The pen scratched on in silence the name of the San Francisco girl. Then he reached for the letter the correspondent handed.
“To be sent, in case of your death. Now, Mr. Perrin?”
The pen scratched Lee’s name and address.
“Anything to send?”
“Nothing!”
“Very well, gentlemen!” His superficial cheerfulness was denied by his handshake—the sympathetic pressure of comrades under stress. “I shall observe your wishes—if possible. Well—” His shoulders rose again. “Hasta luego! Till we meet again.”
“A brave man in a weak place!” The correspondent rightfully placed him, outside. “Now, Diogenes, for the front.”
An hour later, after a heart-bursting run on foot for the last quarter-mile through small fountains of dust raised by shrapnel and rifle-bullets, the pair gained the uttermost outpost, a low wall of stones on the crest of a small hill that lay like a halved orange on the flat of the desert. A mile eastward, from the crest of the other half, a battery of French “threes” was spitting shrapnel with the feverish energy of an angry cat.
Between the hills ran a trench lined with thousands of revolutionists, whose incessant fire shrouded the front in bluish haze that was shot through and through with darting puffs. To the west and a quarter-mile in the rear, a second battery occupied a smaller elevation, protecting that flank.
Of the enemy, thirty thousand Carranzistas, out there on the plain were to be seen only lines of smoke that hung low over sand and chaparral in a great half-moon, the tips of which extended beyond the Vallista positions. But they could hear, too plainly, the twit! twit! of the ceaseless leaden rain passing overhead. Now and then a bullet would strike the wall with the sharp ring of a hammer on stone. Slipping through an embrasure, one pierced the brain of a revolutionist.