n replies of one word. He
was a city lad, slight in frame, of pale, tired face.

"Yes, there is always work at Dixmude," Hilda agreed.

They started on the six-mile run.

"What do you think of using black troops against white, miss?" asked
Smith, after they had bowled along for a few minutes.

"I'm not a warlike person," replied Hilda, "so I don't know what's the
proper thing. But, just the same, I don't like to see them using black
men. They don't know what they're fighting about. Anyway, I'd rather
help them, than shoot them."

"It isn't their fault, is it, miss?" said Smith.

"By no means," returned Hilda; "they deserve all the more help because
they are ignorant."

"That's right enough, too," agreed Smith and relapsed into his
constitutional silence. He had a quiet way with him, which was
particularly agreeable when the outer air was tense.

They rode on into Dixmude. The little city had been torn into shreds, as
a sail is torn by a hurricane. But the ruined place was still treated
from time to time with shell fire, lest any troops should make the
charred wreckage a cover for advancing toward the enemy trenches. They
rode on to where they caught a flash of soldiers' uniform.

In a blackened butt of an inn, a group of Senegalese were hiding. They
were great six-foot fellows, with straight bodies, and shoulders for
carrying weights--the face a black mask, expressionless, save for the
rolling whites of the eyes, and the sudden startling grin of perfect
white teeth, when trouble fell out of the sky. They had been left there
to hold the furthest outpost. A dozen of them were hale and cheery. Two
of them sat patiently in the straw, nursing each a damaged arm. Out in
the gutter, fifty feet away, one sat picking at his left leg. Smith
turned the car, half around, then backed it toward the ditch, then
forward again, and so around, till at last he had it headed back along
the road they had come. Then he brought it to a standstill, leaving the
power on, so that the frame of the car shook, as the body of a hunting
dog shakes before it is let loose from the leash.

There was a wail in the air overhead, a wail and then a roar, as a shell
cut close over the hood of the ambulance and exploded in the low wall
of the house opposite. Three more came more quickly than one could count
aloud.

"Four; a battery of four," said Hilda.

The enemy artillery had sighted their ambulance, and believing it to
contain reinforcements