broke to
a smile.

Larry shook a hairy fist at Parley-voo and answered the question himself:

"Of course she's right! Isn't she always? An' who but a heathen would be
doubtin' the manners of a ghost?"

"Aye, but where will I be gettin' the boots?" Patsy made a sour grimace.
"Me own purty ones had Christian burial somewhere back in that tremendous
mud-puddle. Would any gentleman, now, still havin' two good legs, give me
the loan of his boots for one night? Size eleven, if I don't disremember."

"That's Teig's number. Lend him yours, Teig, like a good lad, or we'll
never be rid o' them ghosts." Mat O'Shaughnessy, at the other end of the
line, fairly shook with the depth of his wail.

Teig Magee chuckled. He had lost an inch or so of back and was waiting the
glad day when they could mend it with an inch or so of shin-bone; in the
mean time he was paralyzed. "Say, Docthor, would ye mind reachin' undther
my pillow an' fetchin' them out for me? The lads have a way of forgettin'
my hands are temporarily engaged. Thank ye. Ye can have them, Patsy, but
ye'll have to go bail your ghosts won't up an' thramp off wi' them
entirely."

It ended by the schoolmaster giving security--a half-crown with a bullet
hole through it. Sheila was appointed custodian, and the boots were placed
beside the color-sergeant's cot "against the comin' night."

As the chief and Sheila passed on from cot to cot, the spirits of Ward 7-A
never wavered. Johnnie, who had piped the lads into battle and out for
four years, and who daily rejoiced over the fact that Fritzie had shown
the good sense to take a foot instead of a hand, told them that he was in
rare luck now, for there would be time to make wee Johnnie at home the
grandest piper in all of Ireland--an honor he could never have promised
himself before.

There was "Bertha" Milliken, named for the big gun he had put out of
commission and the gun crew he had captured. He had been given the V. C.
for that. His pet joke was telling how the Fritzies grudged him its
possession by shooting it away on the Scheldt along with a good bit that
was under it. The nurse and surgeon handled "Bertha" very carefully; there
was no knowing just what was going to happen to him. Casey Ryan had lost
the odd of 'most everything the Lord had started him with, as he put it.
An eye, an ear, a lung, and a leg were gone, and he was beating all the
others at getting well. Mat O'Shaughnessy had it in the "vital." He was
contin