“Humph!...  Pretty quiet out there?”

“So Bob says, but what’s he know—­more than us?  I heard guns up the line, and rifle-fire not so far off.”

“Can you see any—­”

“Not a damn thing—­yet everything,” interrupted Sanborn, enigmatically.

“Dixon!” called Owens, low and quickly, from the darkness.

Dixon did not reply.  His sudden hard breathing, the brushing of his garments against the door, then swift, soft steps dying away attested to the fact of his going.

Dorn tried to compose himself to rest, if not to sleep.  He heard Sanborn sit down, and then apparently stay very still for some time.  All of a sudden he whispered to himself.  Dorn distinguished the word “hell.”

“What’s ailin’ you, pard?” drawled Brewer.

Sanborn growled under his breath, and when some one else in the dugout quizzed him curiously he burst out:  “I’ll bet you galoots the state of California against a dill pickle that when your turn comes you’ll be sick in your gizzards!”

“We’ll take our medicine,” came in the soft, quiet voice of Purcell.

No more was said.  The men all pretended to fall asleep, each ashamed to let his comrade think he was concerned.

A short, dull, heavy rumble seemed to burst the outer stillness.  For a moment the dugout was silent as a tomb.  No one breathed.  Then came a jar of the earth, a creaking of shaken timbers.  Some one gasped involuntarily.  Another whispered: 

“By God! the real thing!”

Dorn wondered how far away that jarring shell had alighted.  Not so far!  It was the first he had ever heard explode near him.  Roaring of cannon, exploding of shell—­this had been a source of every-day talk among his comrades.  But the jar, the tremble of the earth, had a dreadful significance.  Another rumble, another jar, not so heavy or so near this time, and then a few sharply connected reports, clamped Dorn as in a cold vise.  Machine-gun shots!  Many thousand machine-gun shots had he heard, but none with the life and the spite and the spang of these.  Did he imagine the difference?  Cold as he felt, he began to sweat, and continually, as he wiped the palms of his hands, they grew wet again.  A queer sensation of light-headedness and weakness seemed to possess him.  The roots of his will-power seemed numb.  Nevertheless, all the more revolving and all-embracing seemed his mind.

The officer in his speech a few hours back had said the sector to which the battalion had been assigned was alive.  By this he meant that active bombardment, machine-gun fire, hand-grenade throwing, and gas-shelling, or attack in force might come any time, and certainly must come as soon as the Germans suspected the presence of an American force opposite them.