ld go forward rumbling to the
horses' trot--saw his dearly beloved batteries swing into a road in the
moonlight.

"La, la, la! The worm will turn!" he clucked. "It's a merry, gambling
old world and I'm right fond of it--so full of the unexpected for the
Grays! That lead horse is a little lame, but he'll last the night
through. Lots of lame things will! Who knows? Maybe we'll be cleaning
the mud off our boots on the white posts of the frontier to-morrow! A
whole brigade mine! I live! You old brick, Lanny! This time we are going
to spank the enemy on the part of his anatomy where spanks are
conventionally given. La, la, la!"

* * * * *

If not his own pain, the moans, the gasps, the appeals for water, the
convulsive shivers from cold, and the demoniacal giggles from a soldier
gone insane in medley around him would have kept the judge's son awake.
After he had fallen, struck by he knew not what, and consciousness had
returned, came the surging charge of the Browns in the counter-attack,
with throaty cries and threshing tread. He was able to turn over on his
face and cover the back of his head with his hands, as a slight
protection from steps that found footing on his body instead of on the
earth. After that he had understood vaguely that a newcomer on the field
of the fallen needed help with a first aid, and he had found his knife
and slit a sleeve and applied a bandage to check the bleeding of an
artery. Before dawn broke the sky was all alight again with a
far-reaching gun-fire--that of the Brown advance--throwing the scene of
slaughter into spectral relief, which became more real and terrible in
the undramatic light of day.

Thick, ghastly thick, the dead and wounded; and the faces--faces half
buried, faces black with congealed blood, faces staring straight up at
the sky, faces with eyes popping where necks had been twisted! Near by
was the distorted metal work of a dirigible, with the bodies of its
crew burned beyond recognition, and farther away were other dirigible
wrecks. A wounded Gray, who had not the strength to do it himself,
begged some one to lift a corpse off his body. A Gray and a Brown were
locked in a wrestling embrace in which a shrapnel burst had surprised
them. Piles of dead and wounded had been scattered and torn by a shell
which found only dead and wounded for destruction at the point of its
explosion. The living were crawling out from under the shields they had
mad