m home and mamma? Did he long
for mamma to tuck him among the goose feathers, with a sweet biscuit in
his paddy?" inquired Pilzer awakening.

Hugo looked around at Pilzer in his quizzical fashion.

"Jake, you are unnecessarily uprooting an aster with the toe of your
boot," he said.

Pilzer had a torrent of abuse ready to his tongue's end when Fracasse
interrupted with a hoarse, whispered warning:

"Silence, Pilzer! You talk too much."

Now the irascible Pilzer had a further grudge against Hugo for having
made him the object of a reprimand.

"You!" he whispered, when the captain's back was turned, calling Hugo a
foul name.

This cut through even Hugo's philosophy and the blood went in a hot rush
to his cheeks; but he slipped on his pack, as the others were doing, and
readjusted his cartridge-box. Word was passed to make ready for another
rush, and soon the men knew that yesterday was not part of the hideous
nightmare which had kept their legs quivering mechanically, as in the
charge, while they slept, but that the nightmare was a continuing
reality and the peace of morning a dream.

Under cover of the rain of shell fire on Dellarme's position, already
described, they mounted the wall of the second terrace and ran to the
wall of the first terrace. They had expected to suffer terribly, but
passed safely underneath a sheet of bullets that caught other sections
of their regiment on the lower terraces. Over their heads were the
muzzles of the Browns' rifles, blazing toward the road, while in the
direction of the tower they saw the first charge of another regiment
melting like snow under sprays of flame. They could not fire at
Dellarme's men and Dellarme's men could not fire at them without leaning
over the parapet. They could not go ahead. There was no room to their
rear, for the reserves behind the third terrace had rushed up to the
second terrace; those behind the fourth to the third; and still others
across the road to the fourth, in successive waves.

With a welter of slaughter around them, Fracasse's men were in something
of the position that little Peterkin had enjoyed in the shell crater.
They ate a breakfast of biscuits, washed down by water from their
canteens. Trickles of sand from bullet holes sprinkled their shoulders
and they had enough resiliency of spirit to grin when a stream of sand
from a bag torn by a shell burst ran down the back of Pilzer's neck. It
was rather amusing to hear Jake growling as h