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 han