|
On one murky, thunderous day, under a sky ribbed with lightning, in a woeful landscape of cropped trees, mournfully erect like accusing, defiant fingers charred and burnt, "Golden Eyes" lost her way, as many a "better man," less tired than she, has done before this. Anxiously bumping along a strange, pitted road, her ambulance was struck by a Boche shell and the world went dark for a little while. But the girl and the dog that Love was keeping for "Bill" crept and staggered out of the wreckage, with nothing wrong but a tattered uniform and beautiful dog-coat, and a fleck of bright blood on a grazed shoulder.
After dazed hours of crouching through stony, brambled ground, "Golden Eyes" wound up again at her crippled ear, and—fell promptly into the amazed hands of a German patrol! Their officer, bereft of every other sense in his astonishment, except this vanity and appreciation of a blonde girl, with fallen gold hair and golden eyes staring out of a white, tired face, with a dauntless set to its chin, ordered his patrol at a distance.
Interested, intent, he never saw the girl rip off her brassard and a dog's white teeth close on it. Even while he saw the fright in her face he found time to wonder why her eyes were not in his, but behind and beyond him, where a white and sable dog was deserting! "Golden Eyes" prayed for her fled "Uncle Same," remembering the officer's inevitable automatic. And only at quick shouts and a shot of his patrol did the Boche officer understand; and by then an anxious-eye dog was a vanishing streak of white and gold that rose and fell, up and down, and out of sight.
In his teeth he carried her Red Cross on white—and on its back was a message to "Bill," "somewhere in France," from "Golden Eyes."
|
