ns had opened
fire on him, merely for their own amusement--upon the same merry
principle which always led them to shoot at an Ally war-dog. But now
they understood his all-important mission; and they strove with their
best skill to thwart it.

The colonel of the Here-We-Comes drew his breath sharply between his
teeth. He did not regret the sending of the collie. It had been a move
of stark military necessity. And there was an off chance that it might
mean the saving of his whole command.

But the colonel was fond of Bruce, and it angered him to hear the
frantic effort of the boche marksmen to down so magnificent a creature.
The bullets were spraying all about the galloping dog, kicking up tiny
swirls of dust at his heels and in front of him and to either side.

Mahan, watching, with streaming eyes and blaspheming lips, recalled the
French sergeant's theory that Bruce bore a charmed life. And he prayed
that Vivier might be right. But in his prayer was very little faith.
For under such a fusillade it seemed impossible that at least one
highpower bullet should not reach the collie before the slope could be
traversed. A fast-running dog is not an easy mark for a
bullet--especially if the dog be a collie, with a trace of
wolf--ancestry in his gait. A dog, at best, does not gallop straight
ahead as does a horse. There is almost always a sidewise lilt to his
run.

Bruce was still further aided by the shell-plowed condition of the
hillside. Again and again he had to break his stride, to leap some
shell-hole. Often he had to encircle such holes. More than once he
bounded headlong down into a gaping crater and scrambled up its far
side. These erratic moves, and the nine-hundred-yard distance (a
distance that was widening at every second) made the sharpshooters'
task anything but an exact science.

Mahan's gaze followed the dog's every step. Bruce had cleared more than
three-fourths of the slope. The top-sergeant permitted himself the
luxury of a broad grin.

"I'll buy Vivier all the red-ink wine he can gargle, next pay-day!" he
vowed. "He was dead right about the dog. No bullet was ever molded that
can get--"

Mahan broke off in his exultation, with an explosive oath, as a new
note in the firing smote upon his trained hearing.

"The swine!" he roared. "The filthy, unsportsmanly, dog-eating Prussian
swine! They're turning MACHINE-GUNS on him!"

In place of the intermittent rattle of rifleshots now came the purring
cou