Captain Dobie had been watching his stopwatch. Five minutes later he said, “All right, Slim, shelling’s over. Fan your men out, and take those Nazis in.”
The new sergeant and his men moved rapidly ahead, skirting the cottage wall.
They had just disappeared around the corner when Dobie cried sharply, “What in the name of—”
Weller had sprung headlong from the jeep and lunged at a sunken doorway.
A moment later he returned, breathing hard, with a dog in his arms.
“Patchou!” Dobie shouted.
Weller, his face tilted away from Patchou’s loving tongue and scrambling paws, pitched the dog into Captain Dobie’s lap.
“If this means what I think it means,” he puffed rapidly, “André’s somewheres about. Maybe you can figure it out, sir....”
Without waiting, he was gone, clanking with grenades, his head lowered between determined shoulders.
Straining forward in the jeep, Captain Dobie sat raging at his helplessness. He knew he would be useless in the field. He could barely walk. But every rifle crack, every grenade explosion sent his blood boiling. To think of André exposed to all this was a maddening extra anxiety.