The Last Shot Part 34

Yet it pleased Stransky not to waken his pa.s.senger until they reached the station his ticket called for. Entering the cut, he was halted by the challenging cry of "Who goes there?" in his own tongue.

"Stransky of the Reds!" he roared back. "Stransky, private of the 53d--Stransky and his bride and grandfather!"

"All right, Bert!" was the answer. "Hurrah for you! I'd know your old bull voice out of a thousand."

Even this did not arouse grandfather. Stransky trudged on past the sentry, across a road and up three series of steps of a garden terrace, through a breach in a breastwork of sand-bags, and was again at home--the only home he knew--among the comrades of his company. Most of them had fallen asleep on the ground after finis.h.i.+ng their rations, logs of men in animal exhaustion. Some of those awake were too weary to give more than a nod and smile and an exclamation of delight. They had witnessed too much horror that day to be excited over a soldier with an old man on his back. A few of the others, including Tom Fragini, gathered around the pair.

"We've arrived, grandfather!" said Stransky, squatting. There was no answer. "He certainly sleeps sound. I wonder if--."

"Yes," said Dellarme, who with Tom eased the fall of the limp body.

The thumping of an old man's heart with the youth of a Hussar had been too much for it.

"He was game!" said Stransky. "There isn't much in this world except to be game, I've concluded; and you can't be so old or so poor or so big-nosed and wall-eyed that you can't be game."

Marta, coming out on the veranda, had not heard his remark, but she had seen a leonine sort of private bearing an old man on his back and had guessed that he had remained behind to save a life when every man in uniform had been engaged in taking life.

"You are tired! You are hungry!" she said with urgent gentleness. "Come in!"

He followed her into the house and dropped on a leather chair before a s.h.i.+ning table in a room panelled with oak, wondering at her and at himself. No woman of Marta's world had ever spoken in that way to him.

But it was good to sit down. Then a maid with a sad, winsome face and tender eyes brought him wine and bread and cold meat and jam. He gulped down a gla.s.sful of the wine; he ate with great mouthfuls in the ravenous call of healthy, exhausted tissues, while the maid stood by to cut more bread.

"When it comes to eating after fighting--"

He looked up when the first pangs of hunger were a.s.suaged. Enormous, broad-shouldered, physical, his cheeks flushed with the wine, his eyes opened wide and brilliant with the fire that was in his nature--eyes that spoke the red business of anarchy and war.

"Say, but you're pretty!"

Springing up, he caught her hand and made to kiss her in the brashness of impulse. Minna struck him a stinging blow in the face. He received it as a mastiff would receive a bite from a pup, and she stood her ground, her eyes challenging his fearlessly.

"So you are like that!" he said thoughtfully. "It was a good one, and you meant it, too."

"Decidedly!" she answered. "There's more where that came from!"

"As I was telling the Grays this afternoon! Good for you!" He sat down again composedly, while she glared at him. "I'm still hungry. I've had wine enough; but would you cut me another slice of bread?"

She cut another slice and he covered it generously with jam. Then little Clarissa Eileen entered and pressed against her mother's skirts, subjecting Stransky to childhood's scrutiny. He waved a finger at her and grinned and drew his eyes together in a squint at the bridge of his nose, making a funny face that brought a laugh.

"Your child?" Stransky asked Minna.

"Yes."

"Where's her father? Away fighting?"

"I don't know where he is!"

"Oh!" he mused. "Was that blow for him at the same time as for me?" he pursued thoughtfully.

"Yes, for all of your kind."

"M-m-m!" came from between his lips as he rose. "Would you mind holding out your hand?" he asked with a gentleness singularly out of keeping with his rough aspect.

"Why?" she demanded.

"I've never studied any books of etiquette of polite society, and I am a poor sort at making speeches, anyhow. But I want to kiss a good woman's hand by way of apology. I never kissed one in my life, but I'm getting a lot of new experiences to-day. Will you?"

She held out her hand at arm's length and flushed slightly as he pressed his lips to it.

"You certainly do cut thick slices of bread," he said, smiling. "And you certainly are pretty," he added, pa.s.sing out of the door as jauntily as if he were ready for another fight and just in time to see the colonel of the regiment come around the house. He stood at the salute, half proudly, half defiantly, but in nowise humbly.

"Well, Major Dellarme!" was the colonel's greeting of the company commander.

"Major?" exclaimed Dellarme.

"Yes. Partow has the power. Four of the aviators have iron crosses already and promotion, too; and you are a major. Company G got into a mess and the whole regiment would have been in one unless you held on.

So I let you stay. It all came out right, as Lanstron planned--right so far. But your losses have been heavy and here you are in the thick of it again. Your company may change places with Company E, which has had a relatively easy time."

"No, sir; we would prefer to stay," Dellarme answered quietly.

"Good! Then you will take this battalion and I'll transfer Groller to Alvery's Bad loss, Alvery--shrapnel. The artillery has been doing ugly work, but that is all in favor of the defensive. If we can hold them on this line till to-morrow noon, it's all we want for the present," he concluded.

"We'll hold them! Don't worry!" put in Stransky.

If a private had spoken to a colonel in this fas.h.i.+on at drill, without being spoken to, it would have been a glaring breach of military etiquette. Now that they were at war it was different. Real comrades.h.i.+p between officer and man begins with war.

"We shall, eh?" chuckled the colonel. "You look big enough to hold anything, young man! Here! Isn't this the fellow that Lanstron got off?"

"Yes, sir," answered Dellarme.

"Well, was Lanstron right?"

"Yes, sir."

"Wonderful man, Lanstron!"

"He knows just' a little too much!" Stransky half growled.

XXIV

THE MAKING OF A HERO

A digression, this, about pale, little Peterkin, the valet's son, whom we left nibbling a biscuit in perfect security after his leap in mortal terror. When Fraca.s.se's men rose from their trench for the final charge and found that the enemy had gone, Peterkin, hearing their cheer and the thunderous tread of their feet, dared to look above the edge of the sh.e.l.l crater. Here was his company coming and he not in the ranks where he belonged. Of course he ought to have gone back with them when they went; whatever they did he ought to do. This was the only safe way for one of his incurable stupidity, as the drill sergeant had told him repeatedly.

He recognized the stocky butcher's son and other familiar figures among his comrades. Their legs, unlike his, had not been paralyzed with fright; they had been able to run. He was in an absolute minority of one, which he knew, from the experience of his twenty years of life and his inheritance as a valet's son, meant that he was utterly in the wrong. In a minute they would be sweeping down on him. They would be jeering him and calling him a rabbit or something worse for hiding in the ground.