"Duck," I said, "you explain your presence here by telling me that you enlisted while drunk. How do you explain my being here?" "You’re a Doc. I guess there must be big money into it," he returned with a wink. "I draw no pay." "I believe you," he remarked, leering. "Say, don’t you do that to me, Doc. I may be unfortunit; I’m a poor damn fool an’ I know it. But don’t tell me you’re here for your health." "I won’t repeat it, Duck," I said, smiling. "Much obliged. Now for God’s sake let’s talk business. You think you’ve got me cinched. You think you can go home an’ raise hell in the 50th while I’m doin’ time into these here trenches. You sez to yourself, ’O there ain’t nothin’ to it!’ An’ then you tickles yourself under the ribs, Doc. You better make a deal with me, do you hear? Gimme mine, and you can have yours, too; and between us, if we work together, we can hand one to Mike the Kike that’ll start every ambulance in the city after him. Get me?" "There’s no use discussing such things----" "All right. I won’t ask you to make it fifty-fifty. Gimme half what I oughter have. You can fix it with Curley Tim Brady----" "Duck, this is no time----" "Hell! It’s all the time I’ve got! What do you expec’ out here, a caffy dansong? I don’t see no corner gin-mills around neither. Listen, Doc, quit up-stagin’! You an’ me kick the block off’n this here Kike-Wop if we get together. All I ask of you is to talk business----" I moved aside, and backward a little way, disgusted with the ratty soul of the man, and stood looking at the soldiers who were digging out bombproof burrows all along the trench and shoring up the holes with heavy, green planks. Everybody was methodically busy in one way or another behind the long rank of Legionaries who stood at the loops, the butts of the Lebel rifles against their shoulders. Some sawed planks to shore up dugouts; some were constructing short ladders out of the trunks of slender green saplings; some filled sacks with earth to fill the gaps on the parapet above; others sharpened pegs and drove them into the dirt façade of the trench, one above the other, as footholds for the men when a charge was ordered. Behind me, above my head, wild flowers and long wild grasses drooped over the raw edge of the parados, and a few stalks of ripening wheat trailed there or stood out against the sky--an opaque, uncertain sky which had been so calmly blue, but which was now sickening with that whitish pallor which presages a storm. Once or twice there came the smashing tinkle of glass as a periscope was struck and a vexed officer, still holding it, passed it to a rifleman to be laid aside. Only one man was hit. He had been fitting a shutter to the tiny embrasure between sandbags where a machine gun was to be mounted; and the bullet came through and entered his head in the center of the triangle between nose and eyebrows.