"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.

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