“He’ll be wise,” Blenheim announced, “to go on doing so.”  The threat was in English for my benefit and came from between his teeth.

In front of us the noise was growing.  With our next turn we entered the highroad, taking our place in a long rumbling line of ambulances and supply-carts and laboring camions, or trucks.  We glimpsed faces, heard voices all about us.  The change from solitude to this unbroken procession was bewildering.  But we did not long remain a part of it; we turned again into narrower lanes.

The control was growing stricter.  Four separate times we were halted, and always I sat hunched in my corner as impassive as a stone.  The more deeply we penetrated toward the Front, the more uneasy grew my companions.  Each time that a sentry halted us they waited in more anxiety for his verdict.  The man beside me, it was true, still menaced me with his pistol point; but the gesture had grown perfunctory.  He did not think I would attempt anything.  He believed now that I was afraid.

Our road crossed a hilltop, and I saw beneath us a valley, streaked at intervals with blinding signal-flashes of red and green.  In my ears the thunder of the guns was growing steadily.  When we were stopped again, the sentry warned us.  The road we were traveling, he said, had been intermittently under fire for two days.

It looked, indeed, as if devils had used it for a playground; the trees were mere blackened stumps; the fields on each side stretched burnt and bare.  And then came the climax:  something passed us,—­high above our heads, I fancy, though its frightful winds seemed brushing us,—­a ghost of the night, an aerial demon, a shrieking thing that made the man beside me cringe and shudder.  It was new to me, but I could not mistake it.  It was what the French call an obus, a word that in some subtle manner seems more menacing and dreadful than our own term of shell.

As we sped on I leaned against the cushions, outwardly quiet.  Inwardly, I was gathering myself together for my attempt.  I had not thought I would first approach the Front this way; but it was a good way, I had a good object.  At the next stop, whatever it was, I meant to make the venture.  I did not doubt I should succeed in it.  But I could not hope to keep my life.

Another obus hurtled over us and shrieked away into the distance; and again the man beside me flinched, but I did not.  I was thinking, with odd lucidity, of many things, among them Dunny and his old house in Washington, into which I should never again let myself with my latch-key, sure of a welcome at any hour of the day or night.  My guardian’s gray head rose before me.  My heart tightened.  The finest, straightest old chap who ever took a forlorn little tike in out of the wet, and petted him, and frolicked with him, and filled his stocking all the year round, and made his holidays things of rapture, and taught him how to ride and shoot and fish and swim and cut his losses and do pretty much everything that makes life worth living—­that was Dunny.