Bruce Part 14

Some one--a woman, from the dress--was apparently picking her way through the boulders. As Bruce moved forward, a big rock shut her off from his view and from the view of the hamlet and of the maneuvering infantry company a furlong away.

Just then a puff of breeze blew from eastward toward the collie; and it bore to him a faint scent that set his ruff a-bristle and his soft brown eyes ablaze. To a dog, a scent once smelled is as recognizable again as is the sight of a once-seen face to a human. Bruce set off at a hand-gallop toward the clump of boulders.

The Red Cross nurse, whom Bruce had so nearly killed, was off duty until the night-shift should go on at the hospital. The nurse had taken advantage of this brief surcease from toil, by going for a little walk in the cool sunset air, and had carried along a bag of sewing.

Up to three months ago this nurse had been known as Heinrich Stolz, and had been a valued member of the Wilhelmstra.s.se's workingforce of secret agents. Then, acting under orders, Herr Heinrich Stolz had vanished from his accustomed haunts. Soon thereafter a Red Cross nurse--Felicia Stuart by name had reported for duty at Paris, having been transferred thither from Italy, and bearing indubitable credentials to that effect.

From carefully picked-up information Stolz had just learned of the expected arrival of the three troop-trains at the junction at nine that evening. The tidings had interested him keenly, and he knew of other people to whom they would be far more interesting.

Seating himself under the lee of the easternmost rock, Stolz primly opened his sewing-bag and drew forth various torn garments. The garments were for the most part white, but one or two were of gaudy colors.

By way of precaution, in case of discovery, the spy threaded a needle.

Thus, if any one should chance to see him shake out a garment, preparatory to laying it on his knee and mending it, there could be no reasonable cause for suspicion. Herr Stolz was nothing if not efficient.

He held up the needle and poked the thread at its eye in truly feminine fashion.

He had just finished this feat of dexterity when he chanced to look up from his work at sound of fast-pattering feet. Not thirty feet away, charging head on at him, rushed the great brown-and-white collie he supposed had been shot.

With a jump of abject terror, Herr Stolz sprang up. Mingled with his normal fear of the dog was a tinge of superst.i.tious dread. He had been so certain the beast was shot! The doctor had given the order for his killing. The doctor was a commissioned officer. Stolz's German mind could not grasp the possibility of a soldier disobeying an officer's imperative command.

The collie was upon him by the time the spy gained his feet. Stolz reached frantically under his dress-folds for the deadly little pistol that he always kept there. But he was still a novice in the mysteries of feminine apparel. And, before his fingers could close on the weapon, Bruce's bared fangs were gleaming at his throat.

Stolz ceased to search for the weapon. And, as before, he threw up both frantic hands to ward off the furious jaws.

He was barely in time. Bruce's white teeth drove deep into the spy's forearm, and Bruce's eighty pounds of furry muscular bulk smote Stolz full in the chest. Down went the spy, under the terrific impact, sprawling wildly on his back, and fighting with both bleeding hands to push back the dog.

Bruce, collie-fashion, did not stick to one grip, but bit and slashed a dozen times in three seconds, tearing and rending his way toward the throat-hold he craved; driving through flesh of hands and of forearms toward his goal.

Like many another German, Stolz was far more adept at causing pain than at enduring it. Also, from birth, he had had an unconquerable fear of dogs. His nerves, too, were not yet recovered from Bruce's attack earlier in the day. All this, and the spectral suddenness of the onslaught, robbed him of every atom of his usual stony self-control.

Sergeant Mahan was a good soldier. Yet a minute earlier he had almost ruined his reputation as such. He had been hard put to it to refrain from leaving the ranks of his drilling company, a furlong from the rocks, and running at record speed toward the boulders. For he had seen the supposed nurse pa.s.s that way. And almost directly afterward he had seen Bruce follow her thither. And he could guess what would happen.

Luckily for the sake of discipline, the order of "Break ranks!" was given before Mahan could disgrace himself by such unmartial behavior.

And, on the instant, the Sergeant broke into a run in the direction of the rocks.

Wondering at his eccentric action, several of the soldiers followed.

The company captain, at sight of a knot of his men dashing at breakneck speed toward the boulders, started at a more leisurely pace in the same direction.

Mahan had reached the edge of the rocks when his ears were greeted by a yell of mortal fear. The captain and the rest, catching the sound, went faster. Screech after screech rang from the rocky enclosure.

Mahan rounded the big boulder at the crest of the ridge and flung himself upon the two combatants, as they thrashed about in a tumultuous dual ma.s.s on the ground. And just then Bruce at last found his grip on Stolz's throat.

A stoical German signal-corps officer, on a hilltop some miles to eastward, laid aside his field-gla.s.s and calmly remarked to a man at his side

"We have lost a good spy!"

Such was the sole epitaph and eulogy of Herr Heinrich Stolz, from his army.

Meantime, Sergeant Mahan was prying loose the collie's ferocious jaws from their prey and was tugging with all his might to drag the dog off the shrieking spy. The throat-hold, he noted, was a bare inch from the jugular.

The rest of the soldiers, rushing up pell-mell, helped him pull the infuriated Bruce from his victim. The spectacle of their admired dog-hero, so murderously mauling a woman of the Red Cross, dazed them with horror.

"Take him AWAY!" bellowed Stolz, delirious with pain and fear. "He's KILLED me--der gottverdammte Teufelhund!"

And now the crazed victim's unconscious use of German was not needed to tell every one within hearing just who and what he was. For the quavering tones were no longer a rich contralto. They were a throaty baritone. And the accent was Teutonic.

"Bruce!" observed Top-Sergeant Mahan next morning, "I've always said a man who kicks a dog is more of a cur than the dog is. But you'll never know how near I came to kicking you yesterday, when I caught you mangling that filthy spy. And Brucie, if I had kicked you, well--I'd be praying at this minute that the good Lord would grow a third leg on me, so that I could kick myself all the way from here to Berlin!"

CHAPTER VI. The Werewolf

When Bruce left the quiet peace of The Place for the h.e.l.l of the Western Front, it had been stipulated by the Mistress and the Master that if ever he were disabled, he should be shipped back to The Place, at their expense.

It was a stipulation made rather to soothe the Mistress's sorrow at parting from her loved pet than in any hope that it could be fulfilled; for the average life of a courierdog on the battle-front was tragically short. And his fate was more than ordinarily certain. If the boche bullets and shrapnel happened to miss him, there were countless diseases--bred of trench and of hardship and of abominable food--to kill him.

The Red Cross appeal raised countless millions of dollars and brought rescue to innumerable human warriors. But in caring for humans, the generosity of most givers reached its limit; and the Blue Cross--"for the relief of dogs and horses injured in the service of the Allies"--was forced to take what it could get. Yet many a man, and many a body of men, owed life and safety to the heroism of some war-dog, a dog which surely merited special care when its own certain hour of agony struck.

Bruce's warmest overseas friends were to be found in the ranks of the mixed Franco-American regiment, nicknamed the "Here-We-Comes." Right gallantly, in more than one tight place, had Bruce been of use to the "Here-We-Comes." On his official visits to the regiment, he was always received with a joyous welcome that would have turned any head less steady than a thoroughbred collie's.

Bruce enjoyed this treatment. He enjoyed, too, the food-dainties wherewith the "Here-We-Comes" plied him. But to no man in the army would he give the adoring personal loyalty he had left at The Place with the Mistress and the Master. Those two were still his only G.o.ds.

And he missed them and his sweet life at The Place most bitterly. Yet he was too good a soldier to mope.

For months the "Here-We-Comes" had been quartered in a "quiet"--or only occasionally tumultuous--sector, near Chateau-Thierry. Then the comparative quiet all at once turned to pandemonium.

A lanky and degenerate youth (who before the war had been unlovingly known throughout Europe as the "White Rabbit" and who now was mentioned in dispatches as the "Crown Prince") had succeeded in leading some half-million fellow-Germans into a "pocket" that had lately been merely a salient.

From the three lower sides of the pocket, the Allies ecstatically flung themselves upon their trapped foes in a laudable effort to crush the half-million boches and their rabbit-faced princeling into surrender before the latter could get out of the snare, and to the shelter of the high ground and the reenforcements that lay behind it. The Germans objected most strenuously to this crushing process. And the three beleaguered edges of the pocket became a triple-section of h.e.l.l.

It was a period when no one's nerves were in any degree normal--least of all the nerves of the eternally hammered Germans. Even the fiercely advancing Franco-Americans, the "Here-We-Comes," had lost the grimly humorous composure that had been theirs, and waxed sullen and ferocious in their eagerness.

Thus it was that Bruce missed his wontedly uproarious welcome as he cantered, at sunset one July day, into a smashed farmstead where his friends, the "Here-We-Comes," were bivouacked for the night. By instinct, the big dog seemed to know where to find the temporary regimental headquarters.

He trotted past a sentry, into an unroofed cattle-shed where the colonel was busily scribbling a detailed report of the work done by the "Here-We-Comes" during that day's drive.

Coming to a halt by the colonel's side, Bruce stood expectantly wagging his plumy tail and waiting for the folded message from division headquarters to be taken off his collar.

Usually, on such visits, the colonel made much of the dog. To-day he merely glanced up abstractedly from his writing, at sight of Bruce's silken head at his side. He unfastened the message, read it, frowned and went on with his report.

Bruce continued to wag his tail and to look up wistfully for the wonted petting and word of commendation. But the colonel had forgotten his existence. So presently the collie wearied of waiting for a caress from a man whose caresses, at best, he did not greatly value. He turned and strolled out of the shed. His message delivered, he knew he was at liberty to amuse himself as he might choose to, until such time as he must carry back to his general a reply to the dispatch he had brought.

From outside came the voices of tired and lounging soldiers. A traveling kitchen had just been set up near by. From it arose a blend of smells that were mighty tempting to a healthily hungry dog. Thither, at a decorous but expectant pace, Bruce bent his steps.

Top-Sergeant Mahan was gazing with solicitous interest upon the toil of the cooks at the wheeled kitchen. Beside him, sharing his concern in the supper preparations, was Mahan's closest crony, old Sergeant Vivier. The wizened little Frenchman, as a boy, had been in the surrender of Sedan. Nightly, ever since, he had besought the saints to give him, some day, a tiny share in the avenging of that black disgrace.

Mahan and Vivier were the warmest of Bruce's many admirers in the "Here-We-Comes." Ordinarily a dual whoop of joy from them would have greeted his advent. This afternoon they merely chirped abstractedly at him, and Mahan patted him carelessly on the head before returning to the inspection of the cooking food.