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Dellarme could now spare attention from the charge of the Gray infantry to observe the results of the shell fire. With the gunner dead, he looked for the gunner's assistant, who lay several feet distant. As Dellarme and the doctor hastened to him he raised himself to a sitting posture and looked around in dazed inquiry.
The signal corporal is waiting for the gesture from Dellarme agreed upon as an announcement. The Brown artillery commander cuts his fuses two hundred and fifty yards shorter. He, too, uses percussion for moral effect.
For the man in us!" they repeated, swallowing the words as if they had the taste of a stimulant. But Dellarme knew that it would not take much to precipitate a break. He himself felt that he had been on that knoll half a lifetime. He looked at his watch and it was five o'clock. For seven hours they had held on. The Grays' trench was complete the breadth of the slope; more reserves were coming up.
It seemed a long time that he was watching that wonderful profile under the very black hair, soft with the softness of flesh, yet firmly carved. She lifted her head gradually, her eyes sweeping past the spot where Dellarme had lain dying, where Feller had manned the automatic, where Stransky had thrown Pilzer over the parapet.
Then a chance shell, striking at the one point which the man who fired it six thousand yards away would have chosen as his bull's-eye, obscured Feller and the automatic and its gunners in the havoc of explosion. Feller must have been killed. The dust settled; she saw Dellarme making frantic gestures as he looked at his men. They were keeping up their fusillade with unflinching rapidity.
The old sergeant was lying beside Captain Dellarme on the crest, the sunrise in their faces. As the mist cleared from the plain it revealed the white dots of the frontier posts in the meadow and behind them many gray figures in skirmish order, scarcely visible except through the glasses. "It looks like business!" declared the old sergeant.
"Those who remain keep increasing their fire!" called Dellarme again. "Cover the whole breadth of the trench!" Every fourth man wormed himself backward on his stomach until he was below the sky-line, when his stiffened limbs brought him to his feet and he started on a dead run down into the valley and toward a cut behind another knoll across the road from the Galland house.
"I certainly like that song," said Stransky. Well he might. It had made him famous throughout the nation. "There's Jehovah and brimstone in it. Now we'll have our own." "Our own" was also of Stransky's composition and about Dellarme; for Stransky, child of the highways and byways, of dark, tragic alleys and sunny fields, had music in him, the music of the people.
But there was Dellarme smiling; there was Hugo Mallin saying that he would fight for his own home; there was Stransky, who had thrown the hand-grenade, bringing in an exhausted old man on his back from under fire; there was Feller as he rallied Dellarme's men; and and there was Lanny waiting at the other end of the wire and a burglar should not take her home.
Then Dellarme saw that grandfather had not yet been carried away and no litters remained. What was to be done? Grandfather was prompt with his own view. "Just leave me behind. I've done my work, I tell you!" he declared. "Can't lose you, grandpop!" said Stransky. Quickly shifting his pack to the ground, he squatted with his back to the old man.
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