r separate times we were halted,
and always I sat hunched in my corner as impassive as a stone. The
more deeply we penetrated toward the Front, the more uneasy grew my
companions. Each time that a sentry halted us they waited in more
anxiety for his verdict. The man beside me, it was true, still menaced
me with his pistol point; but the gesture had grown perfunctory. He did
not think I would attempt anything. He believed now that I was afraid.

Our road crossed a hilltop, and I saw beneath us a valley, streaked at
intervals with blinding signal-flashes of red and green. In my ears the
thunder of the guns was growing steadily. When we were stopped again,
the sentry warned us. The road we were traveling, he said, had been
intermittently under fire for two days.

It looked, indeed, as if devils had used it for a playground; the trees
were mere blackened stumps; the fields on each side stretched burnt and
bare. And then came the climax: something passed us,--high above our
heads, I fancy, though its frightful winds seemed brushing us,--a ghost
of the night, an aerial demon, a shrieking thing that made the man
beside me cringe and shudder. It was new to me, but I could not mistake
it. It was what the French call an _obus_, a word that in some subtle
manner seems more menacing and dreadful than our own term of shell.

As we sped on I leaned against the cushions, outwardly quiet. Inwardly,
I was gathering myself together for my attempt. I had not thought I
would first approach the Front this way; but it was a good way, I had
a good object. At the next stop, whatever it was, I meant to make the
venture. I did not doubt I should succeed in it. But I could not hope to
keep my life.

Another _obus_ hurtled over us and shrieked away into the distance; and
again the man beside me flinched, but I did not. I was thinking, with
odd lucidity, of many things, among them Dunny and his old house
in Washington, into which I should never again let myself with my
latch-key, sure of a welcome at any hour of the day or night. My
guardian's gray head rose before me. My heart tightened. The finest,
straightest old chap who ever took a forlorn little tike in out of the
wet, and petted him, and frolicked with him, and filled his stocking all
the year round, and made his holidays things of rapture, and taught him
how to ride and shoot and fish and swim and cut his losses and do pretty
much everything that makes life worth living--that was Dunny.