a twist delivery.
We had the field to ourselves for two or three years, before the other
fellows caught the idea, and broke our partnership. I turned to
literature, and he began drifting around the world for long shots. He'd
be gone six months, and then turn up with big game night pictures out of
Africa--a lion drinking under a tropical moon. Two more years, and I
had lost him entirely. But I knew we should meet. He was one of those
chaps that, once in your life, is like the _motif_ in an opera, or like
the high-class story, which starts with an insignificant loose brick on
a coping and ends with that brick smiting the hero's head.

It was London where I ran into him at last.

"Happy days?" I said, with a rising inflection.

"So, so," he answered.

He was doing the free-lance game. He had drifted over to England with
his $750 moving-picture machine to see what he could harvest with a
quiet eye, and they had rung in the war on him. He wasn't going to be
happy till he could get the boys in action. Would I go to Belgium with
him? I would.

Next day, we took the Channel ferry from Dover to Ostend, went by train
to Ghent, and trudged out on foot to the battle of Alost.

Those were the early days of the war when you could go anywhere, if you
did it nicely. The Belgians are a friendly people. They can't bear to
say No, and if they saw a hard-working man come along with his eye on
his job, they didn't like to turn him back, even if he was mussing up an
infantry formation or exposing a trench. They'd rather share the risk,
as long as it brought him in returns.

When we footed it out that morning, we didn't know we were in for one of
the Famous Days of history. You never can tell in this war. Sometimes
you'll trot out to the front, all keyed up, and then sit around among
the "Set-Sanks" for a month playing pinochle, and watching the flies
chase each other across the marmalade. And then a sultry dull day will
suddenly show you things....

Out from the Grand Place of Alost radiate narrow little streets that run
down to the canal, like spokes of a wheel. Each little street had its
earthworks and group of defenders. Out over the canal stretched
footbridges, and these were thickly sown with barbed wire.

"Great luck," said Rossiter. "They're making an old-time barricade. It's
as good as the days of the Commune. Do you remember your street-fighting
in Les Miserables?"

"I surely do," I replied. "Breast high earthworks, and