“Oh-h--Iver!” Sara Davenport felt as if the earth were seamed with one great brown trench, all flame-lined, swallowing her.
But before her piteous exclamation died away, her brother--that young lieutenant--had plucked the fiery scorpion from his breast, shaken himself free of the hissing, spitting powder, was stamping fiercely up the beaten sod-steps of the trench, removing his mask with fingers that shook--some of them--like charred twigs, in a withering tempest of pain.
“Thank God! I was into my mask pretty quickly. Otherwise--otherwise I’d have been blinded for life!”
He shuddered, that Boy-Officer, who had prematurely “bawled out” a sergeant, as the words broke from him, seeming to make their way out through a great smoking hole upon his breast, where the tight khaki blouse was burned away.
“Iver! Oh--Iver!” From a distance his young sister started towards him.
Blistered within by pain and rising anger--as without by powder--he did not see her. Nor yet the other visitors back of her--one of them the girl with whom he had exchanged twilight confidences a week before!
His eye, a lurid lightning-flash above the bitten, twisted lips, had instantly singled out the face of a young chemist--a penitent private--nearer, as the latter, in an agony of apology, started towards him.
“I--I didn’t mean it, sir,” stammered the youth, feeble in his confusion. “It--’twas an accident----”
For just one-half minute Lieutenant Davenport’s tall figure loomed, rigid, in the sunlight, that powder-hole smoking upon his breast.
His breath smoked, too--the smoke of his agonizing burns.