"I'll hoist you up as easy as I can," whispered Private Waller eagerly, "and I'll sort of crawl; and if they spot us, I'll let you down easy. Come on, pard."
Fifty yards—that was all—but fifty yards of unspeakable agony. The blood flowed again from Dennis's wounds and matted over Waller's hair. A dozen times he would have fainted, but he grit his teeth, and crawling, grasping, falling, Waller took him to the edge of the trench. And then a bullet caught the little man, and he dropped.
"Good-bye, pard," he said.
So died Private W. Waller, of His Majesty's Canadian Expeditionary Force.
X
Almost a year later, a one-armed man was walking along a quiet street in the northern suburbs of a great Canadian city. He paused at a pretty little cottage that nestled in a well-kept garden to speak to a young woman whose black dress was mute testimony to her tragic bereavement.
"'Ow can I ever thank you, Mr. Montague," she said, "for giving me this cottage and going guardian to little 'Arry? And your wife, too, is that kind and beautiful that after she comes—and she is in and out nearly hevery day—I feel as if an angel had been 'ere. Well, if here ain't little 'Arry with his face all dirty!"
A sturdy urchin stumbled forward, and in some way the one-armed man hoisted him to his shoulder.
"Hello, pard!" said Montague.
The little chap chuckled and pulled at his hat.