idden in a careening, bumping vehicle for
what seemed to him hours and hours. Finally, when he was striving to
reorganise his faculties for the utterance of a protest, someone put
something over his nose and he went sound asleep.

Ensued then a measureless period when he slept and dreamed strange
jumbled dreams. He awakened, clear enough in his thoughts, but beset
with a queer giddiness and a weakness, in a hospital sixteen miles from
where the mix-up had started, though he didn't know about that of course
until subsequent inquiry enabled him to piece together a number of
fragmentary recollections. For the present he was content to realise
that he lay on a comfortable cot under a tight roof and that he had his
full complement of arms and legs and could move them, though when he
moved the right leg the ankle hurt him. Also he had a queer squeezed-in
sensation amidships as though broad straps had been buckled tightly
about his trunk.

Upon top of these discoveries came another. Sitting up in the next-hand
cot to his on the right was a member of his own company, one Paul
Dempsey, now rather elaborately bandaged as to his head and shoulders,
but seemingly otherwise in customary good order and spirits.

"Hello, Dempsey," he said.

"Hello, sarge," answered back Dempsey. "How you feelin' by now--all
right?"

"Guess so. My ankle is sprained or something and my side feels sort of
funny."

"I shouldn't wonder," said Dempsey. "I got a dippy kind of feelin'
inside my own headpiece--piece of shell casin' come and beaned me. It
don't amount to much, though; just enough to get me a wound stripe.
You're the lucky guy, sarge. Maybe it's so you won't have to go back and
prob'ly I will."

The speaker sighed and grinned and then confessed to a great perception
which many before him had known and which many were to know afterward,
but which some--less frank than he--have sought to conceal.

"I'll go back of course if they need me--and if I have to--but I'd just
as lief not. You kin take it from me, I've had plenty of this gettin'
all-shot-up business. Oncet is enough for First-Class Private Dempsey.

"Say," he went on, "looks like you and me are goin' partners a lot here
lately. I get mine right after you get yours. We ride back here together
in the same tin Lizzie--you and me do--and now here we are side by each
again. Well, there's a lot of the fellows we won't neither of us see no
more. But their lives wasn't wasted, at that.