The Hills of Desire

by Richard Aumerle Maher

"Save your ammunition," he commanded, "and cover up the guns. They might be handy if we had to come back this way in a hurry.

"Put the two wounded men under the bridge and take cover in the creek bed."

The two men were quickly eased down into the dry water course under the bridge and left as comfortable as was possible, while the lieutenant called up to Wardwell:

"We'll have to depend on you for a lookout, Wardwell. They might try to rush the creek from above or below. Though I don't think the outfit across there is anxious to rush anything this way. Stay where you are while you can. But if you think they've spotted you, make your rush for the creek bed. Don't stay if it should become—useless."

"'Right, Sir,'" said Wardwell, smiling to himself among the leaves. He knew that the young officer had started to say: "Don't stay if it should become too hot for you." But he was getting used to the way they thought of him and spoke to him. It had started with the boys. They were Irish descent, most of these with whom he had been through these weeks, and, what was worse, they had been brigaded in with an old Irish regiment in the British army early in the summer. What their own ready working imagination had not taught them, about war and its superstitions and its queer and unreadable chances, the Irish had supplied to them. One thing which the Irish had taught them came under the category 'important, if true.' It was founded on the well known fact that a man born to be hanged will never be drowned. Every man, it appeared, had a certain number fixed to him by fate. It represented the number of chances which were his against death, the number of times that he might face death front to front and escape. Some men had only a few chances, and a man might lose out on even the first of his chances. Others had many. But every time a man went through a desperate action he used one of his chances of escape. But there were certain men who had used up all of their chances, who had reached the very last number. And then, in this their last moment, by some queer stumble of fate, they had been missed. After that they were not merely safe, they were isolated. Death fled from them. They could hunt death, and some of them did—so the Irish said, but they could not achieve it from human hands.

Wardwell, it was whispered among the boys with wise nodding of heads, Wardwell was one of these. And they counted the tale of the numbered chances that he had used, until he had, somehow, missed the last unfailing one.

After that, they said, he had no chance. And they told of places where he had put himself in the path of death, of how men had died in front of him and behind him, how he had been shot through so many times that now he hardly bled when wounded. This last was untrue, of course. Many things that they told were over drawn, as they would be. Most of the tales were inaccurate. And, again as would happen, many of the things were only half told.

So Wardwell understood, and smiled when he felt his officer hesitate about naming the word danger to him.

He was partly Irish himself, and he knew that some of the times when he had escaped death it had been hardly short of miraculous. Also he knew that there were other men in the armies who like himself had lived through almost unbelievable numbers of chances and that these were marked men who did not seem to be able to die in battle.

For himself, however, he had no need of the theory of chances which explained these things to the men. He knew.