"You can get help from here!--don't touch me!--I ain't fit!"

The next instant he was dashing headlong into the smoke. Frantically she
screamed:

"Come back!--Jeb!--your unit!"

But she might have made the men on Mars hear as easily. Once she started
to run after him, yet the fruitlessness of such a chase--and, more
important still, the unconscious soldier's claim for aid--checked her.
Blinded by tears, she dashed up the road and down to the quadrangle,
staggered into the dug-out, and cried in a strange voice to Bonsecours:

"There's a man out there I can't bring in!"

He sprang up as if electrified. But her words had not alarmed him so
much as her appearance and, in desperation catching her by the
shoulders, he demanded:

"What has happened--tell me!"

"N--nothing," she sank upon the box, burying her face in her folded
arms. She was sobbing hysterically now, and nurses rarely did
this--until they snapped!

"Tell me!--tell me!" he cried, leaning over her, and fighting as he had
never fought to keep from holding her close to him. His heart had been
too nearly starved, his strength too nearly exhausted, to withstand a
scene like this. "If you pity me, tell me what has happened," he
implored.

She did not look up, but impulsively reached for one of his hands and
pressed it fiercely, almost savagely, against her cheek. This must have
been the comfort she needed, this touch of a man who was every inch a
man, because the sobs at once grew quiet; and, in full control of her
nerves, she arose, saying urgently:

"Quick! He's on the trench bridge!"

As in a dream, the great Bonsecours sprang out.

CHAPTER XIII

Jeb dashed blindly ahead, indifferent to shells and death, not caring
where he went so that it was toward the thick of battle. He wanted to be
killed; he wanted to die as Hastings died, showing the world how real
men are capable of making the last big sacrifice. But his torturing
conscience laughed at the presumption, for Hastings had typified a
faultless courage; and his brain ceaselessly echoed the scorn which
Marian had hurled at him, spurring him as rowels of hot steel to greater
speed.

The smoke, as a heavy fog, shrouded the uncontested No Man's Land, being
quite impenetrable beyond a radius of fifty yards. It was as though he
were running constantly beneath a low, flattened dome which kept
accurate pace with him, through the sides of whose inverted rim new
objects sprang into view with al