I betcher there's a lot of
German bein' spoke in hell these last two or three days.

"Oh, you ain't heard the big news, have you? Bein' off your dip and out
of commission like you was. Well, we busted old Mister Hindenburg's line
in about nine places and now it looks like maybe we'll eat Thanksgivin'
dinner in Berlin or Hoboken--one."

Dempsey went on and every word that he uttered was news--how the
seemingly premature advance of the battalion had not been a mistake at
all; how the only slip was that the battalion walked into a whole cote
of unsuspected machine-gun nests, but how the second battalion going up
and round the shore of the hill to the left had taken the boche on the
flank and cleaned him out of his pretty little ambuscade; how there were
tidings of great cheer filtering back from all along the line and so
forth and so on. Ginsburg broke in on him:

"How's Captain Griswold?"

"Oh, the cap was as good as dead when this here guy, Goodman, fetched
him in on his back after he'd went out after you fell and fetched you
back in first. I seen the whole thing myself--it was right after that
that I got beaned. One good scout, the cap was. And there ain't nothin'
wrong with this Goodman, neither; you kin take it from me."

"Goodman?" Ginsburg pondered. The name was a strange one. "Say, was it
this Goodman that kicked me in the ribs while I was tryin' to pick up
the captain?"

"Kicked you nothin'! You got a machine-gun bullet glancin' on your short
ribs and acrost your chest right under the skin--that was what put you
down and out. And then just as Goodman fetched you in acrost over the
top here come another lot of machine-gun bullets, and one of 'em drilled
you through the ankle and another one of them bored Goodman clean
through the shoulder; but that didn't keep him from goin' right back out
there, shot up like he was, after the captain. Quick as a cat that guy
was and strong as a bull. Naw, Goodman he never kicked you--that was a
little chunk of lead kicked you."

"But I didn't feel any pain like a bullet," protested Ginsburg. "It was
more like a hard wallop with a club or a boot."

"Say, that's a funny thing too," said Dempsey. "You're always readin'
about the sharp dartin' pain a bullet makes, and yet nearly everybody
that gets hit comes out of his trance ready to swear a mule muster
kicked him or somethin'. I guess that sharp-dartin' pain stuff runs for
Sweeney; the guys that write about it oughter get s