A heavy, yet trembling sigh, terminating in a muffled groan, showed him his next course. Stumbling forward, he almost fell over a body prone across his path. Another groan, then:
"Oh-h-h, Gawd — Gawd!" Blaine thought he recognized something half familiar in the words or voice.
Stooping down, he felt a horrible slime and a mashed something that was not like anything he had ever felt before. He dropped to his knees, drew out his small flashlight, hitherto held in reserve for desperate emergencies, and cautiously turned it on.
It glimmered across a face — a face at once familiar and horrible. A well-known face, yet so ghastly in its bloody disfigurement that Blaine shivered, drew back, then bent downward and forward.
"Finzer!" he gasped. "My God! Is this you?"
The one eye left faintly opened and the gashed lips muttered, though Blaine shuddered as he saw by the flashlight that the man's face and head were so torn by machine gun spatter that it was only a question of minutes, if not seconds, before he would be dead.
As it was, Finzer's one eye recognized his sergeant. He tried to speak, but vainly. Finally, with an effort that must have been a last clutch at his vanishing strength, he flung his mashed and bloody hand on a paper pad, with pencil laying by. One sentient gleam; then he gave up the ghost. What did Finzer mean by that last gesture?
With reluctance Blaine picked up the pad and read the following words now almost illegible with blood.
"Boche got me. Machine back by log pile. Good shape. Landed in tree.
Done for. Saw you drift this way. Get machine if yours won't —"
Sadly Lafe drew the body of his friend aside, covered it with his leather blanket coat, piled brush over it, and drew meditatively back, saying: