"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!"
When Bruce left the quiet peace of The Place for the hell 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 gods. And he missed them and his sweet life at The Place most bitterly. Yet he was too good a soldier to mope.