round and
looked at her out of their corners. She had seen that sidelong, attentive
look once before, when she was a little girl, in the eyes of a schoolboy
who had taken her away and told her something horrid. The door of the
shed stood ajar. John half led, half pushed her in.

"Look there--" he said.

The dead men were laid out in a row, on their backs; greyish-white,
sallow-white faces upturned; bodies straight and stiff on a thin litter
of straw. Pale grey light hovered, filtered through dust.

It came from some clearer place of glass beyond that might have been a
carpenter's shop, partitioned off. She couldn't see what was going on
there. She didn't see anything but the dead bodies, the dead faces, and
John's living face.

He leaned against the wall; his head was thrown back, his eyes moved
glistening under the calm lids; the corners of his mouth and the wings of
his nostrils were lifted as he laughed: a soft, thin laugh breathed out
between the edges of his teeth. He pointed.

"There's your man. Shows how much they wanted him, doesn't it?"

He lay there, the last comer, in his uniform and bloody bandages, his
stiff, peaked mouth open, his legs stretched apart as they had sprung in
his last agony.

"Oh, John--"

She cried out in her fright and put her hands over her eyes. She had
always been afraid of the dead bodies. She didn't want to know where they
put them, and nobody told her.

John gripped her wrists so that he hurt her and dragged down her hands.
He looked into her eyes, still laughing.

"I thought you weren't afraid of anything," he said.

"I'm not afraid when we're out there. I'm only afraid of _seeing_ them.
You know I am."

She turned, but he had put himself between her and the door. She wrenched
at the latch, sobbing.

"How could you be so _cruel?_ What did you do it for? What did you
_do_ it for?"

"I wanted you to see what they've done with him. There's his clean bed.
They haven't even taken his boots off."

"You brute. You _utter_ brute!"

A steely sound like a dropped hammer came from behind the glass
partition; then the sliding of a latch. John opened the door a little way
and she slipped out past him.

"_Next time_," he said, "perhaps you'll do as you're told."

She wanted to get away by herself. Not into her own room, where Gwinnie,
who had been unloading ambulance trains half the night, now rested. The
McClane Corps was crowding into the messroom for tea. She passed thr