“Sufferin’ cats!” he bellowed.  “Why didn’t anybody ever tell me Germans was covered with fur instead of clothes?”

The boche platoon was no longer striding along in hike-formation.  It was broken up into masses of wildly running men, all of them bearing down upon the place whence issued this ungodly racket and turmoil.  Stumbling, reeling, blindly falling and rising again, they came on.

Some one among them loosed a rifle-shot in the general direction of the yelling.  A second and a third German rifleman followed the example of the first.  From the distant American trenches, one or two snipers began to pepper away toward the enemy lines, though the fog was too thick for them, to see the German rifle-flashes.

The boches farthest to the left, in the blind rush, fouled with the wires.  German snipers, from behind the Hun parapets, opened fire.  A minute earlier the night had been still as the grave.  Now it fairly vibrated with clangor.  All because one rookie’s nerves had been less staunch than his courage, and because that same rookie had not only had his hand stepped on in the dark, but had encountered something swirling and hairy when he grabbed for the soldier who had stepped on him!

The American lieutenant, at the onset of the clamor, sprang to his feet, whipping out his pistol; his dry lips parted in a command to charge—­a command which, naturally, would have reduced his eleven men and himself to twelve corpses or to an equal number of mishandled prisoners within the next few seconds.  But a big hand was clapped unceremoniously across the young officer’s mouth, silencing the half-spoken suicidal order.

Sergeant Mahan’s career in the regular army had given him an almost uncanny power of sizing up his fellowmen.  And he had long ago decided that this was the sort of thing his untried lieutenant would be likely to do, in just such an emergency.  Wherefore his flagrant breach of discipline in shoving his palm across the mouth of his superior officer.

And as he was committing this breach of discipline, he heard the Missourian’s strangled gasp of: 

“Why didn’t anybody ever tell me Germans was covered with fur?”

In a flash Mahan understood.  Wheeling, he stooped low and flung out both arms in a wide-sweeping circle.  Luckily his right hand’s fingertips, as they completed the circle, touched something fast-moving and furry.

“Bruce!” he whispered fiercely, tightening his precarious grip on the wisp of fur his fingers had touched.  “Bruce!  Stand still, boy!  It’s you who’s got to get us clear of this!  Nobody else, short of the good Lord, can do it!”

Bruce had had a pleasantly lazy day with his friends in the first-line trenches.  There had been much good food and more petting.  And at last, comfortably tired of it all, he had gone to sleep.  He had awakened in a most friendly mood, and a little hungry.  Wherefore he had sallied forth in search of human companionship.  He found plenty of soldiers who were more than willing to talk to him and make much of him.  But, a little farther ahead, he saw his good friend, Sergeant Mahan, and others of his acquaintances, starting over the parapet on what promised to be a jolly evening stroll.