zed that the Browns had won, when
a last detail of the lessening tumult fixed her attention with its
gladiatorial simplicity. Here, indeed, it was a case of man to man with
the weapons nature gave them.

Standing higher than the others on the edge of the breach was that giant
who had brought Grandfather Fragini in pickaback, looking a young god on
an escarpment of rock on Olympus. His great nose showed in silhouette at
intervals of wrestling lurches back and forth as he tugged at the rifle
of a thick-set soldier of the Grays with a liver patch on the cheek that
made his face hideous enough for an incarnation of war's savagery. At
last Jacob Pilzer tumbled backward over the breastwork. Unlucky Pilzer!
That bronze cross was further away than ever for him, while Stransky
shook the trophy of a captured rifle aloft, a torn sleeve revealing the
weaving muscles of his powerful arm.

"I thought so!" cried Feller. "Attacks on frontal positions by daylight
are going out of fashion!"

It was he who mercifully arrested the shower of hand-grenades that
followed the exit of the enemy. Two of the guns of the castle batteries,
having changed their position, were making havoc enough at pointblank
range, with a choice of targets between the Grays huddled on the other
side of the breastwork and those in retreat.

"We'll have peace for a few hours now," said Stransky, squinting down
his nose. "And we'll have something to eat. I ought to have got that
fellow with the beauty-spot on his physiognomy, but, confound him, he
was an eel!"

By this time the men had recovered their breath. It occurred to them by
common impulse that a cheer was due, and for the first time they broke
into a hurrah with wide-open throats.

"Another--for Dellarme!" called Stransky, who seemed to think that he
and not the callow lieutenant was in command.

This they gave, standing instinctively at attention, with heads bared,
for the leader whose spirit survived in them; a cheer with triumph in
its roar, but a different sort of triumph from the first cheer.

Listening to it were the wounded among the Grays who had fallen within
the breastwork to be trampled by the Browns as they had pressed forward.
The doctor, but a moment ago a fiend himself with features of rage, now,
in the second nature of his calling, with a look of tender sympathy, was
ministering without distinction of friend or foe. One of the Grays, his
cheek bearing the mark of a boot heel, raised hi