“Chance, my grandmother’s wall-eyed cat!” snorted Mahan.  “Maybe it might have been chance—­when this place hadn’t been bombed for a month—­for a whole flight of boche artillery and airship grenades to cut loose against it the day General Pershing happened to stop here for an hour on his way to Chateau-Thierry.  Maybe that was chance—­though I know blamed well it wasn’t.  Maybe it was chance that the place wasn’t bombed again till two days ago, when that troop-train had to spend such a lot of time getting shunted at the junction.  Maybe it was chance that the church, over across the street, hadn’t been touched since the last drive, till our regiment’s wounded were put in it—­and that it’s been hit three times since then.  Maybe any one of those things—­and of a dozen others was chance.  But it’s a cinch that all of them weren’t chance.  Chance doesn’t work that way.  I—­”

“Perhaps,” doubtfully assented old Vivier, “perhaps.  But I little like to believe it.  For it means a spy.  And a spy in one’s midst is like to a snake in one’s blankets.  It is a not pleasing comrade.  And it stands in sore need of killing.”

“There’s spies everywhere,” averred Mahan.  “That’s been proved often enough.  So why not here?  But I wish to the Lord I could lay hands on him!  If this was one of the little sheltered villages, in a valley, his work would be harder.  And the boche airships and the long-rangers wouldn’t find us such a simple target.  But up here on this ridge, all a spy has to do is to flash a signal, any night, that a boche airman can pick up or that can even be seen with good glasses from some high point where it can be relayed to the German lines.  The guy who laid out this burg was sure thoughtless.  He might have known there’d be a war some day.  He might even have strained his mind and guessed that we’d be stuck here.  Gee!”

He broke off with a grunt of disgust; nor did he so much as listen to another of the group who sought to lure him into an opinion as to whether the spy might be an inhabitant of the village or a camp-follower.

Sucking at his pipe; the Sergeant glowered moodily down the ruined street.  The village drowsed under the hot midday.  Here and there a soldier lounged along aimlessly or tried out his exercise-book French on some puzzled, native.  Now and then an officer passed in or out of the half-unroofed mairie which served as regimental headquarters.

Beyond, in the handkerchief-sized village square, a platoon was drilling.  A thin French housewife was hanging sheets on a line behind a shell-twisted hovel.  A Red Cross nurse came out of the hospital-church across the street from the estaminet and seated herself on the stone steps with a basketful of sewing.

Mahan’s half-shut eyes rested critically on the drilling platoon—­amusedly on the woman who was so carefully hanging the ragged sheets,—­and then approvingly upon the Red Cross nurse on the church steps across the way.