“Now you’ve said it!”
“How ridiculous that sounds—in this day and generation. You don’t mean that people around here believe such stories?”
“They do.”
“And you half believe it yourself, Mr. Bragg,” cried Ruth, laughing.
“I tell you what it is,” the young fellow said earnestly, while still guiding the car through the dark way with a skill that was really wonderful. “There are a whole lot of things I don’t know in this world. I didn’t used to think so; but I do now.”
“But you don’t believe in magic—either black or white?”
“I know that that thing you saw just now—and that I have seen twice before—flies through this country just like that, and at night. It never makes a sound. Soldiers have shot at it, and either missed—or their bullets go right through it.”
“Oh, how absurd!”
“Isn’t it?” and perhaps Charlie Bragg grinned. But he went on seriously enough: “I don’t know. I’m only telling you what they say. If it is a white or gray dog, it leaps the very trenches and barbed-wire entanglements on the front—so they say. It has been seen doing so. No one has been able to shoot it. It crosses what they call No Man’s Land between the two battlefronts.”
“It carries despatches to the Germans, then!” cried Ruth.