Hence, a chance bark, rising through the night to where some enemy airman soared with engines turned off, might well lead to the bombing of hitherto unlocated trenches or detachment-camps. For this and divers other reasons, the first lesson taught to arriving wardogs was to abstain from barking.

The dogs were divided, roughly, by breeds, as regarded the line of training assigned to them. The collies were taught courier-work. The Airedales, too,—hideous, cruel, snake-headed,—were used as couriers, as well as to bear Red Cross supplies and to hunt for the wounded. The gaunt and wolflike police dogs were pressed into the two latter tasks, and were taught listening-post duty. And so on through all available breeds,—including the stolidly wise Old English sheepdogs who were to prove invaluable in finding and succoring and reporting the wounded,—down to the humble terriers and mongrels who were taught to rid trenches of vermin.

Everywhere was quiet efficiency and tirelessly patient and skillful work on the part of the trainers. For Britain's best dog men had been recruited for service here. On the perfection of their charges' training might depend the fate of many thousand gallant soldiers. Wherefore, the training was perfect.

Hundreds of dogs proved stupid or unreliable or gun-shy or too easily confused in moments of stress. These were weeded out, continually, and shipped back to the masters who had proffered them.

Others developed with amazing speed and cleverness, grasping their profession as could few human soldiers. And Bruce, lonely and heartsore, yet throwing himself into his labors with all the zest of the best thoroughbred type,—was one of this group.

His early teachings now stood him in good stead. What once had been a jolly game, for his own amusement and that of the Mistress and the Master, was now his life-work. Steadily his trainer wrought over him, bringing out latent abilities that would have dumfounded his earliest teachers, steadying and directing the gayly dashing intelligence; upbuilding and rounding out all his native gifts.

A dog of Bruce's rare type made up to the trainers for the dullness of their average pupils. He learned with bewildering ease. He never forgot a lesson once taught.

No, the Mistress need not have interceded to save him from beating. As soon would an impresario think of thrashing Caruso or Paderewski as would Bruce's glum Scottish trainer have laid whip to this best pupil of his. Life was bare and strict for Bruce. But life was never unkind to him, in these first months of exile from The Place. And, bit by bit, he began to take a joy in his work.

Not for a day,—perhaps not for an hour, did the big collie forget the home of his babyhood or those he had delighted to worship, there. And the look of sadness in his dark eyes became a settled aspect. Yet, here, there was much to interest and to excite him. And he grew to look forward with pleasure to his daily lessons.

At the end of three months, he was shipped to France. There his seemingly aimless studies at the training camp were put to active use.

* * * * *

At the foot of the long Flanders hill-slope the "Here-We-Come" Regiment, of mixed American and French infantry, held a caterpillar-shaped line of trenches.

To the right, a few hundred yards away, was posted a Lancashire regiment, supported by a battalion from Cornwall. On the left were two French regiments. In front, facing the hill-slope and not a half-mile distant, was the geometric arrangement of sandbags that marked the contour of the German first-line trenches.

The hill behind them, the boches in front of them, French and British troops on either side of them—the Here-We-Comes were helping to defend what was known as a "quiet" sector. Behind the hill, and on loftier heights far to the rear, the Allied artillery was posted. Somewhere in the same general locality lay a division of British reserves.

It is almost a waste of words to have described thus the surroundings of the Here-We-Comes. For, with no warning at all, those entire surroundings were about to be changed.

Ludendorff and his little playmates were just then engaged in the congenial sport of delivering unexpected blows at various successive points of the Allied line, in an effort to find some spot that was soft enough to cave in under the impact and let through a horde of gray-clad Huns. And though none of the defenders knew it, this "quiet" sector had been chosen for such a minor blow.

The men in higher command, back there behind the hill crest, had a belated inkling, though, of a proposed attack on the lightly defended front trenches. For the Allied airplanes which drifted in the upper heavens like a scattered handful of dragon-flies were not drifting there aimlessly. They were the eyes of the snakelike columns that crawled so blindly on the scarred brown surface of the earth. And those "eyes" had discerned the massing of a force behind the German line had discerned and had duly reported it.

The attack might come in a day. It might not come in a week. But it was coming—unless the behind-the-lines preparations were a gigantic feint.

A quiet dawn, in the quiet trenches of the quiet sector. Desultory artillery and somewhat less desultory sniping had prevailed throughout the night, and at daybreak; but nothing out of the ordinary.

Two men on listening-post had been shot; and so had an overcurious sentry who peeped just an inch too far above a parapet. A shell had burst in a trench, knocking the telephone connection out of gear and half burying a squad of sleepers under a lot of earth. Otherwise, things were drowsily dull.

In a dugout sprawled Top-Sergeant Mahan,—formerly of Uncle Sam's regular army, playing an uninspiring game of poker with Sergeant Dale of his company and Sergeant Vivier of the French infantry. The Frenchman was slow in learning poker's mysteries.

And, anyway, all three men were temporarily penniless and were forced to play for I.O.U's—which is stupid sport, at best.

So when, from the German line, came a quick sputt-sputt-sputt from a half-dozen sharpshooters' rifles, all three men looked up from their desultory game in real interest. Mahan got to his feet with a grunt.

"Some other fool has been trying to see how far he can rubber above the sandbags without drawing boche fire," he hazarded, starting out to investigate. "It's a miracle to me how a boche bullet can go through heads that are so full of first-quality ivory as those rubberers'."

But Mahan's strictures were quite unwarranted. The sharpshooters were not firing at the parapet. Their scattering shots were flying high, and hitting against the slope of the hill behind the trenches.

Adown this shell-pocked hillside, as Mahan and the other disturbed idlers gazed, came cantering a huge dark-brown-and-white collie. The morning wind stirred the black stippling that edged his tawny fur, showing the gold-gray undercoat beneath it. His white chest was like a snowdrift, and offered a fine mark for the German rifles. A bullet or two sang whiningly past his gayly up-flung head.

A hundred voices from the Here-We-Come trenches hailed the advancing dog.

"Why, it's Bruce!" cried Mahan in glad welcome. "I might 'a' known he or another of the collies would be along. I might 'a' known it, when the telephones went out of commission. He—"

"Regardez-donc!" interrupted the admiring Vivier. "He acts like bullets was made of flies! Mooch he care for boche lead-pills, ce brave vieux!"

"Yes," growled Dale worriedly; "and one of these days a bullet will find its way into that splendid carcass of his. He's been shot at, a thousand times, to my own knowledge. And all I ask is a chance, with a rifle-butt, at the skull of the Hun who downs him!"

"Downs Bruce?" queried Vivier in fine scorn. "The boche he is no borned who can do it. Bruce has what you call it, in Ainglish, the 'charm life.' He go safe, where other caniche be pepper-potted full of holes. I've watch heem. I know."

Unscathed by the several shots that whined past him, Bruce came to a halt at the edge of a traverse. There he stood, wagging his plume of a tail in grave friendliness, while a score of khaki-clad arms reached up to lift him bodily into the trench.

A sergeant unfastened the message from the dog's collar and posted off to the colonel with it.

The message was similar to one which had been telephoned to each of the supporting bodies, to right and to left of the Here-We-Comes. It bade the colonel prepare to withdraw his command from the front trenches at nightfall, and to move back on the main force behind the hill-crest. The front trenches were not important; and they were far too lightly manned to resist a mass attack. Wherefore the drawing-in and consolidating of the whole outflung line.

Bruce, his work done now, had leisure to respond to the countless offers of hospitality that encompassed him. One man brought him a slice of cold broiled bacon. Another spread pork-grease over a bit of bread and proffered it. A third unearthed from some sacredly guarded hiding-place an excessively stale half-inch square of sweet chocolate.

Had the dog so chosen, he might then and there have eaten himself to death on the multitude of votive offerings. But in a few minutes he had had enough, and he merely sniffed in polite refusal at all further gifts.

"See?" lectured Mahan. "That's the beast of it! When you say a fellow eats or drinks 'like a beast,' you ought to remember that a beast won't eat or drink a mouthful more than is good for him."

"Gee!" commented the somewhat corpulent Dale. "I'm glad I'm not a beast—especially on pay-day."

Presently Bruce tired of the ovation tendered him. These ovations were getting to be an old story. They had begun as far back as his training-camp days—when the story of his joining the army was told by the man to whom The Place's guest had written commending the dog to the trainers' kindness.

At the training-camp this story had been reenforced by the chief collie-teacher—a dour little Hieland Scot named McQuibigaskie, who on the first day declared that the American dog had more sense and more promise and more soul "than a' t'other tykes south o' Kirkcudbright Brae."

Being only mortal, Bruce found it pleasanter to be admired and petted than ignored or kicked. He was impersonally friendly with the soldiers, when he was off duty; and he relished the dainties they were forever thrusting at him.

But at times his soft eyes would grow dark with homesickness for the quiet loveliness of The Place and for the Mistress and the Master who were his loyally worshiped gods. Life had been so happy and so sweetly uneventful for him, at The Place! And there had been none of the awful endless thunder and the bewilderingly horrible smells and gruesome sights which here met him at every turn.

The dog's loving heart used to grow sick with it all; and he longed unspeakably for home. But he was a gallant soldier, and he did his work not only well, but with a snap and a dash and an almost uncanny intelligence which made him an idol to the men.

Presently, now, having eaten all he wanted and having been patted and talked to until he craved solitude, Bruce strolled ever to an empty dugout, curled up on a torn blanket there, put his nose between his white paws and went to sleep.

The German artillery-fire had swelled from an occasional explosion to a ceaseless roar, that made the ground vibrate and heave, and that beat on the eardrums with nauseating iterance. But it did not bother Bruce. For months he had been used to this sort of annoyance, and he had learned to sleep snugly through it all.

Meanwhile, outside his dugout, life was speeding up at a dizzying rate. The German artillery had sprung to sudden and wholesale activity. Far to the right of the Here-We-Come regiment's trenches a haze had begun to crawl along the ground and to send snaky tendrils high in air-tendrils that blended into a single grayish-green wall as they moved forward. The hazewall's gray-green was shot by yellow and purple tinges as the sun's weak rays touched it. To the left of the Here-We-Comes, and then in front of them, appeared the same wall of billowing gas.

The Here-We-Comes were ready for it with their hastily donned masks. But there was no need of the precaution. By one of the sudden wind—freaks so common in the story of the war, the gas-cloud was cleft in two by a swirling breeze, and it rolled dankly on, to right and left, leaving the central trenches clear.

Now, an artillery barrage, accompanied or followed by a gas-demonstration, can mean but one thing: a general attack. Therefore telephonic word came to the detachments to left and right of the Here-We-Comes, to fall back, under cover of the gas-cloud, to safer positions. Two dogs were sent, with the same order, to the Here-We-Comes. (One of the dogs was gassed. A bit of shrapnel found the other.)

Thus it was that the Here-We-Comes were left alone (though they did not know it), to hold the position,—with no support on either side, and with a mere handful of men wherewith to stem the impending rush.

On the heels of the dispersing gas-cloud, and straight across the half-mile or less of broken ground, came a line of gray. In five successive waves, according to custom, the boches charged. Each wave hurled itself forward as fast as efficiency would let it, in face of the opposing fire, and as far as human endurance would be goaded. Then it went down, and its survivors attached themselves to the succeeding wave.

Hence, by the time the fifth and mightiest wave got into motion, it was swelled by the survivors of all four of its predecessors and was an all-but-resistless mass of shouting and running men.

The rifles and machine-guns of the Here-We-Comes played merrily into the advancing gray swarms, stopping wave after wave, and at last checking the fifth and "master" wave almost at the very brink of the Franco-American parapet.

"That's how they do!" Mahan pantingly explained to a rather shaky newcomer, as the last wave fell back. "They count on numbers and bullrushes to get them there. If they'd had ten thousand men, in that rush, instead of five thousand, they'd have got us. And if they had twice as many men in their whole army as they have, they'd win this war. But praise be, they haven't twice as many! That is one of the fifty-seven reasons why the Allies are going to lick Germany."

Mahan talked jubilantly. The same jubilation ran all along the line of victors. But the colonel and his staff were not rejoicing. They had just learned of the withdrawal of the forces to either side of them, and they knew they themselves could not hope to stand against a second and larger charge.

Such a charge the enemy were certain to make. The Germans, too, must soon learn of the defection of the supports. It was now only a question of an hour or less before a charge with a double-enveloping movement would surround and bag the Here-We-Comes, catching the whole regiment in an inescapable trap.

To fall back, now, up that long bare hillside, under full fire of the augmented German artillery, would mean a decimating of the entire command. The Here-We-Comes could not retreat. They could not hope to hold their ground. The sole chance for life lay in the arrival of strong reenforcements from the rear, to help them hold the trenches until night, or to man the supporting positions. Reserves were within easy striking distance. But, as happened so many times in the war, there was no routine way to summon them in time.

It was the chance sight of a crumpled message lying on his dugout-table that reminded the colonel of Bruce's existence and of his presence in the front trench. It was a matter of thirty seconds for the colonel to scrawl an urgent appeal and a brief statement of conditions. Almost as soon as the note was ready, an orderly appeared at the dugout entrance, convoying the newly awakened Bruce.

The all-important message was fastened in place. The colonel himself went to the edge of the traverse, and with his own arms lifted the eighty-pound collie to the top.

There was tenderness as well as strength in the lifting arms. As he set Bruce down on the brink, the colonel said, as if speaking to a fellow-human:

"I hate to do it, old chap. I HATE to! There isn't one chance in three of your getting all the way up the hill alive. But there wouldn't be one chance in a hundred, for a MAN. The boches will be on the lookout for just this move. And their best sharpshooters will be waiting for you—even if you dodge the shrapnel and the rest of the artillery. I'm sorry! And—good-by."

Then, tersely, he rasped out the command—

"Bruce! Headquarters! Headquarters! QUICK!"

At a bound, the dog was gone.

Breasting the rise of the hill, Bruce set off at a sweeping run, his tawny-and-white mane flying in the wind.

A thousand eyes, from the Here-We-Come trenches, watched his flight. And as many eyes from the German lines saw the huge collie's dash up the coverless slope.

Scarce had Bruce gotten fairly into his stride when the boche bullets began to sing—not a desultory little flurry of shots, as before; but by the score, and with a murderous earnestness. When he had appeared, on his way to the trenches, an hour earlier, the Germans had opened fire on him, merely for their own amusement—upon the same merry principle which always led them to shoot at an Ally war-dog. But now they understood his all-important mission; and they strove with their best skill to thwart it.

The colonel of the Here-We-Comes drew his breath sharply between his teeth. He did not regret the sending of the collie. It had been a move of stark military necessity. And there was an off chance that it might mean the saving of his whole command.

But the colonel was fond of Bruce, and it angered him to hear the frantic effort of the boche marksmen to down so magnificent a creature. The bullets were spraying all about the galloping dog, kicking up tiny swirls of dust at his heels and in front of him and to either side.

Mahan, watching, with streaming eyes and blaspheming lips, recalled the French sergeant's theory that Bruce bore a charmed life. And he prayed that Vivier might be right. But in his prayer was very little faith. For under such a fusillade it seemed impossible that at least one highpower bullet should not reach the collie before the slope could be traversed. A fast-running dog is not an easy mark for a bullet—especially if the dog be a collie, with a trace of wolf—ancestry in his gait. A dog, at best, does not gallop straight ahead as does a horse. There is almost always a sidewise lilt to his run.

Bruce was still further aided by the shell-plowed condition of the hillside. Again and again he had to break his stride, to leap some shell-hole. Often he had to encircle such holes. More than once he bounded headlong down into a gaping crater and scrambled up its far side. These erratic moves, and the nine-hundred-yard distance (a distance that was widening at every second) made the sharpshooters' task anything but an exact science.

Mahan's gaze followed the dog's every step. Bruce had cleared more than three-fourths of the slope. The top-sergeant permitted himself the luxury of a broad grin.

"I'll buy Vivier all the red-ink wine he can gargle, next pay-day!" he vowed. "He was dead right about the dog. No bullet was ever molded that can get—"

Mahan broke off in his exultation, with an explosive oath, as a new note in the firing smote upon his trained hearing.

"The swine!" he roared. "The filthy, unsportsmanly, dog-eating Prussian swine! They're turning MACHINE-GUNS on him!"

In place of the intermittent rattle of rifleshots now came the purring cough of rapidfire guns. The bullets hit the upper hillside in swathes, beginning a few yards behind the flying collie and moving upward toward him like a sweeping of an unseen scythe.

"That's the wind-up!" groaned Mahan. "Lord, send me an even break against one of those Hun machinegunners some day! If—"

Again Mahan failed to finish his train of thought. He stared open-mouthed up the hill. Almost at the very summit, within a rod or two of the point where the crest would intervene between him and his foes, Bruce whirled in mid-air and fell prone.

The fast-following swaths of machine-gun bullets had not reached him. But another German enemy had. From behind a heap of offal, on the crest, a yellow-gray dog had sprung, and had launched himself bodily upon Bruce's flank as the unnoticing collie had flashed past him.

The assailant was an enormous and hyena-like German police-dog. He was one of the many of his breed that were employed (for work or food) in the German camps, and which used to sneak away from their hard-kicking soldier-owners to ply a more congenial trade as scavengers, and as seekers for the dead. For, in traits as well as in looks, the police-dog often emulates the ghoulish hyena.

Seeing the approaching collie (always inveterate foe of his kind), the police-dog had gauged the distance and had launched his surprise attack with true Teuton sportsmanship and efficiency. Down went Bruce under the fierce weight that crashed against his shoulder. But before the other could gain his coveted throat-grip, Bruce was up again. Like a furry whirlwind he was at the police-dog, fighting more like a wolf than a civilized collie—tearing into his opponent with a maniac rage, snapping, slashing; his glittering white fangs driving at a dozen vulnerable points in a single second.

It was as though Bruce knew he had no time to waste from his life-and-death mission. He could not elude this enemy, so he must finish him as quickly as possible.

"Give me your rifle!" sputtered Mahan to the soldier nearest him. "I'll take one potshot at that Prussian cur, before the machine-guns get the two of 'em. Even if I hit Bruce by mistake, he'd rather die by a Christian Yankee-made bullet than—"

Just then the scythelike machine-gun fire reached the hillcrest combatants. And in the same instant a shell smote the ground, apparently between them. Up went a geyser of smoke and dirt and rocks. When the cloud settled, there was a deep gully in the ground where a moment earlier Bruce and the police-dog had waged their death-battle.

"That settles it!" muttered the colonel.

And he went to make ready for such puny defense as his men might hope to put up against the German rush.

While these futile preparations were still under way, terrific artillery fire burst from the Allied batteries behind the hill, shielding the Here-We-Come trenches with a curtain of fire whose lower folds draped themselves right unlovingly around the German lines. Under cover of this barrage, down the hill swarmed the Allied reserves!

"How did you get word?" demanded the astonished colonel of the Here-We-Comes, later in the day.

"From your note, of course," replied the general he had questioned. "The collie—old Bruce."

"Bruce?" babbled the colonel foolishly.

"Of course," answered the general. "Who else? But I'm afraid it's the last message he'll ever deliver. He came rolling and staggering up to headquarters—one mass of blood, and three inches thick with caked dirt. His right side was torn open from a shell-wound, and he had two machine-gun bullets in his shoulder. He's deaf as a post, too, from shell-shock. He tumbled over in a heap on the steps of headquarters. But he GOT there. That's Bruce, all over. That's the best type of collie, all over. Some of us were for putting him out of his misery with a shot through the head. We'd have done it, too, if it had been any other dog. But the surgeon-general waded in and took a hand in the game—carried Bruce to his own quarters. We left him working over the dog himself. And he swears Bruce will pull through!"



CHAPTER IV. When Eyes Were No Use

"Yes, it's an easy enough trade to pick up," lectured Top-Sergeant Mahan, formerly of the regular army. "You've just got to remember a few things. But you've got to keep on remembering those few, all the time. If you forget one of 'em, it's the last bit of forgetting you're ever likely to do."

Top-Sergeant Mahan, of the mixed French-and-American regiment known as "Here-We-Come," was squatting at ease on the trench firing-step. From that professorial seat he was dispensing useful knowledge to a group of fellow-countrymen-newly arrived from the base, to pad the "Here-We-Come" ranks, which had been thinned at the Rache attack.

"What sort of things have we got to remember, Sergeant?" jauntily asked a lanky Missourian. "We've got the drill pretty pat; and the trench instructions and—"

"Gee!" ejaculated Mahan. "I had no idea of that! Then why don't you walk straight ahead into Berlin? If you know all you say you do, about war, there's nothing more for you to learn. I'll drop a line to General Foch and suggest to him that you rookies be detailed to teach the game to us oldsters."

"I didn't mean to be fresh," apologized the jaunty one. "Won't you go ahead and tell us the things we need to remember?"

"Well," exhorted Mahan, appeased by the newcomer's humility, "there aren't so many of them, after all. Learn to duck, when you hear a Minnie grunt or a whizzbang cut loose; or a five-nine begin to whimper. Learn not to bother to duck when the rifles get to jabbering—for you'll never hear the bullet that gets you. Study the nocturnal habits of machine-guns and the ways of snipers and the right time not to play the fool. And keep saying to yourself: 'The bullet ain't molded that can get ME!' Mean it when you say it. When you've learned those few things, the rest of the war-game is dead easy."

"Except," timidly amended old Sergeant Vivier, the gray little Frenchman, "except when eyes are—are what you call it, no use." "That's right," assented Mahan. "In the times when eyes are no use, all rules fail. And then the only thing you can do is to trust to your Yankee luck. I remember—"

"'When eyes are no use'?" repeated the recruit. "If you mean after dark, at night—haven't we got the searchlights and the starshells and all that?"

"Son," replied Mahan, "we have. Though I don't see how you ever guessed such an important secret. But since you know everything, maybe you'll just kindly tell us what good all the lights in the world are going to do us when the filthy yellow-gray fog begins to ooze up out of the mud and the shell-holes, and the filthy gray mist oozes down from the clouds to meet it. Fog is the one thing that all the war-science won't overcome. A fogpenetrator hasn't been invented yet. If it had been, there'd be many a husky lad living today, who has gone West, this past few years, on account of the fogs. Fog is the boche's pet. It gives Fritzy a lovely chance to creep up or, us. It—"

"It is the helper of US, too," suggested old Vivier. "More than one time, it has kept me safe when I was on patrol. And did it not help to save us at Rache, when—"

"The fog may have helped us, one per cent, at Rache," admitted Mahan. "But Bruce did ninety-nine per cent of the saving."

"A Scotch general?" asked the recruit, as Vivier nodded cordial affirmation of Mahan's words, and as others of the old-timers muttered approval.

"No," contradicted Mahan. "A Scotch collie. If you were dry behind the ears, in this life, you wouldn't have to ask who Bruce is."

"I don't understand," faltered the rookie, suspicious of a possible joke.

"You will soon," Mahan told him. "Bruce will be here to-day. I heard the K.O. saying the big dog is going to be sent down with some dispatches or something, from headquarters. It's his first trip since he was cut up so."

"I am saving him—this!" proclaimed Vivier, disgorging from the flotsam of his pocket a lump of once-white sugar. "My wife, she smuggle three of these to me in her last paquet. One I eat in my cafe noir; one I present to mon cher vieux, ce bon Mahan; one I keep for the grand dog what save us all that day."

"What's the idea?" queried the mystified rookie. "I don't—"

"We were stuck in the front line of the Rache salient," explained Mahan, eager to recount his dog-friend's prowess. "On both sides our supports got word to fall back. We couldn't get the word, because our telephone connection was knocked galley-west. There we were, waiting for a Hun attack to wipe us out. We couldn't fall back, for they were peppering the hillslope behind us. We were at the bottom. They'd have cut us to ribbons if we'd shown our carcasses in the open. Bruce was here, with a message he'd brought. The K.O. sent him back to headquarters for the reserves. The boche heavies and snipers and machine-guns all cut loose to stop him as he scooted up the hill. And a measly giant of a German police dog tried to kill him, too. Bruce got through the lot of them; and he reached headquarters with the SOS call that saved us. The poor chap was cut and gouged and torn by bullets and shell-scraps, and he was nearly dead from shell-shock, too. But the surgeon general worked over him, himself, and pulled him back to life. He—"

"He is a loved pet of a man and a woman in your America, I have heard one say," chimed in Vivier. "And his home, there, was in the quiet country. He was lent to the cause, as a patriotic offering, ce brave! And of a certainty, he has earned his welcome."

When Bruce, an hour later, trotted into the trenches, on the way to the "Here-We-Come" colonel's quarters, he was received like a visiting potentate. Dozens of men hailed him eagerly by name as he made his way to his destination with the message affixed to his collar.

Many of these men were his well-remembered friends and comrades. Mahan and Vivier, and one or two more, he had grown to like—as well as he could like any one in that land of horrors, three thousand miles away from The Place, where he was born, and from the Mistress and the Master, who were his loyally worshiped gods.

Moreover, being only mortal and afflicted with a hearty appetite, Bruce loved the food and other delicacies the men were forever offering him as a variation on the stodgy fare dished out to him and his fellow war-dogs.

As much to amuse and interest the soldiers whose hero he was, as for any special importance in the dispatch he carried, Bruce had been sent now to the trenches of the Here-We-Comes. It was his first visit to the regiment he had saved, since the days of the Rache assault two months earlier. Thanks to supremely clever surgery and to tender care, the dog was little the worse for his wounds. His hearing gradually had come back. In one shoulder he had a very slight stiffness which was not a limp, and a new-healed furrow scarred the left side of his tawny coat. Otherwise he was as good as new.

As Bruce trotted toward the group that so recently had been talking of him, the Missouri recruit watched with interest for the dog's joy at this reunion with his old friends. Bruce's snowy chest and black-stippled coat were fluffed out by many recent baths. His splendid head high and his dark eyes bright, the collie advanced toward the group.

Mahan greeted him joyously. Vivier stretched out a hand which displayed temptingly the long-hoarded lump of sugar. A third man produced, from nowhere in particular, a large and meat-fringed soup-bone.

"I wonder which of you he'll come to, first," said the interested Missourian.

The question was answered at once, and right humiliatingly. For Bruce did not falter in his swinging stride as he came abreast of the group. Not by so much as a second glance did he notice Mahan's hail and the tempting food.

As he passed within six inches of the lump of sugar which Vivier was holding out to him, the dog's silken ears quivered slightly, sure sign of hard-repressed emotion in a thoroughbred collie,—but he gave no other manifestation that he knew any one was there.

"Well, I'll be blessed!" snickered the Missourian in high derision, as Bruce passed out of sight around an angle of the trench. "So that's the pup who is such a pal of you fellows, is he? Gee, but it was a treat to see how tickled he was to meet you again!"

To the rookie's amazement none of his hearers seemed in the least chagrined over the dogs chilling disregard of them. Instead, Mahan actually grunted approbation.

"He'll be back," prophesied the Sergeant. "Don't you worry. He'll be back. We ought to have had more sense than try to stop him when he's on duty. He has better discipline than the rest of us. That's one of very first things they teach a courier-dog—to pay no attention to anybody, when he's on dispatch duty. When Bruce has delivered his message to the K.O., he'll have the right to hunt up his chums. And no one knows it better'n Bruce himself."

"It was a sin—a thoughtlessness—of me to hold the sugar at him," said old Vivier. "Ah, but he is a so good soldier, ce brave Bruce! He look not to the left nor yet to the right, nor yet to the so-desired sugar-lump. He keep his head at attention! All but the furry tips of his ears. Them he has not yet taught to be good soldiers. They tremble, when he smell the sugar and the good soup-bone. They quiver like the little leaf. But he keep on. He—"

There was a scurry of fast-cantering feet. Around the angle of the trench dashed Bruce. Head erect, soft dark eyes shining with a light of gay mischief, he galloped up to the grinning Sergeant Vivier and stood. The dog's great plume of a tail was wagging violently. His tulip ears were cocked. His whole interest in life was fixed on the precious lump of sugar which Vivier held out to him.

From puppyhood, Bruce had adored lump sugar. Even at The Place, sugar had been a rarity for him, for the Mistress and the Master had known the damage it can wreak upon a dog's teeth and digestion. Yet, once in a while, as a special luxury, the Mistress had been wont to give him a solitary lump of sugar.

Since his arrival in France, the dog had never seen nor scented such a thing until now. Yet he did not jump for the gift. He did not try to snatch it from Vivier. Instead, he waited until the old Frenchman held it closer toward him, with the invitation:

"Take it, mon vieux! It is for you."

Then and then only did Bruce reach daintily forward and grip the grimy bit of sugar between his mighty jaws. Vivier stroked the collie's head while Bruce wagged his tail and munched the sugar and blinked gratefully up at the donor. Mahan looked on, enviously. "A dog's got forty-two teeth, instead of the thirty-two that us humans have to chew on," observed the Sergeant. "A vet' told me that once. And sugar is bad for all forty-two of 'em. Maybe you didn't know that, Monsoo Vivier? Likely, at this rate, we'll have to chip in before long and buy poor Brucie a double set of false teeth. Just because you've put his real ones out of business with lumps of sugar!"

Vivier looked genuinely concerned at this grim forecast. Bruce wandered across to the place where the donor of the soup-bone brandished his offering. Other men, too, were crowding around with gifts.

Between petting and feeding, the collie spent a busy hour among his comrades-at-arms. He was to stay with the "Here-We-Comes" until the following day, and then carry back to headquarters a reconnaissance report.

At four o'clock that afternoon the sky was softly blue and the air was unwontedly clear. By five o'clock a gentle India-summer haze blurred the world's sharper outlines. By six a blanket-fog rolled in, and the air was wetly unbreatheable. The fog lay so thick over the soggy earth that objects ten feet away were invisible.

"This," commented Sergeant Mahan, "is one of the times I was talking about this morning—when eyes are no use. This is sure the country for fogs, in war-time. The cockneys tell me the London fogs aren't a patch on 'em."

The "Here-We-Comes" were encamped, for the while, at the edge of a sector from whence all military importance had recently been removed by a convulsive twist of a hundred-mile battle-front. In this dull hole-in-a-corner the new-arrived rivets were in process of welding into the more veteran structure of the mixed regiment.

Not a quarter-mile away—across No Man's Land and athwart two barriers of barbed wire—lay a series of German trenches. Now, in all probability, and from all outward signs, the occupants of this boche position consisted only of a regiment or two which had been so badly cut up, in a foiled drive, as to need a month of non-exciting routine before going back into more perilous service.

Yet the commander of the division to which the "Here-We-Comes" were attached did not trust to probabilities nor to outward signs. He had been at the front long enough to realize that the only thing likely to happen was the thing which seemed unlikeliest. And he felt a morbid curiosity to learn more about the personnel of those dormant German trenches.

Wherefore he had sent an order that a handful of the "Here-We-Comes" go forth into No Man's Land, on the first favorable night, and try to pick up a boche prisoner or two for questioning-purposes. A scouring of the doubly wired area between the hostile lines might readily harvest some solitary sentinel or some other man on special duty, or even the occupants of a listening-post. And the division commander earnestly desired to question such prisoner or prisoners. The fog furnished an ideal night for such an expedition.

Thus it was that a very young lieutenant and Sergeant Mahan and ten privates—the lanky Missourian among them—were detailed for the prisoner-seeking job. At eleven o'clock, they crept over the top, single file.

It was a night wherein a hundred searchlights and a million star-flares would not have made more impression on the density of the fog than would the striking of a safety match. Yet the twelve reconnoiterers were instructed to proceed in the cautious manner customary to such nocturnal expeditions into No Man's Land. They moved forward at the lieutenant's order, tiptoeing abreast, some twenty feet apart from one another, and advancing in three-foot strides. At every thirty steps the entire line was required to halt and to reestablish contact—in other words, to "dress" on the lieutenant, who was at the extreme right.

This maneuver was more time-wasting and less simple than its recital would imply. For in the dark, unaccustomed legs are liable to miscalculation in the matter of length of stride, even when shell-holes and other inequalities of ground do not complicate the calculations still further. And it is hard to maintain a perfectly straight line when moving forward through choking fog and over scores of obstacles.

The halts for realignment consumed much time and caused no little confusion. Nervousness began to encompass the Missouri recruit. He was as brave as the next man. But there is something creepy about walking with measured tread through an invisible space, with no sound but the stealthy pad-pad-pad of equally hesitant footsteps twenty feet away on either side. The Missourian was grateful for the intervals that brought the men into mutual contact, as the eerie march continued.

The first line of barbed wire was cut and passed. Then followed an endless groping progress across No Man's Land, and several delays, as one man or another had trouble in finding contact with his neighbor.

At last the party came to the German wires. The lieutenant had drawn on a rubber glove. In his gloved hand he grasped a strip of steel which he held in front of him, like a wand, fanning the air with it.

As he came to the entanglement, he probed the barbed wire carefully with his wand, watching for an ensuing spark. For the Germans more than once had been known to electrify their wires, with fatal results to luckless prowlers.

These wires, to-night, were not charged. And, with pliers, the lieutenant and Mahan started to cut a passageway through them.

As the very first strand parted under his pressure, Mahan laid one hand warningly on the lieutenant's sleeve, and then passed the same prearranged warning down the line to the left.

Silence—moveless, tense, sharply listening silence—followed his motion. Then the rest of the party heard the sound which Mahan's keener ears had caught a moment earlier—the thud of many marching feet. Here was no furtive creeping, as when the twelve Yankees had moved along. Rather was it the rhythmic beat of at least a hundred pairs of shapeless army boots—perhaps of more. The unseen marchers were moving wordlessly, but with no effort at muffling the even tread of their multiple feet.

"They're coming this way!" breathed Sergeant Mahan almost without sound, his lips close to the excited young lieutenant's ear. "And they're not fifty paces off. That means they're boches. So near the German wire, our men would either be crawling or else charging, not marching! It's a company—maybe a battalion—coming back from a reconnaissance, and making for a gap in their own wire some where near here. If we lay low there's an off chance they may pass us by."

Without awaiting the lieutenant's order, Mahan passed along the signal for every man to drop to earth and lie there. He all but forced the eagerly gesticulating lieutenant to the ground.

On came the swinging tread of the Germans. Mahan, listening breathlessly, tried to gauge the distance and the direction. He figured, presently, that the break the Germans had made in their wire could be only a few yards below the spot where he and the lieutenant had been at work with the pliers. Thus the intruders, from their present course, must inevitably pass very close to the prostrate Americans—so close, perhaps, as to brush against the nearest of them, or even to step on one or more of the crouching figures.

Mahan whispered to the man on his immediate left, the rookie from Missouri:

"Edge closer to the wire—close as you can wiggle, and lie flat. Pass on the word."

The Missourian obeyed. Before writhing his long body forward against the bristly mass of wire he passed the instructions on to the man at his own left.

But his nerves were at breaking-point.

It had been bad enough to crawl through the blind fog, with the ghostly steps of his comrades pattering softly at either side of him. But it was a thousand times harder to lie helpless here, in the choking fog and on the soaked ground, while countless enemies were bearing down, unseen, upon him, on one side, and an impenetrable wire cut off his retreat on the other.

The Missourian had let his imagination begin to work; always a mistake in a private soldier. He was visualizing the moment when this tramping German force should become aware of the presence of their puny foes and should slaughter them against the merciless wires. It would not be a fair stand-up fight, this murder-rush of hundreds of men against twelve who were penned in and could not maneuver nor escape. And the thought of it was doing queer things to the rookie's overwrought nerves.

Having passed the word to creep closer to the wires, he began to execute the order in person, with no delay at all. But he was a fraction of a second too late. The Germans were moving in hike-formation with "points" thrown out in advance to either side—a "point" being a private soldier who, for scouting and other purposes, marches at some distance from the main body.

The point, ahead of the platoon, had swerved too far to the left, in the blackness—an error that would infallibly have brought him up against the wires, with considerable force, in another two steps. But the Missourian was between him and the wires. And the point's heavy-shod foot came down, heel first, on the back of the rookie's out-groping hand. Such a crushing impact, on the hand-back, is one of the most agonizing minor injuries a man can sustain. And this fact the Missourian discovered with great suddenness.

His too-taut nerves forced from his throat a yell that split the deathly stillness with an ear-piercing vehemence. He sprang to his feet, forgetful of orders intent only on thrusting his bayonet through the Hun who had caused such acute torture to his hand. Half way up, the rookie's feet went out from under him in the slimy mud. He caromed against the point, then fell headlong.

The German, doubtless thinking he had stumbled upon a single stray American scout, whirled his own rifle aloft, to dash out the brains of his luckless foe. But before the upflung butt could descend,—before the rookie could rise or dodge,—the point added his quota to the rude breaking of the night's silence. He screamed in panic terror, dropped his brandished gun and reeled backward, clawing at his own throat.

For out of the eerie darkness, something had launched itself at him—something silent and terrible, that had flown to the Missourian's aid. Down with a crash went the German, on his back. He rolled against the Missourian, who promptly sought to grapple with him.

But even as he clawed for the German, the rookie's nerves wrung from him a second yell—this time less of rage than of horror.

"Sufferin' cats!" he bellowed. "Why didn't anybody ever tell me Germans was covered with fur instead of clothes?"

The boche platoon was no longer striding along in hike-formation. It was broken up into masses of wildly running men, all of them bearing down upon the place whence issued this ungodly racket and turmoil. Stumbling, reeling, blindly falling and rising again, they came on.

Some one among them loosed a rifle-shot in the general direction of the yelling. A second and a third German rifleman followed the example of the first. From the distant American trenches, one or two snipers began to pepper away toward the enemy lines, though the fog was too thick for them, to see the German rifle-flashes.

The boches farthest to the left, in the blind rush, fouled with the wires. German snipers, from behind the Hun parapets, opened fire. A minute earlier the night had been still as the grave. Now it fairly vibrated with clangor. All because one rookie's nerves had been less staunch than his courage, and because that same rookie had not only had his hand stepped on in the dark, but had encountered something swirling and hairy when he grabbed for the soldier who had stepped on him!

The American lieutenant, at the onset of the clamor, sprang to his feet, whipping out his pistol; his dry lips parted in a command to charge—a command which, naturally, would have reduced his eleven men and himself to twelve corpses or to an equal number of mishandled prisoners within the next few seconds. But a big hand was clapped unceremoniously across the young officer's mouth, silencing the half-spoken suicidal order.

Sergeant Mahan's career in the regular army had given him an almost uncanny power of sizing up his fellowmen. And he had long ago decided that this was the sort of thing his untried lieutenant would be likely to do, in just such an emergency. Wherefore his flagrant breach of discipline in shoving his palm across the mouth of his superior officer.

And as he was committing this breach of discipline, he heard the Missourian's strangled gasp of:

"Why didn't anybody ever tell me Germans was covered with fur?"

In a flash Mahan understood. Wheeling, he stooped low and flung out both arms in a wide-sweeping circle. Luckily his right hand's fingertips, as they completed the circle, touched something fast-moving and furry.

"Bruce!" he whispered fiercely, tightening his precarious grip on the wisp of fur his fingers had touched. "Bruce! Stand still, boy! It's YOU who's got to get us clear of this! Nobody else, short of the good Lord, can do it!"

Bruce had had a pleasantly lazy day with his friends in the first-line trenches. There had been much good food and more petting. And at last, comfortably tired of it all, he had gone to sleep. He had awakened in a most friendly mood, and a little hungry. Wherefore he had sallied forth in search of human companionship. He found plenty of soldiers who were more than willing to talk to him and make much of him. But, a little farther ahead, he saw his good friend, Sergeant Mahan, and others of his acquaintances, starting over the parapet on what promised to be a jolly evening stroll.

All dogs find it hard to resist the mysterious lure of a walk in human companionship. True, the night was not an ideal one for a ramble, and the fog had a way of congealing wetly on Bruce's shaggy coat. Still, a damp coat was not enough of a discomfort to offset the joy of a stroll with his friends. So Bruce had followed the twelve men quietly into No Man's Land, falling decorously into step behind Mahan.

It had not been much of a walk, for speed or for fun. For the humans went ridiculously slowly, and had an eccentric way of bunching together, every now and again, and then of stringing out into a shambling line. Still, it was a walk, and therefore better than loafing behind in the trenches. And Bruce had kept his noiseless place at the Sergeant's heels.

Then—long before Mahan heard the approaching tramp of feet—Bruce caught not only the sound but the scent of the German platoon. The scent at once told him that the strangers were not of his own army. A German soldier and an American soldier—because of their difference in diet as well as for certain other and more cogent reasons—have by no means the same odor, to a collie's trained scent, nor to that of other breeds of war-dogs. Official records of dog-sentinels prove that.

Aliens were nearing Bruce's friends. And the dog's ruff began to stand up. But Mahan and the rest seemed in no way concerned in spirit thereby—though, to the dog's understanding, they must surely be aware of the approach. So Bruce gave no further sign of displeasure. He was out for a walk, as a guest. He was not on sentry-duty.

But when the nearest German was almost upon them, and all twelve Americans dropped to the ground, the collie became interested once more. A German stepped on the hand of one of his newest friends. And the friend yelled in pain. Whereat the German made as if to strike the stepped-on man.

This was quite enough for loyal Bruce. Without so much as a growl of warning, he jumped at the offender.

Dog and man tumbled earthward together. Then after an instant of flurry and noise, Bruce felt Mahan's fingers on his shoulder and heard the stark appeal of Mahan's whispered voice. Instantly the dog was a professional soldier once more—alertly obedient and resourceful.

"Catch hold my left arm, Lieutenant!" Mahan was exhorting. "Close up, there, boys—every man's hand grabbing tight to the shoulder of the man on his left! Pass the word. And you, Missouri, hang onto the Lieutenant! Quick, there! And tread soft and tread fast, and don't let go, whatever happens! Not a sound out of any one! I'm leading the way. And Bruce is going to lead me."

There was a scurrying scramble as the men groped for one another. Mahan tightened his hold on Bruce's mane.

"Bruce!" he said, very low, but with a strength of appeal that was not lost on the listening dog. "Bruce! Camp! Back to CAMP! And keep QUIET! Back to camp, boy! CAMP!"

He had no need to repeat his command so often and so strenuously. Bruce was a trained courier. The one word "Camp!" was quite enough to tell him what he was to do.

Turning, he faced the American lines and tried to break into a gallop. His scent and his knowledge of direction were all the guides he needed. A dog always relies on his nose first and his eyes last. The fog was no obstacle at all to the collie. He understood the Sergeant's order, and he set out at once to obey it.

But at the very first step, he was checked. Mahan did not release that feverishly tight hold on his mane, but merely shifted to his collar.

Bruce glanced back, impatient at the delay. But Mahan did not let go. Instead he said once more:

"CAMP, boy!"

And Bruce understood he was expected to make his way to camp, with Mahan hanging on to his collar.

Bruce did not enjoy this mode of locomotion. It was inconvenient, and there seemed no sense in it; but there were many things about this strenuous war-trade that Bruce neither enjoyed nor comprehended, yet which he performed at command.

So again he turned campward, Mahan at his collar and an annoyingly hindering tail of men stumbling silently on behind them. All around were the Germans—butting drunkenly through the blanket-dense fog, swinging their rifles like flails, shouting confused orders, occasionally firing. Now and then two or more of them would collide and would wrestle in blind fury, thinking they had encountered an American.

Impeded by their own sightlessly swarming numbers, as much as by the impenetrable darkness, they sought the foe. And but for Bruce they must quickly have found what they sought. Even in compact form, the Americans could not have had the sheer luck to dodge every scattered contingent of Huns which starred the German end of No Man's Land—most of them between the fugitives and the American lines.

But Bruce was on dispatch duty. It was his work to obey commands and to get back to camp at once. It was bad enough to be handicapped by Mahan's grasp on his collar. He was not minded to suffer further delay by running into any of the clumps of gesticulating and cabbage-reeking Germans between him and his goal. So he steered clear of such groups, making several wide detours in order to do so. Once or twice he stopped short to let some of the Germans grope past him, not six feet away. Again he veered sharply to the left—increasing his pace and forcing Mahan and the rest to increase theirs—to avoid a squad of thirty men who were quartering the field in close formation, and who all but jostled the dog as they strode sightlessly by. An occasional rifle-shot spat forth its challenge. From both trench-lines men were firing at a venture. A few of the bullets sang nastily close to the twelve huddled men and their canine leader. Once a German, not three yards away, screamed aloud and fell sprawling and kicking, as one such chance bullet found him. Above and behind, sounded the plop of star-shells sent up by the enemy in futile hope of penetrating the viscid fog. And everywhere was heard the shuffle and stumbling of innumerable boots.

At last the noise of feet began to die away, and the uneven groping tread of the twelve Americans to sound more distinctly for the lessening of the surrounding turmoil. And in another few seconds Bruce came to a halt—not to an abrupt stop, as when he had allowed an enemy squad to pass in front of him, but a leisurely checking of speed, to denote that he could go no farther with the load he was helping to haul.

Mahan put out his free hand. It encountered the American wires. Bruce had stopped at the spot where the party had cut a narrow path through the entanglement on the outward journey. Alone, the dog could easily have passed through the gap, but he could not be certain of pulling Mahan with him. Wherefore the halt.

* * * * *

The last of the twelve men scrambled down to safety, in the American first-line trench, Bruce among them. The lieutenant went straight to his commanding officer, to make his report. Sergeant Mahan went straight to his company cook, whom he woke from a snoreful sleep. Presently Mahan ran back to where the soldiers were gathered admiringly around Bruce.

The Sergeant carried a chunk of fried beef, for which he had just given the cook his entire remaining stock of cigarettes.

"Here you are, Bruce!" he exclaimed. "The best in the shop is none too good for the dog that got us safe out of that filthy mess. Eat hearty!"

Bruce did not so much as sniff at the (more or less) tempting bit of meat. Coldly he looked up at Mahan. Then, with sensitive ears laid flat against his silken head, in token of strong contempt, he turned his back on the Sergeant and walked away.

Which was Bruce's method of showing what he thought of a human fool who would give him a command and who would then hold so tightly to him that the dog could hardly carry out the order.



CHAPTER V. The Double Cross

In the background lay a landscape that had once been beautiful. In the middle distance rotted a village that had once been alive. In the foreground stood an edifice that had once been a church. The once-beautiful landscape had the look of a gigantic pockmarked face, so scored was it by shell-scar and crater. Its vegetation was swept away. Its trees were shattered stumps. Its farmsteads were charred piles of rubble.

The village was unlike the general landscape, in that it had never been beautiful. In spite of globe-trotters' sentimental gush, not all villages of northern France were beautiful. Many were built for thrift and for comfort and for expediency; not for architectural or natural loveliness.

But this village of Meran-en-Laye was not merely deprived of what beauty it once might or might not have possessed. Except by courtesy it was no longer a village at all. It was a double row of squalid ruins, zig-zagging along the two sides of what was left of its main street. Here and there a cottage or tiny shop or shed was still habitable. The rest was debris.

The church in the foreground was recognizable as such by the shape and size of its ragged walls, and by a half-smashed image of the Virgin and Child which slanted out at a perilous angle above its facade.

Yet, miserable as the ruined hamlet seemed to the casual eye, it was at present a vacation-resort—and a decidedly welcome one—to no less than three thousand tired men. The wrecked church was an impromptu hospital beneath whose shattered roof dozens of these men lay helpless on makeshift cots.

For the mixed American and French regiment known as the "Here-We-Comes" was billeted at Meran-en-Laye during a respite from the rigors and perils of the front-line trenches.

The rest and the freedom from risks, supposed to be a part of the "billeting" system, were not wholly the portion of the "Here-We Comes." Meran—en—Laye was just then a somewhat important little speck on the warmap.

The Germans had been up to their favorite field sport of trying to split in half two of the Allied armies, and to roll up each, independently. The effort had been a failure; yet it had come so near to success that many railway communications were cut off or deflected. And Meran-en-Laye had for the moment gained new importance, by virtue of a spur railway-line which ran through its outskirts and which made junction with a new set of tracks the American engineers were completing. Along this transverse of roads much ammunition and food and many fighting men were daily rushed.

The safety of the village had thus become of much significance. While it was too far behind the lines to be in grave danger of enemy raids, yet such danger existed to some extent. Wherefore the presence of the "Here-We-Comes"—for the paradoxical double purpose of "resting up" and of guarding the railway Function.

Still, it was better than trench-work; and the "Here-We-Comes" enjoyed it—for a day or so. Then trouble had set in.

A group of soldiers were lounging on the stone seat in front of the village estaminet. Being off duty, they were reveling in that popular martial pastime known to the Tommy as "grousing" and to the Yankee doughboy as "airing a grouch."

Top-Sergeant Mahan, formerly of the regular army, was haranguing the others. Some listened approvingly, others dissentingly and others not at all.

"I tell you," Mahan declared for the fourth time, "somebody's double-crossing us again. There's a leak. And if they don't find out where it is, a whole lot of good men and a million dollars' worth of supplies are liable to spill out through that same leak. It—"

"But," argued his crony, old Sergeant Vivier, in his hard-learned English, "but it may all be of a chance, mon vieux. It may, not be the doubled cross,—whatever a doubled cross means,—but the mere chance. Such things often—"

"Chance, my grandmother's wall-eyed cat!" snorted Mahan. "Maybe it might have been chance—when this place hadn't been bombed for a month—for a whole flight of boche artillery and airship grenades to cut loose against it the day General Pershing happened to stop here for an hour on his way to Chateau-Thierry. Maybe that was chance—though I know blamed well it wasn't. Maybe it was chance that the place wasn't bombed again till two days ago, when that troop-train had to spend such a lot of time getting shunted at the junction. Maybe it was chance that the church, over across the street, hadn't been touched since the last drive, till our regiment's wounded were put in it—and that it's been hit three times since then. Maybe any one of those things—and of a dozen others was chance. But it's a cinch that ALL of them weren't chance. Chance doesn't work that way. I—"

"Perhaps," doubtfully assented old Vivier, "perhaps. But I little like to believe it. For it means a spy. And a spy in one's midst is like to a snake in one's blankets. It is a not pleasing comrade. And it stands in sore need of killing."

"There's spies everywhere," averred Mahan. "That's been proved often enough. So why not here? But I wish to the Lord I could lay hands on him! If this was one of the little sheltered villages, in a valley, his work would be harder. And the boche airships and the long-rangers wouldn't find us such a simple target. But up here on this ridge, all a spy has to do is to flash a signal, any night, that a boche airman can pick up or that can even be seen with good glasses from some high point where it can be relayed to the German lines. The guy who laid out this burg was sure thoughtless. He might have known there'd be a war some day. He might even have strained his mind and guessed that we'd be stuck here. Gee!"

He broke off with a grunt of disgust; nor did he so much as listen to another of the group who sought to lure him into an opinion as to whether the spy might be an inhabitant of the village or a camp-follower.

Sucking at his pipe; the Sergeant glowered moodily down the ruined street. The village drowsed under the hot midday. Here and there a soldier lounged along aimlessly or tried out his exercise-book French on some puzzled, native. Now and then an officer passed in or out of the half-unroofed mairie which served as regimental headquarters.

Beyond, in the handkerchief-sized village square, a platoon was drilling. A thin French housewife was hanging sheets on a line behind a shell-twisted hovel. A Red Cross nurse came out of the hospital-church across the street from the estaminet and seated herself on the stone steps with a basketful of sewing.

Mahan's half-shut eyes rested critically on the drilling platoon—amusedly on the woman who was so carefully hanging the ragged sheets,—and then approvingly upon the Red Cross nurse on the church steps across the way.

Mahan, like most other soldiers, honored and revered the Red Cross for its work of mercy in the army. And the sight of one of the several local nurses of the Order won from him a glance of real approbation.

But presently into his weather-beaten face came an expression of glad welcome. Out of the mairie gate and into the sleepy warmth of the street lounged a huge dark-brown-and-white collie. The don stretched himself lazily, fore and aft, in true collie style, then stood gazing about him as if in search of something of interest to occupy his bored attention.

"Hello!" observed Mahan, breaking in on a homily of Vivier's. "There's Bruce!"

Vivier's leathery face brightened at sound of the collie's name. He looked eagerly in the direction of Mahan's pointing finger.

"Ce brave!" exclaimed the Frenchman. "I did not know even that he was in the village. It must be he is but new-arriven. Otherwise he would, of an assuredly, have hunted up his old friends. Ohe, Bruce!" he called invitingly.

"The big dog must have gotten here just a few minutes ago," said Sergeant Mahan. "He was coming out of headquarters when I saw him. That must mean he's just struck the town, and with a message for the K.O. He always goes like greased lightning when he's on dispatch duty, till he has delivered his message. Then, if he's to be allowed to hang around a while before he's sent back, he loafs, lazy-like; the way you see him now. If all the courier-dogs were like him, every human courier would be out of a job."

At Vivier's hail the great collie had pricked his ears and glanced inquiringly up and down the street. Catching sight of the group seated in front of the estaminet, he began to wag his plumy tail and set off toward them at a trot.

Ten minutes earlier, Bruce had cantered into Meran-en-Laye from the opposite end of the street, bearing in his collar a dispatch from the corps commander to the colonel of the "Here-We-Comes." The colonel, at the mairie, had read the dispatch and had patted its bearer; then had bidden the dog lie down and rest, if he chose, after his long run.

Instead, Bruce had preferred to stroll out in search of friends.

Top-Sergeant Mahan, by the way, would have felt highly flattered had he chanced to get a glimpse of the dispatch Bruce had brought to the colonel. For it bore out Mahan's own theory regarding the presence of spies at or near the village, and it bade the "Here-We-Come" colonel use every means for tracing them.

It added the information that three troop-trains with nine engines were to pass through the village that night on their way to the trenches, and that the trains were due at the junction at nine o'clock or shortly thereafter. The mairie was on the other side of the street from the estaminet. Incidentally, it was on the shady side of the street—for which reason Bruce,—being wise, and the day being hot,—remained on that side, until he should come opposite the bench where his friends awaited him.

His course, thus, brought him directly past the church.

As he trotted by the steps, the Red Cross nurse, who sat sewing there, chirped timidly at him. Bruce paused in his leisurely progress to see who had accosted him whether an old acquaintance, to be greeted as such, or merely a pleasantly inclined stranger.

His soft brown eyes rested first in idle inquiry upon the angular and white-robed figure on the steps. Then, on the instant, the friendly inquiring look left his eyes and their softness went with it—leaving the dog's gaze cold and frankly hostile.

One corner of Bruce's lips slowly lifted, revealing a tiny view of the terrible white fangs behind them. His gayly erect head was lowered, and in the depths of his furry throat a growl was born. When a dog barks and holds his head up, there is little enough to fear from him. But when he lowers his head and growl—then look out.

Mahan knew dogs. In stark amazement he now noted Bruce's strange attitude toward the nurse. Never before had he seen the dog show active hostility toward a stranger—least of all toward a stranger who had in no way molested him. It was incredible that the wontedly dignified and sweet-tempered collie had thus returned a greeting. Especially from a woman!

Mahan had often seen Red Cross nurses stop to caress Bruce. He had been amused at the dog's almost protective cordiality toward all women, whether the French peasants or the wearers of the brassard of mercy.

Toward men—except those he had learned to look on as friends—the collie always comported himself with a courteous aloofness But he had seemed to regard every woman as something to be humored and guarded and to be treated with the same cordial friendliness that he bestowed on their children—which is the way of the best type of collie. Yet Bruce had actually snarled at this woman who had chirped to him from the steps of the church! And he showed every sign of following up the challenge by still more drastic measures.

"Bruce!" called Mahan sharply. "BRUCE! Shame! Come over here! Come, NOW!"

At the Sergeant's vehement summons Bruce turned reluctantly away from the foot of the church steps and came across the street toward the estaminet. He came slowly. Midway he halted and looked back over his shoulder at the nurse, his fangs glinting once more in a snarl. At a second and more emphatic call from Mahan the dog continued his progress.

The nurse had started back in alarm at the collie's angry demonstration. Now, gathering up her work, she retreated into the church.

"I'm sorry, Miss!" Mahan shouted after her. "I never saw him that way, before, when a lady spoke to him. If it was any dog but old Bruce, I'd give him a whaling for acting like that to you. I'm dead-sure he didn't mean any harm."

"Oh, I was going in, anyway," replied the nurse, from the doorway. "It is of no consequence."

She spoke nervously, her rich contralto voice shaken by the dog's fierce show of enmity. Then she vanished into the church; and Mahan and Vivier took turns in lecturing Bruce on his shameful dearth of courtesy.

The big dog paid no heed at all to his friends' discourse. He was staring sullenly at the doorway through which the nurse had gone.

"That's one swell way for a decently bred dog to treat a woman!" Mahan was telling him. "Least of all, a Red Cross nurse! I'm clean ashamed of you!"

Bruce did not listen. In his heart he was still angry—and very much perplexed as well. For he knew what these stupid humans did not seem to know.

HE KNEW THE RED CROSS NURSE WAS NO WOMAN AT ALL, BUT A MAN.

Bruce knew, too, that the nurse did not belong to his loved friends of the Red Cross. For his uncanny power of scent told him the garments worn by the impostor belonged to some one else. To mere humans, a small and slender man, who can act, and who dons woman's garb, is a woman. To any dog, such a man is no more like a woman than a horse with a lambskin saddle-pad is a lamb. He is merely a man who is differently dressed from other men—even as this man who had chirped to Bruce, from the church steps, was no less a man for the costume in which he had swathed his body. Any dog, at a glance and at a sniff, would have known that.

Women, for one thing, do not usually smoke dozens of rank cigars daily for years, until their flesh is permeated with the smell of tobacco. A human could not have detected such a smell—such a MAN-smell,—on the person who had chirped to Bruce. Any dog, twenty feet away, would have noticed it, and would have tabulated the white-clad masquerader as a man. Nor do a woman's hair and skin carry the faint but unmistakable odor of barracks and of tent-life and of martial equipment, as did this man's. The masquerader was evidently not only a man but a soldier.

Dogs,—high-strung dogs,—do not like to have tricks played on them; least of all by strangers. Bruce seemed to take the nurse-disguise as a personal affront to himself. Then, too, the man was not of his own army. On the contrary, the scent proclaimed him one of the horde whom Bruce's friends so manifestly hated—one of the breed that had more than once fired on the dog.

Diet and equipment and other causes give a German soldier a markedly different scent, to dogs' miraculously keen nostrils,—and to those of certain humans,—from the French or British or American troops. War records prove this. Once having learned the scent, and having learned to detest it, Bruce was not to be deceived.

For all these reasons he had snarled loathingly at the man in white. For these same reasons he could not readily forget the incident, but continued every now and then to glance curiously across toward the church.

Presently,—not relishing the rebukes of the friends who had heretofore pestered him by overmuch petting,—the collie arose quietly from his couch of trampled earth at the foot of the stone bench and strolled back across the street. Most of the men were too busy, talking, to note Bruce's departure. But Sergeant Mahan caught sight of him just as the dog was mounting the last of the steps leading into the church.

As a rule, when Bruce went investigating, he walked carelessly and with his tail slightly a-wag. Now his tail was stiff as an icicle, and he moved warily, on the tips of his toes. His tawny-maned neck was low. Mahan, understanding dogs, did not like the collie's demeanor. Remembering that the nurse had entered the church a few minutes earlier, the Sergeant got to his feet and hastily followed Bruce.

The dog, meanwhile, had passed through the crazily splintered doorway and had paused on the threshold of the improvised hospital, as the reek of iodoform and of carbolic smote upon his sensitive nostrils. In front of him was the stone-paved vestibule. Beyond was the interior of the shattered church, lined now with double rows of cots.

Seated on a camp-chair in the shadowy vestibule was the pseudo Red Cross nurse. At sight of the collie the nurse got up in some haste. Bruce, still walking stiff-legged, drew closer.

Out from under the white skirt flashed a capable and solidly-shod foot. In a swinging kick, the foot let drive at the oncoming dog. Before Bruce could dodge or could so much as guess what was coming,—the kick smote him with agonizing force, square on the shoulder.

To a spirited collie, a kick carries more than the mere pain of its inflicting. It is a grossly unforgivable affront as well—as many a tramp and thief have learned, at high cost.

By the time the kick had fairly landed, Bruce had recovered from his instant of incredulous surprise; and with lightning swiftness he hurled himself at his assailant.

No bark or growl heralded the murderous throatlunge. It was all the more terrible for the noiselessness wherewith it was delivered. The masquerading man saw it coming, just too late to guard against it. He lurched backward, belatedly throwing both hands up to defend his throat. It was the involuntary backward step which saved his jugular. For his heel caught in the hem of his white skirt. And wholly off balance, he pitched headlong to the floor.

This jerky shift of position, on the part of the foe, spoiled Bruce's aim. His fearful jaws snapped together harmlessly in empty air at a spot where, a fraction of a second earlier, the other's throat had been. Down crashed the disguised man. And atop of him the furious dog hurled himself, seeking a second time the throatgrip he had so narrowly missed.

At this point on the program Sergeant Mahan arrived just in time to bury both hands in the mass of Bruce's furry ruff and to drag the snarlingly rabid dog back from his prey.

The place was in an uproar. Nurses and doctors came rushing out into the vestibule; sick and wounded men sat up on their cots and eagerly craned their necks to catch sight of the scrimmage. Soldiers ran in from the street.

Strong as he was, Mahan had both hands full in holding the frantic Bruce back from his enemy. Under the insult of the kick from this masquerader, whom he had already recognized as a foe, the collie had temporarily lost every vestige of his stately dignity. He was for the moment merely a wild beast, seeking revenge for a brutal injury. He writhed and fought in Mahan's grasp. Never once did he seek to attack the struggling man who held him. But he strained every giant sinew to get at the foe who had kicked him.

The dog's opponent scrambled to his feet, helped by a dozen willing hands and accosted by as many solicitous voices. The victim's face was bone-gray with terror. His lips twitched convulsively. Yet, as befitted a person in his position, he had a splendid set of nerves. And almost at once he recovered partial control over himself.

"I—I don't know how it happened," he faltered, his rich contralto voice shaky with the ground-swells of his recent shock. "It began when I was sitting on the steps, sewing. This dog came past. He growled at me so threateningly that I came indoors. A minute later, while I was sitting here sewing, he sprang at me and threw me down. I believe he would—would have killed me," the narrator finished, with a very genuine shudder, "if I had not been rescued when I was. Such bloodthirsty brutes ought to be shot!"

"He not only OUGHT to be," hotly agreed the chief surgeon, "but he is GOING to be. Take him out into the street, one of you men, and put a ball in his head."

The surgeon turned to the panting nurse.

"You're certain he didn't hurt you?" he asked. "I don't want a newcomer, like yourself, to think this is the usual treatment our nurses get. Lie down and rest. You look scared to death. And don't be nervous about the cur attacking you again. He'll be dead inside of three minutes."

The nurse, with a mumbled word of thanks, scuttled off into the rear of the church, where the tumbledown vestry had been fitted up as a dormitory.

Bruce had calmed down somewhat under Mahan's sharp reproof. But he now struggled afresh to get at his vanished quarry. And again the Sergeant had a tussle to hold him.

"I don't know what's got into the big fellow!" exclaimed Mahan to Vivier as the old Frenchman joined the tumultuous group. "He's gone clean daft. He'd of killed that poor woman, if I hadn't—"

"Get him out of here!" ordered the surgeon. "And clear out, yourselves, all of you! This rumpus has probably set a lot of my patients' temperatures to rocketing. Take the cur out and shoot him!"

"Excuse me, sir," spoke up Mahan, as Vivier stared aghast at the man who commanded Bruce's destruction, "but he's no cur. He's a courier-collie, officially in the service of the United States Government. And he's the best courier-dog in France to-day. This is—"

"I don't care what he is!" raged the surgeon. "He—"

"This is Bruce," continued Mahan, "the dog that saved the 'Here-We-Comes' at Rache, and that steered a detail of us to safety one night in the fog, in the Chateau-Thierry sector. If you order any man of the 'Here-We-Comes' to shoot Bruce, you're liable to have a mutiny on your hands—officer or no officer. But if you wish, sir, I can transmit your order to the K.O. If he endorses it—"

But the surgeon sought, at that moment, to save the remnants of his dignity and of a bad situation by stalking loftily back into the hospital, and leaving Mahan in the middle of his speech.

"Or, sir," the Sergeant grinningly called after him, "you might write to the General Commanding, and tell him you want Bruce shot. The Big Dog always sleeps in the general's own room, when he's off-duty, at Division Headquarters. Maybe the general will O.K. his death-sentence, if you ask him to. He—"

Somewhat quickening his stately stride, the surgeon passed out of earshot. At the officers' mess of the "Here-We-Comes," he had often heard Bruce's praises sung. He had never chanced to see the dog until now. But, beneath his armor of dignity, he quaked to think what the results to himself must have been, had he obeyed his first impulse of drawing his pistol and shooting the adored and pricelessly useful collie.

Mahan,—stolidly rejoicing in his victory over the top-lofty potentate whom he disliked,—led the way out of the crowded vestibule into the street. Bruce followed demurely at his heels and Vivier bombarded everybody in sight for information as to what the whole fracas was about.

Bruce was himself again. Now that the detested man in woman's clothes had gone away, there was no sense in continuing to struggle or to waste energy in a show of fury. Nevertheless, in his big heart burned deathless hatred toward the German who had kicked him. And, like an elephant, a collie never forgets.

"But," Vivier was demanding of everybody, "but why should the gentle Bruce have attacked a good nurse? It is not what you call 'make-sense.' C'est un gentilhomme, ce vieux! He would not attack a woman less still a sister of the Red Cross. He—"

"Of course he wouldn't," glumly assented the downhearted Mahan. "But he DID. That's the answer. I saw him do it. He knocked her down and—"

"Which nurse was she?" asked a soldier who had come up after the trouble was over.

"A new one here. I don't know her name. She came last week. I saw her when she got here. I was on duty at the K.O.'s office when she reported. She had a letter from some one on the surgeon-general's staff. But why Bruce should have gone for her to-day—or for any woman—is more than I can see. She was scared half to death. It's lucky she heard the surgeon order him shot. She'll suppose he's dead, by now. And that'll cure her scare. We must try to keep Bruce away from this end of the street till he goes back to headquarters to-morrow."

As a result Bruce was coaxed to Mahan's company-shed and by dint of food-gifts and petting was induced to spend most of the day there.

At sunset Bruce tired of his dull surroundings. Mahan had gone on duty; so had Vivier; so had others of his friends. The dog was bored and lonely. Also he had eaten much. And a walk is good, not only for loneliness, but for settling an overfull stomach. Bruce decided to go for a walk.

Through the irregular street of the village he picked his way, and on toward the open country beyond. A sentry or two snapped fingers of greeting to him as he strolled past them. The folk of the village eyed his bulk and graceful dignity with something like awe.

Beyond the hamlet the ridge of hilltop ran on for perhaps a quarter-mile before dipping into the plain below. At one end of this little plateau a company of infantry was drilling. Bruce recognized Mahan among the marching lines, but he saw his friend was on duty and refrained from going up to him.

Above, the sunset sky was cloudless. Like tiny specks, miles to eastward, a few enemy airships circled above the heap of clustered hills which marked the nearest German position. The torn-up plain, between, seemed barren of life. So, at first, did the farther end of the jutting ridge on which the village was perched. But presently Bruce's idly wandering eye was caught by a flutter of white among some boulders that clumped together on the ridge's brow farthest from the village.

Some one—a woman, from the dress—was apparently picking her way through the boulders. As Bruce moved forward, a big rock shut her off from his view and from the view of the hamlet and of the maneuvering infantry company a furlong away.

Just then a puff of breeze blew from eastward toward the collie; and it bore to him a faint scent that set his ruff a-bristle and his soft brown eyes ablaze. To a dog, a scent once smelled is as recognizable again as is the sight of a once-seen face to a human. Bruce set off at a hand-gallop toward the clump of boulders.

The Red Cross nurse, whom Bruce had so nearly killed, was off duty until the night-shift should go on at the hospital. The nurse had taken advantage of this brief surcease from toil, by going for a little walk in the cool sunset air, and had carried along a bag of sewing.

Up to three months ago this nurse had been known as Heinrich Stolz, and had been a valued member of the Wilhelmstrasse's workingforce of secret agents. Then, acting under orders, Herr Heinrich Stolz had vanished from his accustomed haunts. Soon thereafter a Red Cross nurse—Felicia Stuart by name had reported for duty at Paris, having been transferred thither from Italy, and bearing indubitable credentials to that effect.

From carefully picked-up information Stolz had just learned of the expected arrival of the three troop-trains at the junction at nine that evening. The tidings had interested him keenly, and he knew of other people to whom they would be far more interesting.

Seating himself under the lee of the easternmost rock, Stolz primly opened his sewing-bag and drew forth various torn garments. The garments were for the most part white, but one or two were of gaudy colors.

By way of precaution, in case of discovery, the spy threaded a needle. Thus, if any one should chance to see him shake out a garment, preparatory to laying it on his knee and mending it, there could be no reasonable cause for suspicion. Herr Stolz was nothing if not efficient.