One of them stepped upon McDermott's stomach, where he lay sleeping and dreaming of the war he had come to look at.
McDermott, when he had been drinking, was often cross. And especially was he cross if, when sleeping off his liquor, some one purposely or inadvertently interfered with his rightful and legitimate rest. When this coarse and heavy-footed intruder set his boot, albeit unwittingly, upon McDermott's stomach, McDermott sat up with a bellow of rage, instinctively and instantaneously grabbed the leg attached to the boot, rose as burning rocks rise from a volcano, with the leg in his hands, upset the man attached to the leg, and jumped with two large feet accurately upon the back of that person's neck. Whereupon the Boche went to Valhalla. McDermott, though nearer fifty than forty years old, was a barroom fighter of wonderful speed and technique, and this instinctive and spontaneous maneuver was all one motion, just as it is all one motion when a cat in a cellar leaps over a sack of potatoes, lands upon a rat, and sinks her teeth into a vital spot. The second German and the third German hung back an instant toward the door, and then came on toward the moving shadow in the midst of shadows. For their own good they should have come on without hanging back that second; but perhaps their training, otherwise so efficient, did not include barroom tactics. Their hesitation gave McDermott just the time he needed, for when he faced them he had the first German's gun in his hands.
“No war,” said McDermott, “can come into me slapin' chamber and stand on me stomach like that, and expict me to take it peaceful!”
With the words he fired the first German's rifle into the second German. The third German, to the rear of the second one, fired his gun simultaneously, but perhaps he was a hit flurried, for he also fired directly into the second German, and there was nothing the second German could do but die; which he did at once. McDermott leaped at the third German with his rifle clubbed just as the man pressed the trigger again. The bullet struck McDermott's rifle, splintered the butt of it and knocked it from his hands; but a second later McDermott's hands were on the barrel of the German's gun and the two of them were struggling for it.
There is one defect in the German military system, observers say: the drill masters do not teach their men independent thinking; perhaps the drill-masters do not have the most promising material to work upon. At any rate, it occurred to McDermott to kick the third German in the stomach while the third German was still thinking of nothing else than trying to depress the gun to shoot or bayonet McDermott. Thought and kick were as well coordinated as if they had proceeded from one of McDermott's late mules.
The Boche went to the floor of the Hôtel Faucon with a groan. “Gott!” he said.
“A stomach f'r a stomach,” said Mc-Dermott, standing over him with the rifle. “Git up!”
The German painfully arose.
“Ye are me prisoner,” said McDermott, “an' the furst wan I iver took. Hould up y'r hands! Hould thim up, I say! Not over y'r stomach, man, but over y'r head!”
The Boche complied hurriedly.