ite
a noise and tore up the earth considerably."

"He was lucky--the young Herr Captain," said Von Scheller--"luckier than
his predecessor. A fortnight ago one of the enemy's flyers struck one
of our balloons with a bomb and the gas envelope exploded. When the
wreckage reached the earth there was nothing much left of the operator--
poor fellow!--except the melted buttons on his coat. There are very few
safe jobs in this army, but being a captive-balloon observer is one of
the least safe of them all."

I had noted that the young captain wore in the second buttonhole of his
tunic the black-and-white-striped ribbon and the black-and-white Maltese
Cross; and now when I looked about me I saw that at least every third
man of the present company likewise bore such a decoration. I knew the
Iron Cross was given to a man only for gallant conduct in time of war at
the peril of his life.

A desire to know a few details beset me. Humplmayer, the scholarly art
dealer, was at my side. He had it too--the Iron Cross of the first
class.

"You won that lately?" I began, touching the ribbon.

"Yes," he said; "only the other day I received it."

"And for what, might I ask?" said I, pressing my advantage.

"Oh," he said, "I've been out quite a bit in the night air lately. You
know we Germans are desperately afraid of night air."

Later I learned--though not from Humplmayer--that he had for a period of
weeks done scout work in an automobile in hostile territory; which meant
that he rode in the darkness over the strange roads of an alien country,
exposed every minute to the chances of ambuscade and barbed-wire
mantraps and the like. I judge he earned his bauble.

I tried Von Theobald next--a lynx-faced, square-shouldered young man of
the field guns. To him I put the question: "What have you done, now, to
merit the bestowal of the Cross?"

"Well," he said--and his smile was born of embarrassment, I thought--
"there was shooting once or twice, and I--well, I did not go away. I
remained."

So after that I quit asking. But it was borne in upon me that if these
gold-braceletted, monocled, wasp-waisted exquisites could go jauntily
forth for flirtations with death as afore-time I had seen them going,
then also they could be marvelously modest touching on their own
performances in the event of their surviving those most fatal
blandishments.

Pretty soon we told the Staff good night, according to the ritualistic
Teutonic fash