“Weel,—­I was wounded and couldna’ fight anither stroke; I was jeest tired oot wi’ killin’ Boches and hadna’ the strength to stand anither minute; I jeest had to get away.”

“Well, you’ve had a damned good rest now and you can get back to the O.C. and tell him what you have told me and he will see that you get a fitting decoration.”  This latter was spoken very grimly, and I could see the great fighter’s face fall.  “You will see to it, Grant,” said the Q.M. “that Henderson doesn’t hide his heroism from the O.C.; that he gives it to him in detail, just as he has to me.”  “Yes, sir,” and I left with my prisoner.

We hurried along as night was falling and the German flares were commencing to fly.  On the way back we met two Algerian troopers and in the gleam of a star shell and the fading twilight they looked more like two escaped denizens of the chamber of horrors than anything I could well imagine.  Indeed, their appearance was so ghastly under the weird light of the flares and the fading day, that I involuntarily shivered, hardened though I was by that time to grim sights.  Each of them carried on his shoulder the hind-quarter of a cow that had been killed by a shell at a nearby farm, and the dripping blood from the beast had slopped all over their uniforms; under each arm was tucked a ham they had “swiped” from the farmhouse and each had a young suckling pig running ahead, squealing and grunting, tied by a string on the hind leg and held by the left hand, while in the right hand each man carried a sharply pointed stick to prod the pig when it veered from a straight line, which was about every other step or so.

Just as we got immediately opposite the looters a burst of shell fire from the German guns, followed by a hail of shrapnel, blazed all about us, and the hero-cook jumped like a bullfrog, bumping plumb into one of the Algerians, and he and the cook and the pig tumbled over and over, the pig squealing like mad, the Algerian rolling out deep-throated oaths in his native tongue, and Scotty cursing as only a redheaded gabby Scotchman can, all amid an ear-splitting din of shrieking shells and flare-gleams completing a mise en scene as striking as anything ever created by a master artist of stagecraft.

When Scotty extricated himself from the tangle his face and clothes were smeared from the blood of the dripping beast, so that he could indeed have passed for the blood-stained hero he had proclaimed himself in the cookhouse, and in spite of his plight Scotty grinned as I suggested the thought to him and the twinkle returned to his eye, and his spirits took a decidedly upward turn until we reached the Major’s quarters.

The Major was still cursing mad over the loss of the trenches in the gas attack and I felt the moment he spoke that Scotty’s fate looked black.

“Where have you been, Henderson?”

“I was in the cookhouse, sir, when a shell struck it, smashing everything in sight, and I lost complete control o’ my nerves and started for the wagon lines wi’out knowing what I was doing or where I was going, and didna’ come to mysel’ until Grant ran across me in the dugout.”