“Wearin’ her over his heart, huh!” chuckled Ho, one thick, dirty finger upon the locket, while his knowing glance pinned the stricken one of the girl. With a sob, Hilda drew back, and came slowly to her feet, her eyes still looking down at the unconscious face with an element of both terror and anguish.
He returned with a cry—a startling cry of blended agony and fear, for the odour of blood was still in his nostrils and all about him was the tumult of the battlefield; but all that Hilda noted was that his first motion was that grasp at his breast. His hand closed above the locket. He sat up unsteadily, dazedly. He even made an effort now to smile.
“That’s f-funny. Carn’t stand the blood. M-makes me f-funky. C-c-constitutional—” His words dribbled off.
Hilda said nothing. She continued to stare down at him, but her face had hardened.
“What t’ ’ell’s the matter?” snarled Ho. “Ain’t yer fit to stand the gaff of a bit of brandin’ even?”
The girl’s averted face gave him no encouragement, and Cheerio went on deliriously, slipping deeper and deeper into the mire of disgrace.
“C-carn’t stand the b-b-blood. M-makes me sick. Constitutional. Affected me like that in France. I w-w-went f-funky when they needed me m-most—dr‑opped out, you know—r-r-r-ran away and—”
Ho, hand cupped at the back of his ear, was drinking in every word of the broken confession, while his delighted eyes exchanged glances with the girl. Her chin had gone to a high level. Without looking at Cheerio, she said:
“Say no more. We have your number.”
“Better get to the bunkhouse,” said Ho. “This ain’t no place for a minister’s son.”
Cheerio managed somehow to come to his feet. He still felt fearfully weak and the persisting odour of blood and burnt hide made him sick beyond endurance. Limping to the gate, he paused a moment to say to the girl, with a pathetic attempt at lightness of speech:
“ ’Fraid I’m not cut out for cowboy life. I’d j-jolly well like to learn the g-game. I d-don’t seem exactly to fit.”
She was leaning against the corral gate. Her face was turned away, and the averted cheek was scarlet. He felt the blaze of her scornful eyes and suffered an exquisite pang of longing to see them again as sometimes, after the readings in the evening, humid and wide, they had looked back at him in the twilight.
“No, you don’t fit,” she said slowly. “It takes a man with guts to stand our life—a dead game sport, and not—not—”
She left the sentence unfinished, leaving the epithet to his imagination. She turned her back upon him. He limped to the house. For a long time he sat on the steps, his head in his hands.
Slowly there grew into his consciousness another scene. He had come to suddenly out of just such a moment of unconsciousness as that he had suffered at the corral. Then there had flooded over him such an overpowering consciousness of what had befallen him that he had staggered, with a shout, to his feet. At the psychological moment, when his company had started forward, he had welched, stumbled back, and, with the anguished oaths of the captain he loved ringing in his ears, Cheerio had gone down into darkness. He had come to as one in a resurrection, born anew, and invigorated with a passionate resolve to compensate with his life for that error, that moment of weakness.
There was an objective to be taken at any cost. The men had gone on. He found himself crawling across No Man’s Land. But a hundred feet away he came to his company. Upon the ground they lay, like a bunch of sheep without a leader. There was not an officer left, save that one who had been his friend and who had cursed him for a renegade when he turned back. Fearfully wounded, his captain was slowly pulling his way along the ground, painfully worming toward that clump of wood from which the sporadic bursts of gunfire were coming. Cheerio understood. Someone had to put that machine-gun out of commission or they would all be annihilated. He was crawling side by side with his captain, begging him to turn back and to trust him to take his place. He was pleading, arguing, threatening and forcing the wounded man down into a shell-hole where he could not move. Now he was on his own job.
Alone, within forty or fifty yards of the machine-gun, he paused, to take stock of what he had in the way of ammunition with him. He found he had a single smoke bomb and resolved to use it. Getting into a shell-hole, he unslung his rifle and placed the bomb into it and prepared it for firing. He waited for the right wind to shift the smoke and then carefully fired the gun.
By some remarkable stroke of fortune, it fell and exploded in such a position that the wind carried the smoke in a heavy cloud immediately over the German machine-gun post, rendering the operators of the machine absolutely powerless. At that moment Cheerio leaped from the shell-hole, and rushing forward, pulled a pin from a Mills bomb, as he ran. When about twenty yards away, he threw the bomb into the smoke and fell to the ground to await the explosion. It came with a terrific crash, fragments of the bomb bursting overhead. Jumping up and grasping his rifle firmly, he plunged into the smoke which had not yet cleared. Suddenly he fell into a trench, and he could not restrain a cheer to find that the machine-gun was lying on its side. It was out of action.
There was no time to survey the situation, for two of the enemy had rushed toward him swinging their “potato mashers” as the British soldiers were wont to call this type of
