"My little chap!" he muttered, and his heart wept, but no tears came to his arid eyes. Then something cold touched his mouth. The rim of a cup with water in it. "Thank you!" he said, after a gulping draught, opening his eyes with the sense of reviving coolness stealing through his parched vitals. "That's—absolutely IT!"
The boyish treble said with a quaver in it:
"If I set this can beside you—I got the water from the pipe that is running—and the broken cup near it, could you manage to dip it in? Are you able to move this hand?"
"First class!" whispered Franky, lifting the member a very little way and dropping it again. "The—the other arm came in for it when the shrapper hit me in the ribs.... Halloa! Chocolate," for a bit touched his lips and was gently pushed between them. "That reminds me. I've an iron ration somewhere about me. No—they took my pack off when I got crumped up." It had seemed only—decent to Franky in those days of endless foot-slogging, to carry a pack and a Lee-Enfield and fare no better than his men. "Frightfully obliged. But I won't take this." This being another scrap of chocolate. "Is thy servant a Boche that he should stodge kid's grub?"
"You're English!" The blue eyes were full of hungry worship. "Man alive!" quavered the boyish treble, "you don't know how I've wanted to hear an English voice again. Tell me"—he panted and was pale under his multitudinous freckles, and the beating of the childish heart shook the thin young frame—"the Germans haven't beaten England—and sunk our Navy, and wiped out our Army—and killed the King, and Lord Roberts, and the Chief Scout, and Lord Kitchener, and—and my father and mother and everyone?"
"No!" said the wounded man, and his faint whisper was as convincing as though the negative had been shouted with the full strength of vigorous lungs. "Is that the kind of lie they've been pitching you? Perhaps it does 'em good to believe it! Let 'em, if they like. It'll never be true!"
"I knew it couldn't!" The clear treble had lost its quaver. "And yet there were times when I was funky. He seemed so awfully sure at—the beginning! And—the Enemy never stops—rubbing it in!"
"Who is the Enemy?"
"His name is von Herrnung. And—and I must go now, for—for your sake." The eyes flickered, and their pupils dilated to wide circles of frightened blackness. "He might wake up—and come—and find you. And if he found you——"
When the arteries have been almost depleted by hæmorrhage, and the strength of the body has ebbed to vanishing point, the brain is sometimes dazzlingly clear. Thus, though the faint whisper barely reached the ear of the other, the haggard eyes looking out of the begrimed and unshaven face of the man lying in the blood-soaked stretcher were alert and observant. He said reassuringly: