ething that lay somewhere amid flaming obscurity in
that hell of murder beyond the Somme--their souls' salvation perhaps.

Twelve fed-up men went. And what happened to all except the four French
youths is known. Fate laid a guiding hand on the shoulder of Carfax and
gave him a gentle shove toward the Vosges. Destiny linked arms with Stent
and Brown and led them toward Italy. Wayland's rendezvous with Old Man
Death was in Finistere. Neeland sailed with an army corps, but Chance met
him at Lorient and led him into the strangest paths a young man ever
travelled.

As for Sticky Smith, Kid Glenn and Jack Burley, they were muleteers. Or
thought they were. A muleteer has to do with mules. Nothing else is
supposed to concern him.

But into the lives of these three muleteers came things never dreamed of
in their philosophy--never imagined by them even in their cups.

As for the others, Carfax, Brown, Stent, Wayland, Neeland, this is what
happened to each one of them. But the episode of Carfax comes first. It
happened somewhere north of the neutral Alpine region where the Vosges
shoulder their way between France and Germany.

After he had exchanged a dozen words with a staff officer, he began to
realize, vaguely, that he was done in.

CHAPTER II

MAROONED

"Will they do anything for us?" repeated Carfax.

The staff officer thought it very doubtful. He stood in the snow switching
his wet puttees and looking out across a world of tumbled mountains. Over
on his right lay Germany; on his left, France; Switzerland towered in ice
behind him against an arctic blue sky.

It grew warm on the Falcon Peak, almost hot in the sun. Snow was melting
on black heaps of rocks; a black salamander, swollen, horrible, stirred
from its stiff lethargy and crawled away blindly across the snow.

"Our case is this," continued Carfax; "somebody's made a mistake. We've
been forgotten. And if they don't relieve us rather soon some of us will
go off our bally nuts. Do you get me, Major?"

"I beg your pardon----"

"Do you understand what I've been saying?"

"Oh, yes; quite so."

"Then ask yourself, Major, how long can four men stand it, cooped up here
on this peak? A month, two months, three, five? But it's going on ten
months--ten months of solitude--silence--not a sound, except when the
snowslides go bellowing off into Alsace down there below our feet." His
bronzed lip quivered. "I'll get aboard one if this keeps on."

He kicked