striking the
floor with his face.

CHAPTER XXIV

BUBBLES

An east wind was very likely to bring gas to the trenches north of the
Sainte Lesse salient. A north wind, according to season, brought snow or
rain or fog upon British, French, Belgian and Boche alike. Winds of the
south carried distant exhalations from orchards and green fields into the
pitted waste of ashes where that monstrous desolation stretched away
beneath a thundering iron rain which beat all day, all night upon the dead
flesh of the world.

But the west wind was the vital wind, flowing melodiously through the
trees--a clean, aromatic, refreshing wind, filling the sickened world with
life again.

Sometimes, too, it brought the pleasant music of the bells into far-away
trenches, when the little bell-mistress of Sainte Lesse played the
carillon. And when her friend, the great bell, Bayard, spoke through the
resounding sky of France to a million men-at-arms in blue and steel, who
were steadily forging hell's manacles for the uncaged Hun, the loyal
western wind carried far beyond the trenches an ominous iron vibration
that meant doom for the Beast.

And the Beast heard, leering skyward out of pale pig-eyes, but did not
comprehend.

At the base corral down in the meadow, mules had been scarce recently,
because a transport had been torpedoed. But the next transport from New
Orleans escaped; the dusty column had arrived at Sainte Lesse from the
Channel port, convoyed by American muleteers, as usual; new mules, new
negroes, new Yankee faces invaded the town once more.

However, it signified little to the youthful mistress-of-the-bells,
Maryette Courtray, called "Carillonnette," for her Yankee lover still lay
in his distant hospital--her muleteer, "Djack." So mules might bray, and
negroes fill the Sainte Lesse meadows with their shouting laughter; and
the lank, hawk-nosed Yankee muleteers might saunter clanking into the
White Doe in search of meat or drink or tobacco, or a glimpse of the
pretty bell-mistress, for all it meant to her.

Her Djack lived; that was what occupied her mind; other men were merely
men--even his comrades, Sticky Smith and Kid Glenn, assumed individuality
to distinguish them from other men only because they were Djack's friends.
And as for all other muleteers, they seemed to her as alike as Chinamen,
leaving upon her young mind a general impression of long, thin legs and
necks and the keen eyes of hunting falcons.