And, anyway, all three men were temporarily penniless and were forced to play for I.O.U’s—­which is stupid sport, at best.

So when, from the German line, came a quick sputt-sputt-sputt from a half-dozen sharpshooters’ rifles, all three men looked up from their desultory game in real interest.  Mahan got to his feet with a grunt.

“Some other fool has been trying to see how far he can rubber above the sandbags without drawing boche fire,” he hazarded, starting out to investigate.  “It’s a miracle to me how a boche bullet can go through heads that are so full of first-quality ivory as those rubberers’.”

But Mahan’s strictures were quite unwarranted.  The sharpshooters were not firing at the parapet.  Their scattering shots were flying high, and hitting against the slope of the hill behind the trenches.

Adown this shell-pocked hillside, as Mahan and the other disturbed idlers gazed, came cantering a huge dark-brown-and-white collie.  The morning wind stirred the black stippling that edged his tawny fur, showing the gold-gray undercoat beneath it.  His white chest was like a snowdrift, and offered a fine mark for the German rifles.  A bullet or two sang whiningly past his gayly up-flung head.

A hundred voices from the Here-We-Come trenches hailed the advancing dog.

“Why, it’s Bruce!” cried Mahan in glad welcome.  “I might ‘a’ known he or another of the collies would be along.  I might ‘a’ known it, when the telephones went out of commission.  He—­”

“Regardez-donc!” interrupted the admiring Vivier.  “He acts like bullets was made of flies!  Mooch he care for boche lead-pills, ce brave vieux!”

“Yes,” growled Dale worriedly; “and one of these days a bullet will find its way into that splendid carcass of his.  He’s been shot at, a thousand times, to my own knowledge.  And all I ask is a chance, with a rifle-butt, at the skull of the Hun who downs him!”

“Downs Bruce?” queried Vivier in fine scorn.  “The boche he is no borned who can do it.  Bruce has what you call it, in Ainglish, the ‘charm life.’  He go safe, where other caniche be pepper-potted full of holes.  I’ve watch heem.  I know.”

Unscathed by the several shots that whined past him, Bruce came to a halt at the edge of a traverse.  There he stood, wagging his plume of a tail in grave friendliness, while a score of khaki-clad arms reached up to lift him bodily into the trench.

A sergeant unfastened the message from the dog’s collar and posted off to the colonel with it.

The message was similar to one which had been telephoned to each of the supporting bodies, to right and to left of the Here-We-Comes.  It bade the colonel prepare to withdraw his command from the front trenches at nightfall, and to move back on the main force behind the hill-crest.  The front trenches were not important; and they were far too lightly manned to resist a mass attack.  Wherefore the drawing-in and consolidating of the whole outflung line.