"Yes, you funny old simpleton! You are almost too easy!"
There was something of the vivacity of the barrack-room banter in the exclamations at Eugene's expense. Yet they were not the same. The look on no man's face was the same. The humorist was silent.
"What next, Hugo?"
He half stared at them, and his mask was not solemn but tragic.
"I was thinking how men work their courage up, as if patriotism were a Moloch of which they were afraid," he said. "How in order to get killed we go out to kill others, when right is on their side! How you, Armand, or you, Eugene, might be dead before to-morrow! How—."
"The bullet is not made that will get me!" exclaimed Eugene, with a swelling breath from his bellows-like lungs.
"Take him home to mother!" groaned Pilzer.
"That will do for you, Hugo Mallin!" came another interruption, a sharp one from Captain Fracasse, who had returned unobserved from the rear in time to overhear Hugo's remarks. "And that's the way to talk, Aronson and Pilzer. As for you, Mallin, I've a mind to put you under arrest and send you back for a coward! A coward—do you hear?"
"Ah-h!" breathed Pilzer in a guttural of satisfaction.
Hugo crimsoned at first in confusion, then he looked frankly and unflinchingly at the captain.