re three, when
the firing had died down after the Brown pursuit had stopped, a wireless
from a dirigible flying over the frontier came, telling of bodies of
Gray troops and guns on the march. Soon planes and other dirigibles
flying over other positions were sending in word of the same tenor. The
chiefs drew around the table and looked into one another's eyes in the
significance of a common thought.

"It cannot be a retreat!" said the vice-chief.

"Hardly. That is inconceivable of Westerling at this time," Lanstron
replied. "The bull charges when wounded. It is clear that he means to
make another attack. These troops on the march across country are
isolated from any immediate service."

It was Lanstron's way to be suggestive; to let ideas develop in council
and orders follow as out of council.

"The chance!" exclaimed some one.

"The chance!" others said in the same breath. "The God-given chance for
a quick blow! The chance! We attack! We attack!"

It was the most natural conception to a military tactician, though any
man who made it his own might have builded a reputation on it if he knew
how to get the ear of the press. Their faces were close to Lanstron as
they leaned toward him eagerly. He seemed not to see them but to be
looking at Partow's chair. In imagination Partow was there in the
life--Partow with the dome forehead, the pendulous cheeks, the shrewd,
kindly eyes. A daring risk, this! What would Partow say? Lanstron always
asked himself this in a crisis: What would Partow say?

"Well, my boy, why are you hesitating?" Partow demanded. "I don't know
that I'd have taken my long holiday and left you in charge if I'd
thought you'd be losing your nerve as you are this minute. Wasn't it
part of my plan--my dream--that plan I gave you to read in the vaults,
to strike if a chance, this very chance, were to come? Hurry up! Seconds
count!"

"Yes, a chance to end the killing for good and all!" said Lanstron,
coming abruptly out of his silence. "We'll take it and strike hard."

The staff bent over the map, Lanstron's finger flying from point to
point, while ready expert answers to his questions were at his elbow and
the wires sang out directions that made a drenched and shivering
soldiery Who had been yielding and holding and never advancing grow warm
with the thought of springing from the mire of trenches to charge the
enemy. And one, Gustave Feller, in command of a brigade of
field-guns--the mobile guns that cou