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"Me in a tin derby potting Fritzies! And there’s Heinie, too, and Pick-em-up Joe the whole bunch sewed up in this here trench, oh my God!" I went over to him and stood leaning against the parapet beside him. "Duck," I said, amazed, "how did you come to enlist in the Foreign Legion?" "Aw," he replied with infinite disgust, "I got drunk." "Where?"
A little later when I was returning from that job, walking slowly along the trench, Pick-em-up Joe hailed me cheerfully, and I glanced up to where he and Heinie stood with their rifles thrust between the sandbags and their grimy fists clutching barrel and butt. "Hello, Heinie!" I said pleasantly. "How are you, Joe?"
"You and I reverse rôles, Pick-em-up; you stop bullets; I pick ’em up after you’re through with ’em." "The hell you say!" he retorted, grinning. "Well, grab it from me, if it wasn’t for the Jack Johnsons and the gas, a gun fight in the old 50th would make this war look like Luna Park!
After a breathless pause: "Well," said I, "what will you do about it?" for he was looking murder at me. Neither of us spoke again for a few moments; an officer, smoking a cigarette, came up between Heinie and Pick-em-up Joe, adjusted a periscope and set his eye to it.
I looked at him curiously; turned and glanced along the line where, presently, I recognized his two familiars, Heinie Baum and Pick-em-up Joe Brady with whom he had started off to "Parus" on a month’s summer junket, and with whom he had stumbled so ludicrously into the riff-raff ranks of the 3rd Foreign Legion.
"Commong ça va?" inquired Heinie, evidently mortified at his situation and condition, but putting on the careless front of a gunman in a strange ward. Pick-em-up Joe added jauntily: "Well, Doc, what’s the good word?" "France," I replied, smiling; "Do you know a better word?" "Yes," he said, "Noo York. Say, what’s your little graft over here, Doc?"
"Did you do business with Duck?" inquired Pick-em-up, curiously. "Not so he noticed it. Joe, can’t you and Heinie rise to your opportunities? This is the first time in your lives you’ve ever been decent, ever done a respectable thing. Can’t you start in and live straight think straight?
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