es with heavy, green
planks.

Everybody was methodically busy in one way or another behind the long rank
of Legionaries who stood at the loops, the butts of the Lebel rifles
against their shoulders.

Some sawed planks to shore up dugouts; some were constructing short
ladders out of the trunks of slender green saplings; some filled sacks
with earth to fill the gaps on the parapet above; others sharpened pegs
and drove them into the dirt facade of the trench, one above the other, as
footholds for the men when a charge was ordered.

Behind me, above my head, wild flowers and long wild grasses drooped over
the raw edge of the parados, and a few stalks of ripening wheat trailed
there or stood out against the sky--an opaque, uncertain sky which had
been so calmly blue, but which was now sickening with that whitish pallor
which presages a storm.

Once or twice there came the smashing tinkle of glass as a periscope was
struck and a vexed officer, still holding it, passed it to a rifleman to
be laid aside.

Only one man was hit. He had been fitting a shutter to the tiny embrasure
between sandbags where a machine gun was to be mounted; and the bullet
came through and entered his head in the center of the triangle between
nose and eyebrows.

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?"

"Commong ca 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?"

"You and I reverse roles, 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! It listens like it, too, only
this here show is all fi-_nally_, with Bingle's Band playin' circus tunes
an' the supes hollerin' like they seen real money."

He was a merry ruffian, and he controlled the "coke" graft in the 50th