the collie before the slope could be traversed. A fast-running
dog is not an easy mark for a bullet--especially if the dog be a
collie, with a trace of wolf--ancestry in his gait. A dog, at
best, does not gallop straight ahead as does a horse. There is
almost always a sidewise lilt to his run.

Bruce was still further aided by the shell-plowed condition of
the hillside. Again and again he had to break his stride, to leap
some shell-hole. Often he had to encircle such holes. More than
once he bounded headlong down into a gaping crater and scrambled
up its far side. These erratic moves, and the nine-hundred-yard
distance (a distance that was widening at every second) made the
sharpshooters' task anything but an exact science.

Mahan's gaze followed the dog's every step. Bruce had cleared
more than three-fourths of the slope. The top-sergeant permitted
himself the luxury of a broad grin.

"I'll buy Vivier all the red-ink wine he can gargle, next pay-
day!" he vowed. "He was dead right about the dog. No bullet was
ever molded that can get--"

Mahan broke off in his exultation, with an explosive oath, as a
new note in the firing smote upon his trained hearing.

"The swine!" he roared. "The filthy, unsportsmanly, dog-eating
Prussian swine! They're turning MACHINE-GUNS on him!"

In place of the intermittent rattle of rifleshots now came the
purring cough of rapidfire guns. The bullets hit the upper