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In the dusk of an Autumn night, the wild and wind driving rags of clouds across a fine, thin moon and trembling stars, Golden-Eyes and Uncle same, out again on the perilous doing of their bit for far America and the Triumphing Allies, crept and slid and listened through the haunted waste of No Man's Land in search of their wounded. Already they have found two "boys," hidden painfully in brush and torn earth, and had given them into the hands of two quiet shadows with a stretcher between them.
Hearing voices in a rough, lowered tongue with the hated gutteral hissing, dog and girl dropped and crawled, slowly, fearfully, nearer and nearer, their two hearts thumping on the rough ground they hugged. Once Golden-Eyes' medal worn in pride at night, where she and Uncle Sam could gloat, tinkled faintly on a stone, and the two near fainted away! At the rearing slope of a shell hone, where the roots of a stricken tree, stone and wrecked, earth made a wild heap, they lifted their stealthy lengths, and looked over the crest..... and the moon looked down for a quiet moment and saw—the statue—still, frozen figures of a listening girl and dog, a slim girl and a collie-dog. They might have been a "group" left in the wreckage of a garden. The pale light of the moon touched them spectrally, coldly, over shoulder and on face and breast, and on glistening eyes shone a brighter, warmer light from the depths of the shell hole, gilding Golden-Eyes' face and hair and striking fire on the teeth of Uncle Same.
Out of sight, dug in from wind and enemy, Germans were talking low of a coming big raid on the trench their own Bill held!
Later the ghost-moon saw two wild figures, safe away running—running—reckless of barbed wire and holes, brothers to the wind, falling flat till the glare of a rocket had faded out and rising to fly on—sped by the news they carried to Bill and his boys.
"We got to be on time, Doll-dog!" panted Golden-Eyes, gone ungrammatical and caressing with excitement.
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