Camp Lee, too, had been ablaze with American flags. And after he had learned the rules as to the flag salute Cash had never given the banners a second thought. The regimental flags, too, here in France, had seemed to him but a natural part of the Army’s equipment, and no more to be venerated than the twin bars on his captain’s tunic.
Thus he could not in the very least account for the fiery flare of rebellion that gripped him at this ramrod-like Prussian’s command to defile the emblem. Yet grip him it did. And it held him there, quivering and purple, the strange emotion waxing more and more overpoweringly potent at each passing fraction of a second. Dumb and shaking he glowered down at the amused colonel.
Von Scheurer watched him placidly for a few moments; then with a short laugh he advanced the test. Reaching for the sheet of paper whereon he had sketched the flag the colonel held it lightly between the fingers of his outstretched hands.
“It is really a very simple thing to do,” he said carelessly, yet keeping a covert watch upon the mountaineer. “And it is a thing that every loyal German subject should rejoice to do. All I required was that you first tear the emblem in two and then spit upon it—as I do now.”
But the colonel did not suit action to words. As his fingers tightened on the sheet of paper the dugout echoed to a low snarl that would have done credit to a Cumberland catamount.
And with the snarl six feet of lean and wiry bulk shot through the air across the narrow table that separated Cash from the colonel.
Von Scheurer with admirable presence of mind snatched his pistol from its temporary resting place in his lap. With the speed of the wind he seized the weapon. But with the speed of the whirlwind Cash Wyble was upon him, his clawlike fingers deep in the colonel’s full throat, his hundred and sixty pounds of bone and gristle smiting Von Scheurer on chest and shoulder.
Cash had literally risen in air and pounced on the Prussian. Under the impact Von Scheurer’s chair collapsed. Both men shot to earth, the colonel undermost and the pistol flying unheeded from his grasp. Over, too, went the table, and the electric light upon it. And the dugout was in pitch blackness.
There in the dark Cash Wyble deliriously tackled his prey, making queer and hideous little worrying sounds now and then far down in his throat, like a dog that mangles its meat.
And there the sentry from the earthen passageway found them when he rushed in with an electric torch, and followed by a rabble of fellow soldiers.