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My old outfit, the Machine Gun Company, was stationed in huge elephant dugouts about four hundred yards behind the front-line trench-they were in reserve. Occasionally I would stop in their dugout and have a confab with my former mates. Although we tried to be jolly, still, there was a lurking feeling of impending disaster.
Casey watched the old man place food for one person in little dishes which he set in a bake pan for want of a tray. He added a small tin teapot of tea and disappeared from the dugout. "Two of us waitin' to see your boss, huh?" Casey inquired boldly of Joe. "Can't we eat together?" "You can call yourself lucky if you eat at all," Joe retorted glumly.
When we reached a point near the top of the long hill, which we had been climbing, we got out of the ambulance and found that we were at a first aid dugout just back of the hill from whose top one could see the battle. The first aid post was a cave tunnelled a few yards into the hillside covered with railroad iron and sandbags.
In the cove, they saw the light streaming from the window of the dugout that famous window that had given Lahoma her first outlook upon learning. As the beams caught his eye, a sigh heaved the great bulk of the former master of the cove, but he said nothing.
A little gully had to be crossed on the way to the dugout and the only bridge was a twelve-inch plank. The soldier crossed in safety and turned to look after the girl. Just as she reached the middle of the plank a shell burst not far away. The lassie was so startled that she nearly lost her balance, swaying first one way and then the other.
There was a dugout in our own sector in which were heard mysterious tappings, but though we had an experienced miner sleep in it he reported that the sounds were not those of mining operations. Maybe it was the rats, but we gave that dugout a wide berth, as some one suggested that it was haunted, and even in the trenches, better the devil you know than the devil you don't know!
From there they had gone to the Palace, and afterward, being dazed and feeling drowsy, had wandered in a group into the Dugout, a place that they seldom frequented, and could remember nothing after that. "Why why do they think Lucy doped them?" cried Hiram. Jo shrugged. "They can't remember drinking anywhere but with her and in the Palace," she said. "They got it one place or the other, Hiram."
"Say, what does this mean!" asked Jimmy, a bit sternly, for he was suffering from a reaction. "You're supposed to be in the dugout, or somewhere back there," said Bob, when Franz had crawled to them and had arisen to stand beside them. "What brought you out? Were you sent?" "I sent myself," was the laconic answer. "I couldn't stand it being cooped up back there.
It seems to have been crushed into the slope by the driving force of the vicious mountain storms to which it is open on three sides. There is no shelter for it. It stands out bravely to sunshine and storm alike with the contemptuous indifference of familiarity. It is a dugout, and, as its name implies, is built half in the ground.
"He won't let me take no care of him," complained Brick, as he conducted Wilfred to the dugout. Wilfred cast a longing glance toward the cabin, and again he thought Lahoma's parlor door quivered. He even stopped in the path; but Willock went on, unconscious, and he was obliged to follow. "It's a strange thing," remarked Brick, as he descended the hard dirt steps, "how Lahoma has acted on me.
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