Dave Porter's war honors

by Edward Stratemeyer

As the two young army engineers turned away from where they were standing to look up and down the gully which had been crossed at the time they had seen the last of their chum, they noticed that the cloud of poisonous gas was growing more dense. On every side the water-laden wood showed a thick and sickly yellow haze, the very appearance of which was enough to make one shudder.

For the time being the rain had let up. Overhead the heavy clouds were passing swiftly to the southward, but the wind seemed to be too high up to drive the poisonous gas away.

Dave and his chum traveled all of a quarter of a mile down the gully without getting any trace of Roger. Then they came back on the far side of the gully and progressed in the opposite direction.

This upper section of the wood had been under fire several times during the war, and was consequently much torn up. Shell-holes were to be met at every little distance, and here and there the dying trees lay across the underbrush.

Presently Dave clutched his chum by the arm and pointed to an opening leading down into the gully at a point which so far had not been explored. There on the ground lay a newspaper—a copy of the Stars and Stripes, the official sheet of the American Expeditionary Force in France. Both of the young civil engineers were much interested in the discovery of this newspaper, for they remembered that Roger had had a copy of the publication with him on their last trip forward. In fact, the senator’s son had read some articles aloud for the benefit of his friends.

“If this is the newspaper he was carrying, he must have come this way,” was Dave’s reasoning, and Phil was of a similar mind.

With caution, for the going was treacherous, the two young engineers made their way down the rocks and over the muddy places and through the rain-soaked underbrush toward the bottom of the gully, which, at this point, was thirty or forty feet in depth and probably twice that in width at the top. At the bottom was a tiny watercourse, gurgling over and around the jagged rocks.

Reaching the watercourse, Dave and Phil looked up and down for some trace of their missing chum. But on account of the poisonous haze, which filled the gully, it was difficult to see any considerable distance.

Dave motioned to his chum that he was going farther up the gully, and Phil nodded to show that he was willing to continue the search, even though the poisonous gas in that hollow might be highly dangerous for both of them.

They had progressed less than a hundred feet when, on coming to a momentary halt, they suddenly found several small stones rolling toward them from one side of the gully. Looking up in that direction, they discovered Roger seated on a rock and motioning to them.