ys.

Out over the infernal uproar below pealed the bells; the morning sky rang
with the noble summons to all brave men. Once more the ancient tower
trembled with the mighty out-crash of the battle hymn.

With the last note she turned and looked down at him where he lay against
the wall. He opened his glazing eyes and tried to smile at her.

"Bully," he whispered. "Could you recite--the words--to me--just so I
could hear them on my way--West?"

She left the keyboard, came and dropped on her knees beside him; and
closing her eyes to check the tears sang in a low, tremulous, girlish
voice, De Lonlay's words, to the battle anthem of revolution.

"Bully," he sighed. And spoke no more on earth.

But the little mistress of the bells did not know his soul had passed.

And the French officer who came leaping up the stairs, pistol lifted,
halted in astonishment to see a dead man lying beside a sack of bombs and
a young girl on her knees beside him, weeping and tremblingly intoning "La
Brabanconne."

CHAPTER XXI

THE GARDENER

A week later, toward noon, as usual, the two American, muleteers, Smith
and Glenn, sauntered over from their corral to the White Doe Tavern where,
it being a meatless day, they ate largely of potato soup and of a tench,
smoking hot.

The tench had been caught that morning off the back doorstep, which was an
ancient and mossy slab of limestone let into the coping of the river wall.

Jean Courtray, the crippled inn-keeper, caught it. All that morning he had
sat there in the sun on the river wall, half dozing, opening his dim eyes
at intervals to gaze at his painted quill afloat among the water weeds of
the little river Lesse. At intervals, too, he turned his head with that
peculiar movement of the old, and peered at his daughter, Maryette, and
the Belgian gardener who were working among the potatoes in the garden.

And at last he had hooked his fish and the emaciated young Belgian dropped
his hoe and came over and released it from the hook where it lay flopping
and quivering and glittering among the wild grasses on the river bank. And
that was how Kid Glenn and Sticky Smith, American muleteers on duty at
Saint Lesse, came to lunch on freshly caught tench at the Inn of the White
Doe.

After luncheon, agreeably satiated, they rose from the table in the little
dining room and strolled out to the garden in the rear of the inn, their
Mexican spurs clanking. Maryette heard them; they tipped