'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 l