ss on his coat as Stransky had
to Minna.

"And I took your place," said Marta with a dull, slow emphasis.

Yes, he did owe much to her, she was thinking. In his place she had
lied; his part she had played in shame and no future act, she felt,
could ever expiate it. The teacher of peace, she had become the partisan
of war in wicked cunning.

He guessed nothing of what lay behind her words. He had forgotten her
children's school.

"And did my work better than I could! You are wonderful, wonderful!" He
was aglow with admiration, with awe, with adoration.

She smiled faintly, bitterly, while he burst into a flood of talk.

"I was back with the guns you had given me when I heard that you were
taking my place. Then I thought, can I be worthy of this--of what you
have done for me, giving me back my own world, your world? I vowed I
would be worthy--worthy of you. Heavens! How I made the guns
play--bang-bang-bang!" He cupped his bands over his eyes as an imaginary
range-finder, sweeping the field. "Oh, they are beautiful guns, these
new models! With a battalion I won a regiment. I asked Lanny to tell
you; did he?"

"Yes, and also of the iron cross."

"A fine bit of metal, the cross, and they have not been giving them too
promiscuously, either," said Feller. "But they're not gun-metal! That is
the real metal. It was my guns that closed the gate to the pass," he
went on, swept by the flood of enthusiasm. "I didn't open fire till I
could concentrate so as to make a solidly locked gate. I tell you, the
guns are the thing! You ought to have seen that retreat curl up on
itself. And where the shells struck on the hard road--phew! They lifted
the Grays upward to meet shrapnel pounding them from the sky! We could
have torn the whole Column to pieces if they hadn't surrendered. What a
bag of rifles and guns and stores is going to our capital! Oh, our
friends the Grays were a little too fast! They didn't know what the guns
meant in defence. The guns--they are back to their old place of glory!
They rule!"

"Was it your guns that fired into the melee there by the gate?" Marta
asked.

"Yes. I saw that soft target early. They put up a Red Cross flag at
first, but I soon realized that it wasn't any dressing station; only
stragglers; only the kind that run away without orders. So I let them
have it, for that's the law of war, and the way they would give it to us
and did, more than once. But I took care that no shots were fired at th