The Desert of Wheat by Zane Grey (best books to read now .TXT) 📗

of them, like himself, had a lonely soul. Perhaps they were facing it. He could not conceive of a careless, thoughtless, emotionless attitude toward this first night in the front-line trench.

Dorn gradually grew more acutely sensitive to the many faint, rustling, whispering sounds in and near the dugout.

A soldier came stooping into the opaque square of the dugout door. His rifle, striking the framework, gave out a metallic clink. This fellow expelled a sudden heavy breath as if throwing off an oppression.

"Is that you, Sanborn?" This whisper Dorn recognized as Dixon's. It was full of suppressed excitement.

"Yes."

"Guess it's my turn next. How—how does it go?"

Sanborn's laugh had an odd little quaver. "Why, so far as I know, I guess it's all right. Damn queer, though. I wish we'd got here in daytime.… But maybe that wouldn't help."

"Humph!… Pretty quiet out there?"

"So Bob says, but what's he know—more than us? I heard guns up the line, and rifle-fire not so far off."

"Can you see any—"

"Not a damn thing—yet everything," interrupted Sanborn, enigmatically.

"Dixon!" called Owens, low and quickly, from the darkness.

Dixon did not reply. His sudden hard breathing, the brushing of his garments against the door, then swift, soft steps dying away attested to the fact of his going.

Dorn tried to compose himself to rest, if not to sleep. He heard Sanborn sit down, and then apparently stay very still for some time. All of a sudden he whispered to himself. Dorn distinguished the word "hell."

"What's ailin' you, pard?" drawled Brewer.

Sanborn growled under his breath, and when some one else in the dugout quizzed him curiously he burst out: "I'll bet you galoots the state of California against a dill pickle that when your turn comes you'll be sick in your gizzards!"

"We'll take our medicine," came in the soft, quiet voice of Purcell.

No more was said. The men all pretended to fall asleep, each ashamed to let his comrade think he was concerned.

A short, dull, heavy rumble seemed to burst the outer stillness. For a moment the dugout was silent as a tomb. No one breathed. Then came a jar of the earth, a creaking of shaken timbers. Some one gasped involuntarily. Another whispered:

"By God! the real thing!"

Dorn wondered how far away that jarring shell had alighted. Not so far! It was the first he had ever heard explode near him. Roaring of cannon, exploding of shell—this had been a source of every-day talk among his comrades. But the jar, the tremble of the earth, had a dreadful significance. Another rumble, another jar, not so heavy or so near this time, and then a few sharply connected reports, clamped Dorn as in a cold vise. Machine-gun shots! Many thousand machine-gun shots had he heard, but none with the life and the spite and the spang of these. Did he imagine the difference? Cold as he felt, he began to sweat, and continually, as he wiped the palms of his hands, they grew wet again. A queer sensation of light-headedness and weakness seemed to possess him. The roots of his will-power seemed numb. Nevertheless, all the more revolving and all-embracing seemed his mind.

The officer in his speech a few hours back had said the sector to which the battalion had been assigned was alive. By this he meant that active bombardment, machine-gun fire, hand-grenade throwing, and gas-shelling, or attack in force might come any time, and certainly must come as soon as the Germans suspected the presence of an American force opposite them.

That was the stunning reality to Dorn—the actual existence of the Huns a few rods distant. But realization of them had not brought him to the verge of panic. He would not flinch at confronting the whole German army. Nor did he imagine he put a great price upon his life. Nor did he have any abnormal dread of pain. Nor had the well-remembered teachings of the Bible troubled his spirit. Was he going to be a coward because of some incalculable thing in him or force operating against him? Already he sat there, shivering and sweating, with the load on his breast growing laborsome, with all his sensorial being absolutely at keenest edge.

Rapid footfalls halted his heart-beats. They came from above, outside the dugout, from the trench.

"Dorn, come out!" called the corporal.

Dorn's response was instant. But he was as blind as if he had no eyes, and he had to feel his way to climb out. The indistinct, blurred form of the corporal seemed half merged in the pale gloom of the trench. A cool wind whipped at Dorn's hot face. Surcharged with emotion, the nature of which he feared, Dorn followed the corporal, stumbling and sliding over the wet boards, knocking bits of earth from the walls, feeling a sick icy gripe in his bowels. Some strange light flared up—died away. Another rumble, distinct, heavy, and vibrating! To his left somewhere the earth received a shock. Dorn felt a wave of air that was not wind.

The corporal led the way past motionless men peering out over the top of the wall, and on to a widening, where an abutment of filled bags loomed up darkly. Here the corporal cautiously climbed up breaks in the wall and stooped behind the fortification. Dorn followed. His legs did not feel natural. Something was lost out of them. Then he saw the little figure of Rogers beside him. Dorn's turn meant Rogers's relief. How pale against the night appeared the face of Rogers! As he peered under his helmet at Dorn a low whining passed in the air overhead. Rogers started slightly. A thump sounded out there, interrupting the corporal, who had begun to speak. He repeated his order to Dorn, bending a little to peer into his face. Dorn tried to open his lips to say he did not understand, but his lips were mute. Then the corporal led Rogers away.

That moment alone, out in the open, with the strange, windy pall of night—all-enveloping, with the flares, like sheet-lightning, along the horizon, with a rumble here and a roar there, with whistling fiends riding the blackness above, with a series of popping, impelling reports seemingly close in front—that