, and never stirred. The
German officer fired his revolver again as he went down, shouting
in English, English with no foreign accent,

"You swine, go back to Chicago!" Then he began choking with
blood.

Sergeant Hicks ran in and shot the dying man through the temples.
Nobody stopped him.

The officer was a tall man, covered with medals and orders; must
have been very handsome. His linen and his hands were as white as
if he were going to a ball. On the dresser were the files and
paste and buffers with which he had kept his nails so pink and
smooth. A ring with a ruby, beautifully cut, was on his little
finger. Bert Fuller screwed it off and offered it to Claude. He
shook his head. That English sentence had unnerved him. Bert held
the ring out to Hicks, but the Sergeant threw down his revolver
and broke out:

"Think I'd touch anything of his? That beautiful little girl, and
my buddy--He's worse than dead, Dell is, worse!" He turned his
back on his comrades so that they wouldn't see him cry.

"Can I keep it myself, sir?" Bert asked.

Claude nodded. David had come in, and was opening the shutters.
This officer, Claude was thinking, was a very different sort of
being from the poor prisoners they had been scooping up like
tadpoles from the cellars. One of the men picked up a gorgeous
silk dressing gown from the bed, another pointed to a
dressing-case full of hammered silver. Gerhardt said it was
Russian silver; this man must have come from the Eastern front.
Bert Fuller and Nifty Jones were going through the officer's
pockets. Claude watched them, and thought they did about right.
They didn't touch his medals; but his gold cigarette case, and
the platinum watch still ticking on his wrist,--he wouldn't have
further need for them. Around his neck, hung by a delicate chain,
was a miniature case, and in it was a painting,--not, as Bert
romantically hoped when he opened it, of a beautiful woman, but
of a young man, pale as snow, with blurred forget-me-not eyes.

Claude studied it, wondering. "It looks like a poet, or
something. Probably a kid brother, killed at the beginning of the
war."

Gerhardt took it and glanced at it with a disdainful expression.
"Probably. There, let him keep it, Bert." He touched Claude on
the shoulder to call his attention to the inlay work on the
handle of the officer's revolver.

Claude noticed that David looked at him as if he were very much
pleased with him,--looked, indeed, as if some