Jean never knew exactly what happened after that. He remembered hearing men hard by cheering in a strange tongue; he remembered, too, the firing of rifles behind him; but after that he could recollect no more. Milady, who had been a governess in Brussels, crouched in the hay with the old woman and shuddered. They heard the galloping of the horses, the curses of the soldiers, and the firing, but they understood nothing of its significance. Then came the thunder of a shell bursting beneath the loft. The place took fire and the loose straw sent up clouds of smoke which helped make the terrified women and their position more terrible. They heard one sharp crackle of musketry; then dead silence. This was broken at length by footsteps advancing over the courtyard. They halted cautiously at the threshold of the barn, and then made a bold dash. Seeing nobody, the men halted again.
"I heard voices here," the first man shouted to a comrade. "Somebody is hiding hereabouts—some of the Huns."
Seizing the rungs of the ladder in one hand, he clambered like a cat towards the loft.
"Let the pigs burn," growled his comrade after him.
The women were hidden in the straw, but the soldier saw it move, and poised his bayonet over milady's breast.
"Come out of that," he shouted. In astonishment at hearing the sound of her own tongue, the Englishwoman moved her hands from her eyes.
"Save me!" she implored, and held her hands appealingly towards the soldier. And then Mme. Vinot was the witness of a strange scene. For the soldier, with a startled exclamation, flung down his rifle, seized the woman in his arms, kissed her, and spoke her name in endearing terms. It was her sweetheart, and twice that day, all unknowingly, he had saved her life! Lance-Corporal Bird was present at the sergeant's wedding some months afterwards, and vouches for the happy ending of the story.
VII—TALE OF THE MOHAMMODAN WOMAN SNIPER
When the war broke out, plain John Gallinshaw, a graduate of Harvard University, was earning the hardest of all livings as a journalist by the sweat of his pen. His home being in Newfoundland, he hurried back there, enlisted, came to England with the draft in the 1st Battalion N.R., and spent an arduous winter's training in Stevenson's favourite Edinburgh. Then selections for active service were made, and Corporal Gallinshaw's name was not among them. The men sailed from England late in the spring; and shortly after leaving port a stowaway was found. It was Gallinshaw. He wanted experience, and not even the fear of martial law prevented him from getting what he considered his share of the fun. The Megantic landed her troops, and for the first few weeks on Turkish soil, the preliminary baptism of fire once over, things went on in the old round of dullness, for life in the trenches at Gallipoli became very monotonous, as stereotyped as life at any popular seaside resort.