Slowly there grew into his consciousness another scene. He had come to suddenly out of just such a moment of unconsciousness as that he had suffered at the corral. Then there had flooded over him such an overpowering consciousness of what had befallen him that he had staggered, with a shout, to his feet. At the psychological moment, when his company had started forward, he had welched, stumbled back, and, with the anguished oaths of the captain he loved ringing in his ears, Cheerio had gone down into darkness. He had come to as one in a resurrection, born anew, and invigorated with a passionate resolve to compensate with his life for that error, that moment of weakness.
There was an objective to be taken at any cost. The men had gone on. He found himself crawling across No Man’s Land. But a hundred feet away he came to his company. Upon the ground they lay, like a bunch of sheep without a leader. There was not an officer left, save that one who had been his friend and who had cursed him for a renegade when he turned back. Fearfully wounded, his captain was slowly pulling his way along the ground, painfully worming toward that clump of wood from which the sporadic bursts of gun fire were coming. Cheerio understood. Someone had to put that machine-gun out of commission or they would all be annihilated. He was crawling side by side with his captain, begging him to turn back and to trust him to take his place. He was pleading, arguing, threatening and forcing the wounded man down into a shell-hole where he could not move. Now he was on his own job.
Alone, within forty or fifty yards of the machine-gun, he paused, to take stock of what he had in the way of ammunition with him. He found he had a single smoke bomb and resolved to use it. Getting into a shell-hole, he unslung his rifle and placed the bomb into it and prepared it for firing. He waited for the right wind to shift the smoke and then carefully fired the gun.
By some remarkable stroke of fortune, it fell and exploded in such a position that the wind carried the smoke in a heavy cloud immediately over the German machine-gun post, rendering the operators of the machine absolutely powerless. At that moment Cheerio leaped from the shell-hole, and rushing forward, pulled a pin from a Mills bomb, as he ran. When about twenty yards away, he threw the bomb into the smoke and fell to the ground to await the explosion. It came with a terrific crash, fragments of the bomb bursting overhead. Jumping up and grasping his rifle firmly, he plunged into the smoke which had not yet cleared. Suddenly he fell into a trench, and he could not restrain a cheer to find that the machine-gun was lying on its side. It was out of action.
There was no time to survey the situation, for two of the enemy had rushed toward him swinging their “potato mashers” as the British soldiers were wont to call this type of bomb. Now that he realized that he had accomplished his objective, his elation had turned to the old sickening feeling of terror, as he watched one of the Germans pull the little white knob and throw the grenade. It missed him and struck the parapet of the trench. About to rush him, the Germans were restrained by an officer who had come up unobserved until then. He would take the Englishman prisoner. There were questions he desired to put to him. Yelling: “Komm mit!” they pushed him to his feet, and with prods of the bayonet, Cheerio went before the Germans.
His hands swept his face as if by their motion he put away that scene that had come back so clearly to memory. No! Not even the girl he loved—for in his misery, Cheerio faced the fact that he loved Hilda—not even she could truthfully name him—coward!
CHAPTER XIII
Hard as it is to build up a reputation in a cattle country, which has its own standards of criticism as everywhere else in the world, it is not difficult to lose that reputation. From tongue to tongue rolled the story of Cheerio’s weakness and confession at the branding corral, and that story grew like a rolling snowball in the telling, so that presently it would appear that he had confessed not merely to the most arrant cowardice at the front, but gross treachery to his country and his king.