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Page 31
The all-important message was fastened in place. The colonel
himself went to the edge of the traverse, and with his own arms
lifted the eighty-pound collie to the top.
There was tenderness as well as strength in the lifting arms. As
he set Bruce down on the brink, the colonel said, as if speaking
to a fellow-human:
"I hate to do it, old chap. I HATE to! There isn't one chance in
three of your getting all the way up the hill alive. But there
wouldn't be one chance in a hundred, for a MAN. The boches will
be on the lookout for just this move. And their best
sharpshooters will be waiting for you--even if you dodge the
shrapnel and the rest of the artillery. I'm sorry! And--good-by."
Then, tersely, he rasped out the command--
"Bruce! Headquarters! Headquarters! QUICK!"
At a bound, the dog was gone.
Breasting the rise of the hill, Bruce set off at a sweeping run,
his tawny-and-white mane flying in the wind.
A thousand eyes, from the Here-We-Come trenches, watched his
flight. And as many eyes from the German lines saw the huge
collie's dash up the coverless slope.
Scarce had Bruce gotten fairly into his stride when the boche
bullets began to sing--not a desultory little flurry of shots, as
before; but by the score, and with a murderous earnestness. When
he had appeared, on his way to the trenches, an hour earlier, the
Germans had opened fire on him, merely for their own amusement--
upon the same merry principle which always led them to shoot at
an Ally war-dog. But now they understood his all-important
mission; and they strove with their best skill to thwart it.
The colonel of the Here-We-Comes drew his breath sharply between
his teeth. He did not regret the sending of the collie. It had
been a move of stark military necessity. And there was an off
chance that it might mean the saving of his whole command.
But the colonel was fond of Bruce, and it angered him to hear the
frantic effort of the boche marksmen to down so magnificent a
creature. The bullets were spraying all about the galloping dog,
kicking up tiny swirls of dust at his heels and in front of him
and to either side.
Mahan, watching, with streaming eyes and blaspheming lips,
recalled the French sergeant's theory that Bruce bore a charmed
life. And he prayed that Vivier might be right. But in his prayer
was very little faith. For under such a fusillade it seemed
impossible that at least one highpower bullet should not reach
the collie before the slope could be traversed. A fast-running
dog is not an easy mark for a bullet--especially if the dog be a
collie, with a trace of wolf--ancestry in his gait. A dog, at
best, does not gallop straight ahead as does a horse. There is
almost always a sidewise lilt to his run.
Bruce was still further aided by the shell-plowed condition of
the hillside. Again and again he had to break his stride, to leap
some shell-hole. Often he had to encircle such holes. More than
once he bounded headlong down into a gaping crater and scrambled
up its far side. These erratic moves, and the nine-hundred-yard
distance (a distance that was widening at every second) made the
sharpshooters' task anything but an exact science.
Mahan's gaze followed the dog's every step. Bruce had cleared
more than three-fourths of the slope. The top-sergeant permitted
himself the luxury of a broad grin.
"I'll buy Vivier all the red-ink wine he can gargle, next pay-
day!" he vowed. "He was dead right about the dog. No bullet was
ever molded that can get--"
Mahan broke off in his exultation, with an explosive oath, as a
new note in the firing smote upon his trained hearing.
"The swine!" he roared. "The filthy, unsportsmanly, dog-eating
Prussian swine! They're turning MACHINE-GUNS on him!"
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