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This band of half a dozen was typical, grubbing through the slime of the swamp, snarling at each other, now and again fighting over a leaf, then squatting down in the mud where they were, to chew on it, their torture of mind and body momentarily forgotten. Rags, mud-caked and foul, partly covered their emaciated bodies: their hair was matted, their eyes blood-shot....
The wounded men sat or lay on the grass outside waiting for their turns to go in. They wore the tattered, mud-caked clothes of the battlefield. The bandages of the casualty clearing-station were round their limbs and heads. Some were utterly exhausted. They lay down. They pillowed their heads on their arms and sank into heavy slumber.
That was a day: hot, so that everything you went near seemed burning. The walls even sent forth a heat of their own; and if it hadn't been for the chatties down below, we should have had to give up, for the tank was now completely dried, and the flies buzzing about its mud-caked bottom.
She looked about her with interest the while she endeavoured to sip a cup of steaming milk treated with brandy that Jeff Ironside had brought her. An old, old woman hobbled about the oak-raftered kitchen behind her while Jeff himself knelt before her and unlaced her mud-caked boots.
By the time he had obeyed orders emptied the last pan of water, taken a look at the two horses in the stable behind the shack, tossed his mud-caked boots through the back door to await his pleasure inter-larding between each chore another glance at the trestle Tressa was in her own room. Torrance returned to the front door.
And when our new trench-mortar batteries got to work too, at sixteen to the dozen, well, it was bad enough for us; but what it must have been like at the business end of things, Lord knows! For a few minutes I was almost a pro-Boche!" Other items of intelligence are gleaned. The weather was 'rotten': mud-caked garments corroborate this statement.
A puff of cold wet wind blew over the parapet, and the sergeant wrinkled his nose disgustedly. "Some odorous," he commented to a mud-caked private hunkered down on his heels on the fire-step with his back against the trench wall. "Does, the Boche run a glue factory or a fertilizer works around here?" "The last about fits it," said the private grimly.
Walter, however, did not reply. He was not in the least interested in the mud-caked car. It was its occupants that aroused his curiosity. In all his life he had never seen a genuine detective and he was all impatience for a peep at persons allied with such an intriguing profession.
Everything was as it had been, the valley, the clean white fog, tossing its waves up to him as he had dreamed of it in the arid days of Nebraska; the mountains closing in on him with the line of drooping peace he had never lost from before his eyes during the long, dreary years of exile. Only he was changed. His eye fell on his mud-caked boots, and his face contracted. "Oh, my!
With the last bit of energy in them they freed themselves from the mud's suction and painfully crawled up the bank. "Made it!" said Higgins, dropping flat on his face. Payne raised himself on all fours and looked round through mud-caked eyes. And then he began to laugh in a way that brought Higgins' head up with a start. The high ground of the bank was a strip perhaps ten feet in width.
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