|
“Uncle Sam” tells the next episode that came to the three of them on their way to peace and Love’s fulfillment. A beautiful eye, and a wig-wagging tail. And an enchanting way of laying back soft, brown, plush ears, punctuated his story.
“I am only a dog. But I have seen things; my friend, that would make your stay-at-home hair rise up and walk all up and down you with cold feet! I admit they made mine sometimes—if it had sometimes not been for the tiny fingers of Golden-Eyes twisted in my mane and the ‘courage boy’ of Bill, and I am a dog! Well, we reached Bill’s dugout after our mad flight, and warned him.
“And when the raid came on and the Huns came on, our company was ready for them—with long, cold steel ‘fixed,’ the lookout listening in, packs on the backs for a counter-attack and a foothold in their woods, if the grit of a combination Devil-Saint could hold it! Devils they are—our dough-boys—to that army who ravished the children—the women—the fruit trees—of God! Saints they are to little children, and the old, and dogs like me! So they were ready for them, and they sang under their breath and looked at the stubble-bright of their bayonets.
“And Golden-Eyes and I only saw it at a painful distance, where her ambulance was camped; but we heard every rattling shot, like the shutters on your house in American on a windy night it was, and we heard and saw with our hearts. I’m telling you! Our boys drove them back; when we went out later, after the stray-minnies had almost stopped, looking for each one of us individually, the Huns lay thick, green-gray in the snow. Part of their woods was our—but that night we didn’t care much, Golden-Eyes and I, for somebody had seen Bill fall, and hadn’t seen him again after that.
“All night almost we searched, our Sweetheart and I, Others we found. Sometimes she sobbed cold tears into my collar, and beat her little hands together. That helps humans I guess. Dogs can whine. And at last in the first, faint gray and rose of the dawn, in the blue-gray ghostly mist of the woods with the faint pink shining through loop-holes, in a smother of snow, we found him. He had bandaged his leg, dug himself in, lighted a cigarette—and fainted. Once under Golden-Eyes face he opened his eyes, whispered, ‘I got mine in the leg,’ and was gone again. We dragged him back to safety—we two—leaving a red badge in the snow where we rested, like the ensign of the Red Cross. The tears froze on Golden-Eyes’ eyelashes because of his face almost as white as the snow that powdered his hair; and I had to stop sometimes and get out the way—f ir Golden-Eyes dragged her mate like a cave-woman, backing up, and could not see!
“I am only a dog who carries a little search-light on my back to help my Country and my true-loves—and cannot tell a story very well.”
|
