vor.

"The music--the music! He calls it music!" ran through Marta's mind
mockingly, but she did not open her lips.

"According to my plan--and your plan!" he added.

"My plan--my plan!" she thought. Her plan that was to send men into a
shambles!

"They wait, ready, every detail arranged," he continued proudly.

The violet melted into an inky blue; silence, vast, heavy,
prevailed--silence where the millions lay on their arms. Even the guns
in the distance had ceased their echoing rumble. He felt the power of
her presence and of the moment. It was she who had given the information
that had enabled him to confound the scepticism of the staff by the easy
taking of Bordir. Through her he might repeat Bordir in a larger way at
Engadir, proving his theories of frontal attack. His courage of
initiative would shine out against the background of his staff's
scepticism as a light to the world's imagination. The first great man in
forty years; the genius of the new system of tactics to meet the demands
of a new age as Napoleon had met those of his, Grant of his, and Von
Moltke of his! Engadir taken, and his place on Valhalla would be secure.

The very silence with its taut expectancy was of his planning. Alone
with her he waited for the thunders of his planning that were to break
it. The sky merged into the shadows of the landscape that spread and
thickened into blackness. Out of the drawn curtains of night broke an
ugly flash and farther up the slope spread the explosive circle of light
of a bursting shell.

"The signal!" he exclaimed.

Right and left the blasts spread along the Gray lines and right and
left, on the instant, the Browns sent their blasts in reply. Countless
tongues of flame seemed to burst from countless craters, and the range
to rock in a torment of crashes. In the intervening space between the
ugly, savage gusts from the Gray gun mouths, which sent their shells
from the midst of exploding Brown shells, swept the beams of the Brown
search-lights, their rays lost like sunlight in the vortex of an open
furnace door.

"Splendid! splendid!" exclaimed Westerling, in a sweep of emotion at the
sight that had been born of his command. "Five thousand guns on our
side alone! The world has never seen the equal of this!"

"Five thousand guns!" Marta was thinking. What wouldn't their cost have
bought in books, in gardens, and in playgrounds! Every shot the price of
a year's schooling for a child!

"You see, we a