"I shall be honoured," said the Frenchman. "We three! I begin to understand now. A house should not be divided against itself. Is it not so? We should go far! It is fate to-night that—"
"Or the devil," said the third man.
"My Gawd!" The first man began to laugh—a cracked, jarring laugh. "After the war, the blinking war—after hell! There ain't no end, there ain't no—"
And then a flare hung again in the heavens, and in the thicket three men sat huddled against the tree trunks, torn, ragged and dishevelled men, but they were not staring into each others' faces now; they were staring, their eyes magnetically attracted, at a spot on the ground where a man, a man murdered, should be lying.
But the man was not there.
The fourth man was gone.