were still oblivious of the
scene. The sergeant, stunned, rose to his knees and reached for his
revolver. Dellarme, bent over to keep his head below the crest, had
already drawn his as he hastened toward them.

"Stransky," said Dellarme, "you have struck an officer under fire! You
have refused to fight! Within the law I am warranted in shooting you
dead!"

"Well!" answered Stransky, throwing back his head, his face seeming all
big, bony nose and heavy jaw and burning eyes.

"Will you get down? Will you take your place with your rifle?" demanded
Dellarme.

Stransky laughed thunderously in scorn. He was handsome, titanic, and
barbaric, with his huge shoulders stretching his blouse, which fell
loosely around his narrow hips, while the fist that had felled the
sergeant was still clenched.

"No!" said Stransky. "You won't kill much if you kill me and you'd kill
less if you shot yourself! God Almighty! Do you think I'm afraid?
Me--afraid?"

His eyes in a bloodshot glare, as uncompromising as those of a bull in
an arena watching the next move of the red cape of the matador, regarded
Dellarme, who hesitated in the revulsion of the horror of killing and in
admiration of the picture of human force before him. But the old
sergeant, smarting under the insult of the blow, his sandstone features
mottled with red patches, had no compunctions of this order. He was
ready to act as executioner.

"If you don't want to shoot, I can! An example--the law! There's no
other way of dealing with him! Give the word!" he said to Dellarme.

Stransky laughed, now in strident cynicism. It was the laugh of the red,
of bastardy, of blanketless nights in the hedgerows, and boot soles worn
through to the macadam, with the dust of speeding automobiles blown in
the gaunt face of hunger. Dellarme still hesitated, recollecting
Lanstron's remark. He pictured Stransky in a last stand in a redoubt,
and every soldier was as precious to him as a piece of gold to a miser.

"One ought to be enough to kill me if you're going to do it to slow
music," said Stransky. "You might as well kill me as the poor fools that
your poor fools are trying to--"

Another breath finished the speech; a breath released from a ball that
seemed to have come straight from hell. The fire-control officer of a
regiment of Gray artillery on the plain, scanning the landscape for the
origin of the rifle-fire which was leaving many fallen in the wake of
the charge of the Gray infant