"Splendid old Schnitz," eulogized Roger. "A real Brother from the word go. I thought as much of him as of you and Bob and Iggins, even if I hadn't known him as long."
"No one could help liking him. He was my idea of a thorough-going man. I know we've got to expect this horrible business of losing one another, but it comes hard. Tough luck!"
"Mebbe Schnitz no daid. Mebbe him prisonar," faltered Ignace. "So think I better be daid than go live by Boche."
"Here, too," agreed Jimmy bitterly. "I'd rather think him dead ten times over than at the mercy of those black-hearted fiends. We ought to treat the prisoners we took the same way they've threatened to do to our men. But we won't. We're human and they're inhuman.
"We've got to get busy and find Bob," he reminded. "I'd be as much in the dumps about him as Schnitz, if it wasn't that I know that whatever has happened to him, he's not a prisoner of the Hun dogs. I'm going out now to look again for him. You fellows wait here for me. We'll soon have coffee and grub handed us. I'll take a hike up the trench and come back in time to eat with you. Afterward I'll go at it again unless I get a detail that'll keep me from it. Last night's fracas means hard work all day and lots of it."
Leaving his bunkies in the dugout, Jimmy retraced his steps through that ghastly lane of dead men. Every few paces he paused to stare darkly at a still form, the face of which was smashed beyond identification.
Frequently he stooped over such an one and examined the identification tag attached to the left wrist. He also kept a sharp look-out for a gold service ring which Bob had worn on the ring finger of his right hand. The four Brothers had service rings exactly alike, save for the initial engraved on each plate. These rings had been given them by the Blaises during that memorable Christmas furlough spent with Jimmy's parents.
This careful scrutiny of the dead, coupled with the constant passing to and fro of stretcher-bearers, made his progress through the trench very slow. The groans of the wounded wrenched his heart. Often he stopped and held his water bottle to the lips of a pain-crazed Sammy, who moaned piteously for water. Again a stretcher-bearer would solicit his help in placing a wounded soldier gently upon a stretcher.
It was during one of these labors of mercy that Jimmy stumbled upon news of Bob. Assisting a couple of first-aid men to place the bleeding wreck of an infantryman upon a stretcher, one of them looked sharply over and said:
"I think we took a friend of yours back quite a while ago. A black-eyed, curly-haired chap. I saw him with you after the bombardment the other morning when we came up here to carry off the casualties. He was at the dugout afterward to get his face fixed up. The plaster was still on it when we took him back this morning."