"Where is he now?"
"Hover in the dugout."
I learned that the hero of Mons had regaled them with accounts of his feats of valor in the trenches, very similar to the tales he had recounted to us at Salisbury Plain of his achievements in the Great Retreat, and the cook had given him a meal befitting a hero of his caliber, which Scotty had devoured with the relish and avidity of four heroes, while the others had shown him the due and necessary deference becoming a man of action.
For the benefit of the cook I informed him that Scotty was a damned liar; that it was I who had been with him; that he ran like a white-livered cur under fire from his cookhouse and didn't stop until he had reached the wagon lines; that he was there without being relieved and that he would shortly have another tale to tell.
I hastened to the dugout he had indicated as Scotty's retreat and found him in the innermost corner, pretending to be asleep; he didn't answer until I called him three or four times.
"Scotty, the O.C. wants to know why you left the cookhouse without guard permitting some Algerians to eat up his bacon and stuff, and, further, why you ran away under fire. You are in for hell as sure as there is heather in your hair." His countenance took on a greenish hue and he mumbled something about being shell-shocked and refused to come. I persuaded him, however, to come over to the Quartermaster of the wagon line, and that officer asked him what he was doing there.
"Weel,—I was wounded and couldna' fight anither stroke; I was jeest tired oot wi' killin' Boches and hadna' the strength to stand anither minute; I jeest had to get away."
"Well, you've had a damned good rest now and you can get back to the O.C. and tell him what you have told me and he will see that you get a fitting decoration." This latter was spoken very grimly, and I could see the great fighter's face fall. "You will see to it, Grant," said the Q.M. "that Henderson doesn't hide his heroism from the O.C.; that he gives it to him in detail, just as he has to me." "Yes, sir," and I left with my prisoner.
We hurried along as night was falling and the German flares were commencing to fly. On the way back we met two Algerian troopers and in the gleam of a star shell and the fading twilight they looked more like two escaped denizens of the chamber of horrors than anything I could well imagine. Indeed, their appearance was so ghastly under the weird light of the flares and the fading day, that I involuntarily shivered, hardened though I was by that time to grim sights. Each of them carried on his shoulder the hind-quarter of a cow that had been killed by a shell at a nearby farm, and the dripping blood from the beast had slopped all over their uniforms; under each arm was tucked a ham they had "swiped" from the farmhouse and each had a young suckling pig running ahead, squealing and grunting, tied by a string on the hind leg and held by the left hand, while in the right hand each man carried a sharply pointed stick to prod the pig when it veered from a straight line, which was about every other step or so.
Just as we got immediately opposite the looters a burst of shell fire from the German guns, followed by a hail of shrapnel, blazed all about us, and the hero-cook jumped like a bullfrog, bumping plumb into one of the Algerians, and he and the cook and the pig tumbled over and over, the pig squealing like mad, the Algerian rolling out deep-throated oaths in his native tongue, and Scotty cursing as only a redheaded gabby Scotchman can, all amid an ear-splitting din of shrieking shells and flare-gleams completing a mise en scène as striking as anything ever created by a master artist of stagecraft.