ou've had a damned good rest now and you can get back to the
O.C. and tell him what you have told me and he will see that you get a
fitting decoration." This latter was spoken very grimly, and I could see
the great fighter's face fall. "You will see to it, Grant," said the
Q.M. "that Henderson doesn't hide his heroism from the O.C.; that he
gives it to him in detail, just as he has to me." "Yes, sir," and I left
with my prisoner.

We hurried along as night was falling and the German flares were
commencing to fly. On the way back we met two Algerian troopers and in
the gleam of a star shell and the fading twilight they looked more like
two escaped denizens of the chamber of horrors than anything I could
well imagine. Indeed, their appearance was so ghastly under the weird
light of the flares and the fading day, that I involuntarily shivered,
hardened though I was by that time to grim sights. Each of them carried
on his shoulder the hind-quarter of a cow that had been killed by a
shell at a nearby farm, and the dripping blood from the beast had
slopped all over their uniforms; under each arm was tucked a ham they
had "swiped" from the farmhouse and each had a young suckling pig
running ahead, squealing and grunting, tied by a string on the hind leg
and held by the left hand, while in the right hand each man carried a
sharply pointed stick to prod the pig when it veered from a straight
line, which was about every other step or so.

Just as we got immediately opposite the looters a burst of shell fire
from the German guns, followed by a hail of shrapnel, blazed all about
us, and the hero-cook jumped like a bullfrog, bumping plumb into one of
the Algerians, and he and the cook and the pig tumbled over and over,
the pig squealing like mad, the Algerian rolling out deep-throated oaths
in his native tongue, and Scotty cursing as only a redheaded gabby
Scotchman can, all amid an ear-splitting din of shrieking shells and
flare-gleams completing a _mise en scene_ as striking as anything ever
created by a master artist of stagecraft.

When Scotty extricated himself from the tangle his face and clothes were
smeared from the blood of the dripping beast, so that he could indeed
have passed for the blood-stained hero he had proclaimed himself in the
cookhouse, and in spite of his plight Scotty grinned as I suggested the
thought to him and the twinkle returned to his eye, and his spirits took
a decidedly upward turn until we reached t