“He said, last week, that if we happened to be visiting camp to-day, we might see him getting his medicine at the hands of the young chemists of the Gas Defense Division, who have a witch’s imagination when it comes to horrors.” Olive smiled. “I don’t suppose that this is his first initiation, though, by any manner of means.”
“No, they keep ‘putting them through gas’--or some substitute for poison gas--right along here, so that they may be able to get their masks adjusted inside of six seconds,” remarked her father. “I believe it isn’t really going to be gas and sulphur smoke to-day--simply powder-puffs.”
“Powder-puffs! Pelt--pelt them with powder-puffs!” Sesooā nipped off a comic little shriek.
“Oh! not of the vanity-box order.” Colonel Deering’s smooth-shaven lip twitched. “These puffs are just tiny brown-paper sacks, containing, each, a tablespoonful of black powder with three or four inches of red-capped fuse sticking up out of it. They explode when they strike in the trenches, near a man’s feet, throwing up, each, its own little spitting, venomous spurt of flame, so that if he should be slow about getting into his mask his eyesight might suffer.”
“O dear! To-day I hope it won’t be a case of:
“‘The gas came down and caught the blighter slow!’”
murmured Olive, shuddering with a recollection of last week’s smoky Inferno, with its shaking roar of dynamite, its bright flash of bursting “tear-shells,” its popping of monster fire-crackers in the yellow cloud--and of what that cloud gave forth.
“Oh, no, it won’t! This seems quite tame compared with the real ‘Fritzie’s show’ last week!” Sara’s voice was an echo of her soldier-brother’s. “But who wants to see another smoky spectacle? Not me! To-day, by craning our necks over and looking along the traverse, we can see things--see the boys scrambling into their masks in a blessed hurry! Oh! here come the chemists now, with their bundles of powder-puffs. Funny-looking things those puffs are--like pert snails with their long red necks thrust up, peering around them.”
She laughed, that little Camp Fire Flame, of the shading hair and eyelashes, as the members of the Gas Defense Division, four young privates and a corporal, took up their stations at intervals along the edge of the trenches, near.
Suddenly a gong gave out its loud-tongued signal.