e of
death.

He pulled his blanket up round his head. He must sleep. How silly to
think about it. It was luck. If a shell had his number on it he'd be
gone before the words were out of his mouth. How silly that he might be
dead any minute! What right had a nasty little piece of tinware to go
tearing through his rich, feeling flesh, extinguishing it?

Like the sound of a mosquito in his ear, only louder, more vicious, a
shell-shriek shrilled to the crash.

Damn! How foolish, how supremely silly that tired men somewhere away in
the woods the other side of the lines should be shoving a shell into the
breach of a gun to kill him, Martin Howe!

Like dice thrown on a table, shells burst about the dugout, now one
side, now the other.

"Seem to have taken a fancy to us this evenin'," Howe heard Tom
Randolph's voice from the bunk opposite.

"One," muttered Martin to himself, as he lay frozen with fear, flat on
his back, biting his trembling lips, "two.... God, that was near!"

A dragging instant of suspense, and the shriek growing loud out of the
distance.

"This is us." He clutched the sides of the stretcher.

A snorting roar rocked the dugout. Dirt fell in his face. He looked
about, dazed. The lamp was still burning. One of the wounded men, with a
bandage like an Arab's turban about his head, sat up in his stretcher
with wide, terrified eyes.

"God watches over drunkards and the feeble-minded. Don't let's worry,
Howe," shouted Randolph from his bunk.

"That probably bitched car No. 4 for evermore," he answered, turning on
his stretcher, relieved for some reason from the icy suspense.

"We should worry! We'll foot it home, that's all."

The casting of the dice began again, farther away this time.

"We won that throw," thought Martin.

CHAPTER VIII

Ducks quacking woke Martin. For a moment he could not think where he
was; then he remembered. The rafters of the loft of the farmhouse over
his head were hung with bunches of herbs drying. He lay a long while on
his back looking at them, sniffing the sweetened air, while farmyard
sounds occupied his ears, hens cackling, the grunting of pigs, the
rou-cou-cou-cou, rou-cou-cou-cou of pigeons under the eaves. He
stretched himself and looked about him. He was alone except for Tom
Randolph, who slept in a pile of blankets next to the wall, his head,
with its close-cropped black hair, pillowed on his bare arm. Martin
slipped off the canvas cot he had slept on an