one had a bandage
on his arm and the other one who was talking to him--I heard him say a
long drink of water would go good--and--I--kind of--now----"

The Jersey Snipe winked at Tom and patted his rifle as a man might pat a
favorite dog.

"It's good fresh water," said he.

CHAPTER TWELVE

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

In Tom's visions of the great war there had been no picture of the
sniper, that single remnant of romantic and adventurous warfare, in all
the roar and clangor of the horrible modern fighting apparatus.

He had seen American boys herded onto great ships by thousands; and,
marching and eating and drilling in thousands, they had seemed like a
great machine. He knew the murderous submarine, the aeroplane with its
ear-splitting whir, the big clumsy Zeppelin; and he had handled gas
masks and grenades and poison gas bombs.

But in his thoughts of the war and all these diabolical agents of
wholesale death there had been no visions of the quiet, stealthy figure,
inconspicuous in the counterfeiting hues of tree and rock, stealing
silently away with his trusty rifle and his week's rations for a lonely
vigil in some sequestered spot.

There was the same attraction about this freelance warfare which there
might have been about a privateer in contrast with a flotilla of modern
dreadnaughts and frantic chasers, and it reminded him of Daniel Boone,
and Kit Carson, and Davy Crockett, and other redoubtable scouts of old
who did not depend on stenching suffocation and the poisoning of
streams. It was odd that he had never known much about the sniper, that
one instrumentality of the war who seems to have been able to preserve a
romantic identity in all the bloody _melee_ of the mighty conflict.

For Tom had been a scout and the arts of stealth and concealment and
nature's resourceful disguises had been his. He had thought of the
sniper as of one whose shooting is done peculiarly in cold blood, and he
was surprised and pleased to find his friend in this romantic and noble
role of holding back, single-handed, as it were, these vile agents of
agonizing death.

Arsenic! Tom knew from his memorized list of poison antidotes that if
one drinks arsenic he will be seized with agony unspeakable and die in
slow and utter torture. The more he thought about it, the more the cold,
steady eye of the unseen sniper and his felling shot seemed noble and
heroic.

Almost unconsciously he reached out and patted the rifle also as if it