Red and Black

by Grace S. Richmond

A burst of joyous laughter from all down the ward greeted this triumph of the imagination. Then Jane laid him gently down upon his back again—he had other injuries than the smashed elbow joint, and sitting up wouldn’t do for him yet. In his ear she whispered, “I think it’s Enie too, somehow. But we mustn’t be too sure yet. Just try to wait quietly.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He owned her supremacy as they all did. But for the next twenty-four hours he hardly rested and never slept. Jane shared his vigil, while reports continued to arrive, some adding to their confidence, others taking it away. Finally, they knew that it was all true and the lost was found—what there was left of it.

And then came Enos Dyer, and the Polish boy who had been his companion. Five days without food before starting, eight hours on the trip, exhausted but game, they were brought back to the Field Hospital for the rest that was imperative, and the treatment of minor injuries. That night Jane sat beside Dyer’s bed and listened to his account, because he was too happy to be suppressed until he had told her the outlines. She looked at his thin, exalted face, and saw the lines and hollows that hunger and fatigue had brought there, but saw still more clearly the triumph of spirit over body. She had managed that he should lie in a bed next his big friend, and between the reunited pair she felt like a happy warrior herself.

“Why, it was the thing, to start in the day time,” insisted Enos, in reply to big Johnny’s comment on the foolhardiness of this choice. “All the runners that tried it before in the night got killed or wounded, and somebody’d got to try the thing a different way. I figgered out that in the day time when there ain’t any scrap on, the enemy’s always half asleep, they’re so sure they can see everything that’s goin’ on. Nights everybody on both sides is keyed-up like jack-rabbits, expectin’ trouble. But day times—why they’s nothin’ to it—if they don’t happen to see you.”

Johnny chuckled: “No, if they don’t!”

“You see,” Enos went on, “we made things safe by leavin’ behind our helmets and gas masks and rifles——”

“Leavin’ ’em behind! Why, you’d need ’em.”

“Not much we didn’t. Tin hats hit on stones and ring out, when you’re crawlin’, and rifles and masks get in your way. One officer stopped us, though, and told us to go back and get ’em. I didn’t want to, so I went back to the Major and told him so. He said, ‘Don’t you want ’em?’ And I said, ‘No, sir, we don’t,’ and he laughed and said, ‘All right, go as you like.’ He was the same that told me when I and Stanislaus asked to go that ‘if we got through we was to——’ ‘If we get through——’ I says to him—‘we’re goin’ to get through! If God could take care of Daniel in that lions’ den, I guess He can of us.’ He looked at me a minute, and then he says; ‘You’ll make it.’” Enos laughed gleefully. “Nothin’ like standin’ up to an officer,” he said, by way of throwing a side-light on the affair. Jane thought of Doctor Leaver, and wished he had not gone back to his Base Hospital, and could hear.

“Well, that’s about all there was to it.—Gee, but this pillow does feel good under a fellow’s head!—We crawled down the hill, and across the valley, and we crossed a road three times, right under them Fritzies’ noses, and they never see us. Quite a lot of times I thought they sure had seen us, and was comin’ straight for us, but we laid low, and every time they’d turn off before they got to us, just as if——” his eyes met Jane’s and looked straight into them—“a hand was holdin’ back the lions. I knew then just as sure that we’d get through. We crossed three wire entanglements, and two German trenches, and we run right onto a sniper’s post, only the sniper wasn’t there—gone off for water or somethin’, not thinkin’ there was anythin’ to snipe in broad daylight. About dark it begun to rain—and it got black as a pocket. We was soaked through. But we kep’ a-comin’, and quite awhile after dark we got near our own lines.”

He paused and drew a long breath. Jane laid an exploring finger on his pulse, but it was not unduly excited or more weak than was safe. Johnny, propping himself upon his uninjured elbow, had to be made to lie down again.