah, he had gone down to the station and

sent the telegram to the woman saying simply that he needed the money

and asking for it.

He had had no misgiving that he was doing anything that would ever

hurt Augusta. He had thought no more of the matter than if he had been

asking any man for the return of a loan at need.

The trouble was that the woman was discontented in marriage--as she

would have been discontented in singleness, or discontented in jail,

or discontented in what was her idea of heaven. She was looking for

diversion, and her discontent took the form of imagining herself to be

sadly and irretrievably in love with Wardwell. (If she had been obliged

to live two weeks in a cabin with him she would have come to the point

of murdering him.)

Not long after he had sent the telegram and received his money Jimmie

had begun to be troubled with a sharp premonition of something wrong.

Something was brewing up for him somewhere. He was quick to understand

that the one contact which he had established with the world without

was probably the source of his worry. He mooned around for a day or so,

waiting for something to drop, as he put it to himself. Then he went

fearfully down to the station.

There were six letters waiting for him.

He read the last first. It seemed that the woman had somehow learned

that Wardwell had gone away sick. From the last of the letters he

gathered that she had pictured him to herself as lying penniless and

alone, and at the point of death, somewhere in the woods, and that she

was about to fly to him. She was capable of doing it, he knew.

With the choking, hopeless feeling of a man being drowned, he wondered

if she had already started. In his panic he telegraphed:

_Do not come. Am leaving here._

No sooner was the wire gone than he repented the last words of it. Why

had he lied? He should not have lied, for it would only lead to other

lies. The woman was one to revel in mysteries, and his evading her now

would merely determine her to come and search him out. He was not going

away from here, and he should not have lied to say so. Now he would

have to write, at once, and take back the lie.

Then and there he borrowed paper and wrote. He told her,

circumstantially, that he was in perfect health. He explained that he

and his wife--the woman evidently had not thought of the possibility of

his being married--were living away up here in the woods in order that

they might be able to go on with their writing without interruptions.

He apologized abjectly for having annoyed her. He hoped that she would

remember that only a temporary and acute crisis had made him trouble

her, and at the same time he hoped that she would forget the whole

matter.

The letter was so unlike his usual clear handed methods that he felt

sure the lady would either think him deranged or that she would

disbelieve the whole of it. But he sent the letter. At any rate he must

try to keep her from coming here.

Then he started home to Augusta, dragging with him a weight of hang-dog

misery that increased at every step.

Never had Augusta's sweetness and the dear simple beauty of her faith

in him been so precious to him as in those minutes. He hated the other

woman unreasoningly, viciously; and yet more he hated himself, because,

somehow, he seemed to have thrown a slur upon Augusta. That day, when

her heart was high and sweet with its sacrifice for him, he had forced

her, in some shameful way it seemed, to take something--money in

fact--which he had taken from another woman.

He knew, even in that walk home, that he had done a fatal thing. And

the anxieties and the nightmares of the winter that followed came upon

him inexorably and without surprise.

In alternate letters, and often alternately in the same letter, the

other woman upbraided him for having deceived her, in being married,

and being well, and on the other hand vowed that she did not believe a

word of what he told her but was sure that he was there sick and alone

and that she must come to see.

Through all that winter and into the spring he lived under the constant

dread that the woman might come, and he was obliged to answer every

letter, profusely and carefully, lest something which he omitted to

answer might give her the impulse that would bring her flying to find

him. That the whole business was melodramatic, and entirely foolish,

did not lighten the matter in the least. And at all times he was

convinced with a miserable dull certainty that all he did was useless.

Augusta would inevitably come to know, anyhow. He had never expected

to be able to hide anything from her. He had sworn that he never would

have anything to hide from her. He was certain that she would come to

know of this, and in the most shameful and pitiless way. He had no hope

that it would be otherwise.

Even now, as he watched the German gun being poked into its place

above the line of the dirt on the far hillside, he shuddered at the

humiliation and the ignominy of that winter. Augusta had known that

there was something wrong. She had, of course, seen it in his eyes

and sensed it in the air about him, from the very beginning. But he

had never been able to tell her. He knew Augusta's peculiar jealousy.

It was not the usual property-holding interest by which the average

woman clings to her rights in a man, because she is afraid of the

consequences of letting him slip away from her.

Augusta was in this, as in so many things, different from any woman

whom Wardwell had ever known or imagined. Like all people that live a

great deal within themselves, the things that were her own, even the

little things, had a sacred and a touching value to Augusta. If a thing

was not entirely her own she did not care for it at all. She wanted

nothing near her that she had to share in any way with another person.

Wardwell remembered that she had once given away her best coat because

another girl had put it on herself just for a moment to see how she

would look in it. And as for the loaf of her love, so far from being

able to think of sharing it with anyone, he knew that the thought that

another had even looked at it would be enough to spoil it for Augusta.

And he, with this full knowledge of her fiercely proud little heart,

had brought another woman in to despoil the sacred shrine of Augusta's

love. He knew that she had thanked him for getting her pet back for her

as the dearest thing he had ever done for her. And now when she should

come to know the truth--as she would--it would embitter her to know

that she owed it to another woman.

As the letters continued to come and the worry and humiliation of

keeping up what seemed like an intrigue grew upon him he moodily wished

that Augusta might learn the truth.

He could not tell her, for the very fact that must be his excuse, that

he had done what he did for the love of her, would be the very reason

why Augusta would resent his going to another woman. Explanations were

always useless to Augusta. She cared not at all for the details. She

would understand instantly, he thought, and understand more justly than

he could tell her. But she would be mortally hurt.

It did not occur to him that Augusta would be just like every other

woman. He never thought that Augusta in the supreme test when her love

was threatened, would lose her almost inspired insight and go blind to

everything except the one condemning fact--that he was corresponding

secretly with another woman.

When the end came, when he came home that day to learn that Augusta

had left him, and to read her note with its stark and yet prophetic

finality, he was stunned by this thing which he had expected least of

all.

The first emotion that he remembered was a furious anger with Augusta.

It seemed that she had read but a part of one of the letters and had

immediately jumped to the worst of conclusions. He was angry with

Augusta, he remembered now, not because she had gone, but because she

had allowed herself to be stupid.

How could she have misunderstood? Why should she have misjudged him

so? She must have been deliberately blind, for Augusta had not only an

unerring instinct for truth she had also a keenness of judgment such as

he had hardly ever seen in man or woman.

But that was all very, very long ago, and he scarcely remembered now

the boyish rage in which he had raved and had torn the hated letters

and stamped them into the floor of the cabin.

He had chased feverishly to New York after her, and he had walked the

city, without a starting point and without direction, looking for

her, as he and she together had once walked the streets looking for

Rose Wilding. Then, when at last he had become convinced that it was

useless, that he would never find Augusta until the time that she

should choose, he had gone back to the lake, to the Hills of Desire, to

wait for her.

He found Donahue browsing contentedly among the trees much as he had

left him, and a world mockingly unchanged.

Of course, he could not stay there. The haunting, whispering sweetness

of Augusta's presence was there at every turn of his eyes, in the

breath of every breeze that brushed his cheek, in the song of every

bird that piped. There memories choked him, of the nights when she

had fought the fever with him, of days when their hearts had danced

together in the joy of work. There he had learned why the human race

continues to wish to live--he had learned to know a sweet woman's

heart.

On the morning of the fourth day he went down to the station and bought

a ticket for Montreal. The station agent-postmistress told him with a

simper that there were letters for him.

"Will you please keep them," Wardwell requested politely, "until I call

on my way back. I--I might lose them."

The next day he was a member of a Canadian infantry regiment, on his

way to an assembling camp.

Through two years he had lived and fought, as other men lived and

fought. He had lain sick and had thirsted and despaired, as other men

did; and he had seen how other men died. About the last matter he was

not surprised, except at the unwinking simplicity of it.

A man stood beside you and asked for a chew of tobacco. The next time

you looked at him he was a corpse, to be buried at once--if there

was time. A man ran shouting by your side, and passed you, perhaps,

and when you caught up with him he was dead. And they went out so

untragically true to their ruling habit and disposition. A talkative

man died talking. A quiet man turned his head from you and died his own

way.

They had been sickening years, those two years when the claws of the

Beast were at the throat of the world. And there had been many times

when Wardwell, in the spirit weariness which every good man felt sooner

or later, would have been willing to lie down and ask for death, saying

that he had done his share. But death had not come for him, and his

mind had turned definitely back and rested with conviction on the

sentence which Augusta had written for him. They were not to have this

life together, but he would not go from here until he had seen her.

The sense of injury and misunderstanding which he had at first nursed

had drifted away. Neither did he feel any of the self blame with which

he had loaded himself in the beginning. Augusta had not done this thing

to them. Neither had his foolish doing effected it. Destiny working

with its dull tool, chance, was fashioning out their lives. He did not

understand. But it seemed that Augusta understood. So, then, he should

not go until he heard her voice calling him.

Then there had come the long looked for call of his own country. He

had gone gladly back across the ocean and they had at once given him

work in the training of student officers. He gave no thought to the

commission which might have been his for the asking. He was not looking

for the high adventure of war as these boys and men strained toward it.

He was heartily sick of war and all that went with it. He had come back

to help raise the posse which would put the ramping Beast in pound.

When that should be done, and he knew that it would be done quickly and

properly, his work would be finished. But first he would see Augusta.

He had submitted to his loss of Augusta much as a maimed man submits to

the loss of a member. He could undoubtedly live on without Augusta. But

it is years before a man, who has, for instance, lost a right arm, can

remember that the arm is no longer there. He was forever turning to her

mentally, and in every crowded street he saw the sweet girlish figure

of Augusta just slipping from sight away from him. He had submitted

passively to the decree of fate, or whatever it was that had taken her

from him, but the living delight of her presence never left him. It was

not memory, nor, in any sense, imagination. It was a fact. In those

wonderful months which they had had together, Augusta had not merely

lived with him. She had so lived herself into his life that she had

become an indefinable, but vital, part of the being that was called

Jimmy Wardwell. Without her this Wardwell did not exist.

It was out of this feeling of Augusta's persisting presence with him

that there grew up in him a conviction.

Sometimes it seemed mere impudence. Again it seemed entirely

reasonable--reasonable and possible only, of course, in connection with

Augusta.

He remembered the night when he had lain out alone in a shell hole at

Messines. He was wounded in the chest and there was no hope of help

coming to him. He could feel the life running out of him, as one after

another of the conscious and unconscious grips of life slipped away

from him. He was dying, so it was plain. But even as he was coming to

that point where he finally surrendered consciousness, he was aware of

a force of life within him which was not being dimmed. That part of him

which he had come to think of as being of Augusta, that much of him was

still living and untouched by death. It was not that he dreamed Augusta

there with him. Nor did his groping senses conjure up for him a vision

of her. She was there, in him, a living part of him, which did not and

would not die.

From that night he had known that he would not die so long as Augusta

lived.

But his thought sometimes went further than this. At the oddest

moments, often when hands and body and brain were busiest with the

surface of things, more than once when he was actually fighting for

his life, there had come to him a flash of something--he did not know

whether it was of foreknowledge or of crazy presumption. But it came to

him.

Might it not be that Augusta and he were actually coming to the

adventure of death together--to _survive_ it!--to hold to each other

_beyond_ it!

If he had believed that the thought was his own, he would have given it

no heed. But he was sure that it was not his own. Augusta had given it

to him. Of that much he was sure. And in that much he did not reject it.

For himself, out of his own experiences, he had seen the chemistry of

death setting to work upon the cooling bodies of men in so many ways,

in such varied circumstances, and yet always with such unfailing method

and matter-of-factness, that he had never seen any reason to believe in

the survival of anything beyond it.

Nevertheless, Augusta had given him the thought.

In the days which he had spent in New York he had looked every moment

for Augusta. But when he had stood one day upon the Avenue and had

scanned the marching of five thousand girl nurses who were preparing

for their work in the train of war, and had not seen Augusta among

them, he was convinced that she was not in the country. He was right,

for Augusta was already in France.

Since he had come back now to what he felt was the business of

concluding the war, he was sure that Augusta was nearer to him than she

had been since that day when she left him in the hills. Day and night,

whether in fighting or in dead sleep, he could feel her presence with

him.

Sometimes she was as poignantly real to him, and as reassuring, as on

the long-ago nights in the wagon and in the sugar hut when he used to

wake up and listen for her breathing. But there was no illusion in this

feeling of her nearness. He knew that Augusta was not really there with

him. She was, he had no doubt, though he had not so much as heard her

name mentioned, behind these lines somewhere doing the work that came

to her. Yet there were times when his head would go up, one ear cocked

up in the old way, and a quick little grin would run across his face,

as though he had just thought of something to tell her that would make

her laugh.

In the last three weeks Jimmy's feeling that Augusta was living in his

life, in every moment of the day's work, had been growing so strong

that he knew it could not go on. The end must be near. He would soon

see Augusta. He began to look for it hourly.

It was peculiar that he now no longer thought of the original cause of

his losing Augusta. War and life had ground all that away. He knew that

he would find Augusta looking only to the future. They would keep only

the memory of those months of dear love that they had lived together.

Their work which they had loved with their souls, the dreams which they

had had together, even these things were of the past, and done with.

Wardwell knew that, left to himself, his mind would have thought only

of going back--when this was over--and, with Augusta, trying to rebuild

and live in the home of dreams that had been their house of love in the

Hills of Desire. But Augusta never went back. She was too vital. She

was too much like life itself.

If he was to have Augusta, to be with her, he must go on.

He was coming swift to the Great Adventure. He could feel the pulse of

his being rising to it.

He did not fear, for he believed that now Augusta wanted him. And if

her eyes saw a light through the dropping darkness, then it was a true

light. He had only to stumble after.

So he smiled contentedly at the young officer's hesitation in speaking

to him of danger, and at the foolish theories of the men regarding his

life.

Augusta had always had her will.

Then he happened to remember--for the first time in many months--that

book which had once seemed more to him than life or death. In New York

the publishers had told him that it had done well, considering war

times and all other things it had done very well. The royalties, they

said, they were still holding, because up to that time they had not

been able to locate Augusta, to whom he had assigned the ownership of

the book three years ago. He had merely told them to keep on looking

for her.

Still smiling, he wished that he and Augusta might have just one good

picnic on those spoiling royalties.

From behind the little mound of dirt on the hillside the machine gun

was dripping a line of bullets along the wall where the Americans

had been. There was nobody there, but the German gunner was not yet

convinced of that. A gentle, steady breeze was coming down from the

slope, clearing the light smoke from the machine gun nests and rolling

it slowly down toward the dry creek bed and the bridge. Wardwell thus

had a perfect view of the ravine.

But the enemy was cautious. Not a head nor even a hand showed above the

line of dirt along the face of the hill. Wardwell searched the ravine

itself. A bush in the midst of the dark green centre of the ravine

seemed to be moving about grotesquely. Wardwell, over his sights,

watched it sharply, until his eyes and his imagination working together

resolved it into its component parts. It was a man with green branches

tied all about him, and he was tugging a heavy machine gun into a new

position.

The effect of his shot gave Wardwell a thorough surprise. Not only did

the man with the branches tied about him disappear, but what had seemed

to be an almost solid hedge of green shrubs across the mouth of the

ravine fell away instantly, revealing some bare rocks and two guns.

Wardwell mentally rubbed his eyes and stared. There must, before, have

been at least three or four men standing about the guns and all draped

in heavy bushes.

As he watched, one of the guns began to fire again, though he could not

see the hands that managed it, and a sudden flutter of twigs and leaves

came pattering down upon his head. They had guessed him out in his tree.

He shifted his position to get the full protection of the body of the

tree, and gave his attention to the lone gun out on the hill. He would

like to put that gun out of working, not because it was doing any harm

just now, but because of what might have to be done later. He watched

patiently for several minutes, while the gun in the ravine continued

to trim the little branches from his tree, but it did not seem that he

would get a chance. The fellow in the ditch was keeping entirely under

cover and working his gun with a stubborn fixity of idea against the

line of the bridge wall.

The sputtering explosion of a soft shell on the bridge startled

Wardwell. Now if the Germans had found the creek bed with gas--and, of

course, they had every range studied down to a matter of feet--then

there was a bad time ahead. He waited while another shell fell into the

creek bed below the bridge and another dropped down in front of him

right near where the two wounded men had been placed. The foul poison

was practically colorless, but, immediately, he could see the little

green tufts of grass in the creek bed withering to death.

He slid to the ground and made a low running dive down the bank of the

creek. The lieutenant was already giving orders to get the two men up

from the bed of the creek and to make holes for them in the top of the

bank on the north side. Wardwell saw that the lieutenant had taken his

decision. They could not stay here. The creek bed would soon fill with

gas. If they were to go back, they must go at once, across the half

mile of open field between them and the river. They must carry at least

one wounded man, and, from the elevation, those machine guns could

follow them every inch of the way. What was worse, the gas would soon

fill the creek bed and then the wind coming down from the hill would

carry it back so that it would follow them to the river.

Well, they were not going back. Or at least, Wardwell judged from the

lieutenant's dispositions, they were not going back until they had made

a try for those machine guns.

Three minutes later they were all strung out just on the edge of the

upper bank, with intervals of about fifty feet between them, their

bodies curled up tight for a spring, their eyes fixed on the spitting

guns up the hill before them. The two hundred and fifty yards of

sloping hillside looked as smooth and bare as the top of a slightly

tilted table. There did not seem to be a hollow anywhere in it, not as

much as the suggestion of a furrow, into which a man might drop for

breath and an instant's respite in his rush up toward those guns.

They were stripped of everything except their rifles and the one or

two bombs that each man could carry in his rush. They had not needed

details of instruction. They had done this thing before.

A man rose silently from the edge of the bank. It was the young

lieutenant himself. He did not stand poised, or look at his men. He

came up running, and shot forward with that peculiar, side-wheeling

motion that many men acquire from running with a foot ball under one

arm while warding off tacklers with the other arm stiff. He ran with

his pistol clutched stiffly in his right hand, his other arm curled in

against his side. Fifty, sixty, seventy feet he drove on, running low

and pigeon-toed, always with that wheeling motion, while the machine

guns dropped their other marks and turned their blazing eyes on him.

Before the lieutenant had dropped safe into a little depression of the

slope, another man was shooting forward away out on the right. Then

another, below the bridge, scooted ahead, dodging along in a way that

was his own. Man after man rose running, dove forward for about the

length of five seconds--a hundred feet maybe--then dropped flat into

anything that looked like a slight protection.

There were no signals, no commands, no noise. It was a game which each

man played in his own way. A simple game with only two rules: First,

they must not bunch together; second, no man should be last--there must

not be any last man.

Saving these two rules, they went forward, each in his own way, each

playing out his own hand with death.

Some ran straight, their heads down, their eyes half shut, thinking

only of speed. Others ran zig-zagging and dodging as though they were

picking their way, although there was no cover at all and no choice of

a way.

To the watching foe, who did not even now dare to raise his head above

the ground line, there seemed to be not more than three or four men

coming up the slope. Of course it was puzzling that those three or

four should be able to be continuously popping up at so many different

places of a long line. There must be more than that number of men. But

there was no way of telling how many. And that, of course, was the

reason for the apparently haphazard manner of the rush.

Wardwell, at the extreme right of the uneven line, ran forward with

longer sprints than was possible for the men near the middle of the

line. In comparison with those others he was reasonably safe out here.

His part would come later when, having gotten beyond the line of the

machine guns, he must circle down upon them shooting and bombing and

yelling while the men in front made the final rush.

He was not often excited now in this business, which had come to be to

him merely the day's work. But, running up the hill, he felt a strange

and wonderful tingle of excitation of spirit. Something was waiting for

him at the end of this run. He was suddenly as sure as he had ever in

his life been sure of anything that this was his last fight.

He felt the breath of bullets driving by near his head and dropped,

mechanically obedient to his training. But he was up again in a moment

and running madly.

Now he was up to the line of the single gun that had been placed out

on the hill. But his business was not with that gun. He must run clear

over the brow of the hill and get down into the ravine before the boys

in front were ready to run straight upon the guns.

He was running wildly now, his body and his spirit strangely lifted

with the sense that the Great Adventure was right ahead. It was not the

eagerness of battle nor the fever of fighting that ran in his blood. He

knew that he was coming to the break in the wall, beyond which lay the

Undiscovered Country--so Augusta was whispering to him.

From the edge of the ravine he saw below him ten or a dozen men lying

and working at the three machine guns. Out in the open he saw the

broken line of his own fellows. There was the young lieutenant lying

flat, wriggling along the ground by inches, and digging impatiently

with his toe. They were ready.

Across the space, on the other side of the ravine, there came running

a youngster whom the boys called "Watertown"--he was forever talking

about the place. He came running to the farther edge of the ravine,

swinging his bomb.

Wardwell flung his first bomb down into the cluster of guns and men,

and leaped sliding, stumbling, falling down the crumbling bank.

Half way down he caught his balance, lay back a little, and steadied

himself to throw the other bomb. Then without looking to see the effect

he gripped his rifle, and yelling madly leaped down towards the guns.

Five seconds later he was lying quietly against the gravel of the bank.

There was a hideous commotion going on about him, but he did not mind

it. There was a sharp pain--it felt like a burn--in his throat, and he

seemed to have trouble breathing. But it did not seem to matter. He was

going to sleep anyway.

And then, presently, he would see Augusta. And then he smiled to

himself. Augusta had always had her will.

X

When Wardwell awoke he was petulantly disappointed. He was not quite

clear as to what he had expected, but that he should be awakened by the

old hated smell of anesthetics was a distinct injury.

He did not feel any immediate physical discomfort, but he knew that

this was only because his body had not yet begun to wake up. There were

even now vague nerve stirrings in various scattered places through his

body, though not connected with each other nor, directly, with him. He

knew that these sensations would soon begin to link up with each other,

and then they would connect up with him. Presently torture would begin.

He knew the whole business. He had watched the process before, and he

cringed at its advance.

He felt like a boy who has been cheated of some wonderful promised

adventure which he had been just about to begin. He was lonely, and

he had been cheated, and if he tried to make the slightest move now

somebody would come and begin to poke at him. Why couldn't they leave

him alone? He wanted to cry.

And yet there was a sort of elusive contentment about this place--he

did not know where or what the place was, and did not care--some kind

of a pleasant memory, as though some one had been here. He thought he

could dream here--if only they would not come poking at him. Maybe he

had been dreaming. He could not remember.

There had once been a little white room somewhere. He could not

remember where, but it did not matter. Augusta was in the little white

room. In fact the little white room and Augusta were much the same

thing. You could not seem to see one without the other.

Why should he think of that little white room and Augusta here? Had

Augusta been here? Somehow it seemed like a place where Augusta had

just been. That was a funny thing to think of, but that was true about

Augusta. He remembered how she had only to be a moment in a room, or

any place, and when she went away you could know that Augusta had been

there. There was a blessedness, some sort of a happy sweetness, that

always came with her and which you could feel after she was gone.

It was strange that he should feel that haunting, ethereal presence of

her here. It had never deceived him before. Could it be coming here to

mock him now? That would be too much!

If he could only get back to sleep before they came to poke at him,

maybe they would leave him alone, and--maybe he could dream. He must

have been dreaming of Augusta.

As a matter of fact, Augusta had been in that place, in that room but

a moment or two before. Perhaps some tone of her voice had touched

something in Wardwell's numb brain and had waked him slowly.

She had not seen him. There was no good reason why she should go near

him or see him. He was just one of twenty-five or thirty variously

wrapped bundles that had just come down from the field stations, each

containing a man. So long as the man slept after the jolting and the

fainting fatigue of the journey, he need not be disturbed.

So Augusta had gone on about her affairs. For she was a very busy woman

in a very busy place.

Now she was slowly following a surgeon as he worked his way down a

long line of cots, stopping at each one to inspect the bandages which

had been loosened by a nurse going before, giving instruction for

the washing of a wound where he found that necessary, placing a few

swift stitches where the condition of a cut or an open wound demanded,

probing sharply and directly with never an unnecessary touch, a man

who did three days' work in every one of his days, and often as much

more in one of his nights, with a steady temper and a will that

procreated discipline and swift service in those about him. He was a

middle sized man with Scotch gray eyes, a short gray mustache, very

small feet, and excessively large hands whose bones had been overdrawn

by hard, grubbing work in his youth on a Maine farm. He was short and

blunt of word as most strong men will be when they are putting the

best of their lives into the strokes of their day's work. But he was

sensitive as a cat or a bird to anything unusual in the air about him.

He repeated with unvarying distinctness the few clear orders at the

end of each examination, assuming as bluntly as if Augusta had been an

echo, or an adding machine, that she heard correctly, that she wrote

the instructions properly and that she took each page from her pad and

stuck it on the chart at the head of each bed. She was there for that

purpose, just like the rest of his instruments. But there was something

about this girl today that seemed to be speaking. It was not speaking

to him particularly, but to all the world that had the sense to

understand. There was a persistent breath of happiness about her that

was as patent as sunshine yet as elusive as a perfume in a dream.

After he had finished with the last of the row of men, he stopped

in the act of drying his hands and looked quizzically at her. He

remembered that yesterday and the day before he had seen in this

girl's eyes a peculiar, strained, listening look, as though she were

trying to see something or maybe hear something outside the range of

ordinary senses. He had seen that the girl had been laboring under

some terrifying anxiety, but, as it had not affected the mechanical

perfection of her work, and certainly was not connected with the work,

he had said nothing. Now as he saw the quiet loveliness of some assured

happiness in her face, he said:

"Young lady, what wonderful thing have you been seeing, since

yesterday?"

Augusta looked up at him in startled wonder, but she did not evade or

ask him what he meant. She told him the simple truth, so that he might

make what he would of it.

"It isn't anything that I've _seen_. It's just something that I _know_."

"Um-hum," agreed the doctor cordially. "Very satisfactory, I'm sure.

And very illuminating."

He turned and went out of the ward door into the sunshine of the hot

afternoon. Crossing the wide open court where the great red cross was

painted on the hard whitewashed surface of the ground, he reflected

that, whereas most women would have smiled and evaded and offered some

subterfuge and he could then have guessed the facts to a practical

certainty, this girl had probably spoken the precise truth--leaving him

exactly as wise as he had been before asking.

Augusta, walking slowly back to the head of the line, wondered,

smiling, just what the doctor would have said if she had really told

him what she meant. She had spoken the literal truth, but it was very

far from being what he would have thought truth.

Two days before she had caught a glimpse of Jimmie Wardwell lying with

his head thrown back against a bank of stones and earth. And she had

seen a great, gaping wound at the base of his throat where his shirt

had been torn open. It was but an instant flash of vision that had come

to her while she was in the act of writing a letter for a wounded man.

The man had stopped for a moment, waiting to think of the next thing to

be said in the letter. And while she sat waiting with her writing hand

suspended over the paper she had looked straight at the dirty, streaked

side of a ravine, and there was Jimmie lying there with a trace of a

tired but triumphant little laugh on his face. Even in the instant she

was sure that she saw him tremble and quiver back against the bank, as

though death were striking.

Then the voice of the man on the cot beside her went on slowly--the

letter was to his younger brother at home:

"Tell Mom not to bother any more with sweaters, we'll all be home for

Christmas anyway."

Augusta's poised hand fell mechanically to the paper and began to write.

She had seen no more. All that day and yesterday she had strained at

the windows of her soul, praying and striving to catch again a sight of

her loved one. But there had come to her nothing but a cold, terrifying

conviction that Jimmie was dead. It must be that he was dead, for if

he were alive she was sure that she could make him know that she was

crying to him, and she would be able to see him.

Through two days of heart agony she had walked and worked, her body

and her outward mind responding capably to the demands of each minute,

while her own inner being struggled with the desperation of death, to

free itself from the limitations of the senses, so that it might find

its mate. But, though her soul had cried and fought and suffered until

it seemed that she herself must die, there had come to her vision

nothing but the black wall of death.

Jimmie was dead. There was a corpse lying out somewhere under a

bank--maybe the dirt had rolled down over it now--and that was the end.

There was nothing more. The black conviction of despair, of hope dead

and buried, settled down upon her. Her love was dead. This world was

empty, and there was no other.

Late at night, lying alone in her little wood-walled room over in the

nurses' pavilion, writhing in her pain, Augusta had spoken aloud.

"You fooled me, God," she said bitterly. "You taught me to believe. And

there is nothing--_nothing_."

But the sound of her own voice in the uninterested darkness had turned

her thought back to her self. She had only herself to blame. She had

cheated herself. She had built up for herself a dream. How could she

complain that she should not find it to be only a dream?

Three years ago, on that hideous last day in the little house among

the trees in the Hills of Desire, she had stood looking at a scattered

bundle of letters, and she had seen a glimpse of a woman's face, a

dark, discontented, attractive face.

At that moment there had come into her mind, full formed, the thought

that had been the key to her action and to the words that she had

written on the typewriter for Jimmie.

She did not know whether Jimmie loved this woman. She did not greatly

believe that he did. But it had come to her that her love was spoiled

even by the thought that that other woman had looked at it. There was

not room for her love in the same world where that other woman lived.

Augusta could not share her love loaf even so much as to have it in the

same world where there was another who thought greedily upon it.

Out of that thought had grown the conviction which she had written in

the line to Jimmie. For this life their love had been spoiled. They

were not to have it.

But as she still stood there a whisper had come to her--she had never

thought to question whence it came--a clear, flashing, fearful hope had

come to her. Jimmie and she might not live this life together. But one

day--the sweet hope sang high to her heart--Jimmie and she, they two,

would take the road together, the road that led through the Curtain to

the Great Adventure in the Hills of All Desire.

She had lived through the years on the breath of that whisper which had

come to her. She had believed in it as a promise. She had kept it in

her heart. Only in the very secretest of her communings with the Jimmie

to whom her heart constantly talked had she told it to him.

She had hardly put her thought into words, but it was a part of her

faith in love. She would not believe that love like hers could die. She

did not know how, or in what terms, but she was sure that, somehow, she

and Jimmie would find the broken line of love and go on with it.

It had seemed so simple, when it was not near. She had all the time

been sure that when Jimmie was ready to go--she had not thought that it

would be very long--then she would know it, and she would be ready to

go with him.

Many times in the three years she had known when Jimmie was in danger.

Twice she had seen his name among Americans wounded with the Canadians.

But she had not needed that outward evidence. She had often been able

to call him and to feel his response. Though she had never before been

able to see him, she had at all times known that he was living and

going on.

And lately she had become almost bold. She had felt the coming of what

was to be the great moment. She thought that she had felt the shadow of

the wings of death--and she was not afraid. She believed that Jimmie

would soon be taking the road into the Beyond--and she grew almost

openly confident that she was going with him.

She had lived on the very tip of every moment. With a strange defiance

of reality, she, a soundly healthy young woman--not knowingly exposed

to any more danger than twenty million other inhabitants of France,

went into every action of her waking hours with a sort of provisional

apology. It might be that she should not have time to finish that

action. If so, would some one please see to it.

She had forgotten completely that other woman. She remembered only the

dear and perfect love of those months alone with Jimmie; the joy of

the irresponsible hours upon the road; the fearful sweetness of their

utter seclusion in the hills and their complete dependence one upon the

other. She seemed to see now that they had, in those months, realized

all the very best that this world gives in love.

She had even come to think that she was glad that their perfect days

of love had ended in a sharp crash. How pitiful it would have been to

have seen that love, which was all beauty and tenderness and sacrifice

on both sides, dribble down into the commonplace of discontent, or, at

best, a kindly tolerance! She was glad that it had come to an end while

it was yet a perfect, beautiful thing; glad that she could link those

months of wonder love directly with the wonder and mystery of what was

to come to them.

The three years of separation had not kept them apart. It seemed that

they had at first been thrown violently away from each other. But

there had been an immediate rebound, and Augusta knew that they had

ever since been approaching each other in understanding and spirit.

She had worked, and trained, to prepare herself for this work so dear

to her which she was doing now. And Jimmie had suffered--here in

France. Augusta's eyes had seen the things which he must have gone

through, things which her heart and her intuitions had before told her

concerning him. But all seemed only to fit them into the design that

was prepared for them. In fact, in the supreme egoism of love, it had

not been difficult to believe that the whole world's tragedy had been

in some measure arranged to form a setting for their love.

Every subconscious thought of her waking days, every half formed dream

of day or night had of late been bringing Jimmie to Augusta, until it

seemed that the terrible world about her--which she was still obliged

to call reality--could not much longer persist. The end must be near.

For she had felt the coming of her love so vividly that material, brute

things could not much longer keep it from her.

Jimmie was coming to her! The mistakes, the travail, the dim

misunderstandings of this phase of being which was called life, would

soon be past. Jimmie and she would once more take the open road out

into the country of God.

For weeks her spirit had lived upon and breathed upon her dream, until

it, the dream, had become to her the real. And it seemed to her that

she was already going through the transition that would bring her out

with Jimmie upon the glorious, untried road that lay beyond the world's

death. She had no fear. The very daring of her dream had raised in her

a faith in love that trembled at nothing.

And then, in an instant, everything had gone black.

She had seen Jimmie. And she had thought that she saw Jimmie die,

and--and--_nothing_--

Jimmie was gone from her forever. And there was left to her nothing but

the dry little reflection that she had been a fool.

In those two black days when her soul strained, listening and watching

over the edges of the normal world, she had breasted the dark tide of

despair running full down upon her, and not even she herself could

have told how near she was to going down under it.

And in the darkness, as would happen, the old love came back to mock

her. Oh, why, _why_? had she not kept the love that was hers? Why had

she not fought that dark woman for it? She had meanly run away, because

it was not good enough, because it was not perfect. Because she had

found a flaw in it she had thrown away her jewel.

Now it was given her, for punishment, to know how good that love had

been. The touch of Jimmie's clumsy hands as he had tucked her into her

hammock at night burned her now with the maddening sweetness of a lost

dream. The nights when she had watched over him, the pride and the

swelling love of seeing rugged health come back to him, the memories of

brave, struggling, laughing walks by his side through wind and snow,

all these and a thousand dear, intimate memories came to haunt her with

the mocking difference between a warm, happy human love, and the empty

dream that she had made for herself.

But she did not go down under despair.

Jimmie was gone. She would never be near him again. She did not say it.

But she had no strength to deny it. She was dumb. She was defeated.

There was nothing to live for, and, apparently, nothing to die for.

But her heart held on, beaten, unhoping, but living.

And today, not an hour ago, a wonderful thing had happened. A miracle

had stolen upon her unawares. She could not now say just where she was

or what she was doing at the time. She had heard nothing, seen nothing.

But she found that she was suddenly, and unaccountably, certain that

Jimmie was not dead.

She did not try to think what might have brought this intelligence

to her. Perhaps he had come back to consciousness and his heart had

answered her. She did not care. She did not want to think. Her dream

had sprung back to life again and was once more carrying her, happy but

still trembling and fearful, up again through the heights from which

she had fallen.

She had told the doctor the exact truth. It was not anything that she

had seen or heard. But she _knew_ that somehow a message had come to

her heart from Jimmie. God had not mocked her faith. She _knew_. And

she waited.

It was a long, long summer afternoon through which she worked and

waited, her spirit quivering to the sense of a great wonder hovering

near at hand. She did not feel or recognize any premonition that

Wardwell was physically near her. She had schooled herself well since

those terrible early days, back in the base hospital, when she had

fearfully crept near to and studied every long bundle of a broken man

that was brought in, praying that it might be, and that it might not

be, Jimmie. She did not do those things now, for she had learned the

heavy cost of them upon her strength and her nerves. And now, too, she

was still living upon that sight of Jimmie lying out in the open at the

foot of a bank, and, curiously, she did not think of him as having been

moved from there.

When Wardwell awoke again it was because his throat was hurting

abominably. His mind seemed to clear instantly, and he could not

remember to have felt so wide awake in a long time. He supposed that

this meant that he was going to get well again. He was not pleased

with the prospect, for the weeks of monotonous endurance just ahead

were too well known to be welcome; but he guessed that he would have

to go through with it. This confounded pain in his throat was about

the worst thing he had ever experienced. His mouth was all hard and

cracked inside and the big bandage above his shoulders seemed to be set

on purpose to choke him. He would like to put up his hand and see if

he couldn't ease it a little, but he was sure that as soon as he made

a move someone would notice him, and they would begin the business of

poking at him. He would rather stand this as long as he could if only

he were left to himself.

It was night now--he knew the shaded lights, the enforced quiet, the

restless murmurings of men asleep and half asleep, the feeling of

a hospital ward at night, as well as he knew the sound of his own

breathing--and he had been moved since that last time when he had been

awake. Maybe they had been obliged to clear him out of the receiving

ward--probably that was where he had been that last time--without

operating on him. Maybe the boys were coming down from the stations

pretty fast. He had seen hospitals when the surgeons couldn't begin to

keep up with the work as the men were brought in. In fact he had seen

everything. He had seen the whole blasted wreck of war from beginning

to end, and he didn't want to see any more of it.

His head was propped a little, so that he could just see over the roll

of bandage on his neck. A wardmaster was coming softly down the lane

between the two rows of cots. "I know his kind," Wardwell muttered

mentally, while he shut his eyes and waited, perfectly quiet, for the

wardmaster to pass, "their idea of a good time is to pop a fellow out

of a sound sleep right bang onto an operating table."

He felt rather than heard the wardmaster stop an instant at the foot

of the cot, looking down at him, then he heard the footfall go softly

on down the lane. "Fooled you that time, old scout," thought Wardwell,

with a sort of a foolish gladness and a feeling that he was just about

to either laugh or cry. His throat did hurt like fury.

Then he thought of Augusta. Curious, but he had been certain that she

was somewhere near that last time when he had been awake. Now he did

not seem to be able to feel her near. But just then his mind played a

trick upon him. He did not know whether or not he had shut his eyes for

the moment, but he saw something that he very distinctly remembered

having seen before. One feverish night, in the wagon, on the road, four

years ago, he had wakened from an early sleep. A bar of white moonlight

came in through a little square opening above the flap of the wagon and

fell directly on the pale golden crown of Augusta's rippling hair. She

was kneeling on the bare floor of the wagon, her arms and head sagged

forward into her little hammock.

She had fallen asleep at her night prayers.

And he felt now the big choking throb of pity and tenderness and love

that had come up in his throat at the sight of her. The memory dropped

away instantly, and he was again staring through the dimmed lights at

the bare board walls of the long ward room. But it did not seem that

Augusta was quite so far away as she had been when he awoke.

It is of no connection here. But Augusta was, at that moment, across

the open court in the nurses' pavilion, in the dark by the side of her

own cot, happily saying her tired night prayers.

Wardwell lay quiet a little while, wondering how long he would be able

to hold out against the burning pain in his throat. Perhaps he was

foolish after all. Maybe he might as well call attention to himself and

let them have it over with. They wouldn't hurt him any more than this.

There was a queer thumping noise coming from somewhere, which he

could not make out, and which annoyed him. It was not gunfire of any

kind--didn't he know every kind?--and if it were, what would it be

doing around here? He must be miles and miles down from any fighting

line. This was a regular, big, established hospital. He had no idea

as to just where it was, but it was certainty a long way from where

fighting was to be done. Yet there were explosions going on somewhere

around here. He had no personal interest in the matter, but he wanted

to know what the deuce they were thinking of. Didn't they know that

there were wounded men here who ought to have quiet!

But the thumping kept on, and came closer.

Now there were other sounds, voices outside. Other people had noticed

the thing, and they were going to have it stopped. Well, it certainly

ought to be stopped. Wardwell saw that some of the fellows around him

were being waked up by it, and he felt sorry and indignant for them. It

was a shame! Some confounded fool--

The heavy thud and shudder of an explosion shook the light walls of the

ward, and on its heels there followed a roaring, tearing, ripping sound

of timbers and boards being torn apart and flung about through the

air. Then there rose the cries of men and women, running together and

shouting in the night. Then you could hear sharp orders snapped out of

the confusion.

Another and more terrifying explosion blew out the end of a building

just a little way from the ward where Wardwell lay, and a flying

timber, driven endwise, jabbed through the roof and stuck six feet of

its length into the ward, right over a fellow's head, fourth bed to the

left. Wardwell was sure he counted right. He would like to know who the

poor fellow--

Now there came a continuous rock and roar that seemed to come right up

out of the earth and turn to smash everything flat, and the popping of

aircraft guns hurried up by cursing men began to announce the hideous

truth of what was happening.

A man whose cot lay foot to foot across from Wardwell's sat straight

up. He was an oldish man, among the men here, with a good round face

and a bald head.

"God blast them blind!" he said soberly. "They're bombing the Red Cross

right over our heads!"

The wardmaster came walking up the line between the beds, speaking

steadily through the roaring, splintering din.

"Silence, boys," he was saying, "and keep the blankets up over you.

It's all we can do. They're passing over now. It can't last long."

Now Wardwell considered this thing, and his hands went slowly and

craftily up to the bandages around his neck. He was fairly certain that

if he loosened the bandages he would bleed and faint and die in a very

short time. God! A man had _some_ rights in this business!

He had stood out and lain out to be shot at from every angle with every

kind of a gun that had been made. And he had not even complained at the

gas. But to be butchered now, when he was lying here with a pain in his

throat that would have made him cry if even the gentlest nurse's hand

touched him! He would not have it! A man had _some_ rights!

His hands found the bandages and began to tug at them, but a frightful

crash up at the end of the ward, where the wardmaster had just walked,

held his attention for a moment.

In the tail light of the explosion he saw boards, and men, and a

medicine chest, and beds, and the end of the building, erupting all

together out into the night. And then, when he could look again he saw

through the open space the low horizon stars shining gently in their

places.

The lights were gone now, and he could feel the fright rising in the

men around him. They were afraid in the dark. They began to yell. Some

swore queer oaths, original ones, with tears in their throats. Some

called to God. And some yelled pitifully to somebody to bring a light.

Wardwell began again to tug at the bandages.

But just then, above the cursing, and some praying, and the frightful,

tearing roar of death all about, he heard a girl, down near the end of

the room that was still sound, a girl had come into the ward singing.

He listened, and the words that he heard were these:

"_Gyp, Gyp, me little horse?_"

"_Gyp-Gyp, again, sir._"

"_How many miles to Dublin?_"

"_Four score an' ten, sir._"

High and sweet as the voice of a robin bird in the trees of the Hills

of Desire he heard the voice of his love.

Then the howl and the tearing jaws of death all around had their sway

again. He had thought always that Augusta would somehow come to him

before the end. But, My God! he had never bargained for this! This was

real! Augusta was here, in this death hole! He must get her out of

here. What business had she! Who had let her come here?

He was out of his cot and staggering, bumping down the cot frames,

toward the voice that rang again triumphant, singing:

"_Gyp, Gyp, me little horse?_"

"_Gyp-Gyp, again, sir._"

Now he was coming near her. Now! Another staggering step or two, if he

could only keep his feet straight! Now he was just going to touch her,

to take her in his arms! He had almost lurched past her in the dark.

Now he had her in his arms!

He thought he whispered her name, but it was really a wild yell in her

ear:

"_Augusta!_"

In the first swaying, burning instant their hearts leaped together

and were one at last. There was nothing from the past; nothing to be

explained, nothing to be condoned. Love and truth had burned all things

clear and true for them. They belonged to each other. They were of each

other. And neither life nor death could touch their love now!

And now, curiously, it was Wardwell who did not resist what seemed to

be the conclusion of fate. He had not wanted to die with Augusta. He

had wanted to _live_ with her! But now, if she had foreseen this, that

they were to go together in this way: Well, he was willing to take her

lead, as always. She should have her way. Her way was always right.

But Augusta had her love in her arms, and he was wounded, and fainting,

and leaning upon her. The fierce, protecting surge of mothering nature

rose up in her. She looked into the face of fire, and red murder, and

death, and sprang into battle with them all for him. They should not

have him! He was hers, and _she_ would have him!

She had come into her ward singing her little song, to help the poor

fellows through a bad few minutes. She could not have dreamed that

it was to be as bad as this fiendish reality, but she had already

forgotten her indignation, her pity, her thought of anyone or anything

but Jimmie Wardwell who was swaying leaning upon her breast. To take

him out of here to the blessed open, to keep him from being hurt, was

the thing, it seemed, for which she had lived her life!

The short moment of darkness in which they had somehow found each

other was blasted out into a white flaring light and they were shaken

stumbling and trembling together by an explosion which completely blew

out the end of the building where Augusta had come in.

Looking over her shoulder she saw that she must take him, carry him if

he could not help her, out through that band of fire where already the

jagged sides and roof of the building were being fringed with scallops

of licking flame.

She called on him for an effort, pleading with him to try, to put one

foot before another, to help just one little bit. But his weight lay

almost dead upon her shoulder. He was fainting from his effort to come

to her and from the shock of the last terrible explosion. She must do

all herself. The hoop of fire flamed before her, through which she

must drag him, and her mind and reason quailed but her heart fought on

for its love, blessing God for the strong sure feet that the hills had

given her and the cunning strength in handling the helpless bodies of

men which her training had taught her. These things had been given to

her for this her moment.

Her ears were full of the fearful cries of men in madness, her eyes

were open only to see that ring of fire toward which she was staggering

with her burden, but her heart was strong and sure. What cared she for

the dreams of a heaven that she had made, when she had the warm body of

her love in her arms!

All the women in creation might write love letters to him, but he

was hers and she would take him through that ring of fire and out to

safety! He was hers, and she would have him!

Men shouted to her, to go back, that help was coming quickly another

way, that she was crazy to try to go out that way. But she fought

her way out step by step, through all the blurring horror, up to the

ring of fire, and, staggering, whispering, praying to her love, she

went stumbling through wreck and spitting flames, half carrying, half

dragging her man out into God's open.

A little way out in the grass, away from the worst of the danger, she

stopped--she could go no farther--and let him slip, cunningly and

gently as she could, full length upon the ground.

For the moment, they were left alone. Men running shouting to the work

of rescue did not heed them. And Augusta knelt fixing the big bandage

to Jimmie's throat, and whispering to him. For now, when the strength

of her body was exhausted, her heart went cold with the fear that he

had died in her arms.

But the cool freshness of the grass came up like a reviving shock to

Wardwell's body. He stirred easily, drew two or three good breaths, and

then he spoke, slowly and easily.

"How is it, dear," he asked, plainly knowing that Augusta was there

with him, "are we going _on_, or do we stay? Whichever it is, you know,

I'm for you."

Augusta gave one little animal cry of pure joy. For, instantly, she

_knew_ that all was well, that she would have him again, alive and

strong! Then she bubbled over in tears and the hysteria of gladness,

crying:

"We're going to _stay_, Jimmie darling, we're going to _stay_! And if I

wasn't afraid of hurting you, I'd hug and kiss you till--!"

"Oh, you might take a chance--" said Jimmie. And he went contentedly

off to sleep.

Out of the chaos of noise and the uncertain light a big tall doctor

man came striding across the grass to them, dressed in a long white

operating coat which he had forgotten to throw off.

Augusta rose to her knees and to her overstrained senses the tall

white figure advancing upon her must have taken on some kind of a

supernatural appearance. We do not know just what was in her mind,

probably it is not important. But she raised her hand in a foolish

little salute, and said, somewhat apologetically, to the doctor:

"If you please, God, we've changed our mind. We'd much rather live."

Then she slid quietly down in a faint beside Jimmie.

To this day that surgeon thinks that he did not hear correctly.