“Sergeant,” said Cadel, respectfully, “I laugh to see Private Dard, that got the wind of the shot, dance and sing, when the man that got the shot itself does not say a word.”

“The wind of the shot, you rascal!” roared Private Dard:  “look here!” and he showed the blood running down his face.

The shot had actually driven a splinter of bone out of the sutler into Dard’s temple.

“I am the unluckiest fellow in the army,” remonstrated Dard:  and he stamped in a circle.

“Seems to me you are only the second unluckiest this time,” said a young soldier with his mouth full; and, with a certain dry humor, he pointed vaguely over his shoulder with the fork towards the corpse.

The trenches laughed and assented.

This want of sympathy and justice irritated Dard.  “You cursed fools!” cried he.  “He is gone where we must all go—­without any trouble.  But look at me.  I am always getting barked.  Dogs of Prussians! they pick me out among a thousand.  I shall have a headache all the afternoon, you see else.”

Some of our heads would never have ached again:  but Dard had a good thick skull.

Dard pulled out his spilikin savagely.

“I’ll wrap it up in paper for Jacintha,” said he.  “Then that will learn her what a poor soldier has to go through.”

Even this consolation was denied Private Dard.

Corporal Coriolanus Gand, a bit of an infidel from Lyons, who sometimes amused himself with the Breton’s superstition, told him with a grave face, that the splinter belonged not to him, but to the sutler, and, though so small, was doubtless a necessary part of his frame.

“If you keep that, it will be a bone of contention between you two,” said he; “especially at midnight.  He will be always coming back to you for it.”

“There, take it away!” said the Breton hastily, “and bury it with the poor fellow.”

Sergeant La Croix presented himself before the colonel with a rueful face and saluted him and said, “Colonel, I beg a thousand pardons; your dinner has been spilt—­a shot from the bastion.”

“No matter,” said the colonel.  “Give me a piece of bread instead.”

La Croix went for it himself, and on his return found Cadel sitting on one side of Death’s Alley, and Dard with his head bound up on the other.  They had got a bottle which each put up in turn wherever he fancied the next round shot would strike, and they were betting their afternoon rations which would get the Prussians to hit the bottle first.

La Croix pulled both their ears playfully.

“Time is up for playing marbles,” said he.  “Be off, and play at duty,” and he bundled them into the battery.

It was an hour past midnight:  a cloudy night.  The moon was up, but seen only by fitful gleams.  A calm, peaceful silence reigned.

Dard was sentinel in the battery.