s 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
pu