Dad did not answer. He turned from the boy, brushing the back of a shaking hand over his eyes. He fell to examining his panting horse. The sorrel stood with drooped head and red eyes and nostrils. There were blood-flecks on his sweat-drenched sides. He was heaving and wind-broken. “Foundered!” pronounced Dad, sorrowfully. “I don’t wonder. The going was harder than any foxhunt. Now, how in blue and pink blazes are we going to get back? It’s a good two miles and more to our outposts.” He glanced about. Twenty yards distant the runaway, reeking with sweat and breathing in snorts, had come to a standstill, his senseless nightmare fear lost in exhaustion, and was cropping grass. A hand slipped into Dad’s. “Honest, sir, I didn’t do it on purpose,” Jimmie was saying. “I’m sorry the horses are so done up. And--and I’m a lot sorrier we missed getting to where the Third Ambulance Corps is. Maybe it isn’t too late, yet. We could walk the horses back, you know. It’s only a few miles. Hallo! Here comes Emp! All tuckered out. But as game as tunket, the good little cuss!” Sure enough, up the slope toiled the yellow puppy, his tongue hanging out to an unbelievable length, his multishaded fur coated with dust. He had kept up as well as he could. But he was no fox-hound--at least, not more than perhaps one or two per cent.--and the pace had proven far too hot for him to be in at the death. Still he had done his level four-legged best. And here at last he was, a trifle belated and very leg-weary, but triumphant at having finally overtaken his little master. Emp gamboled weariedly yet joyfully about the boy; then, to show his spirit was less impaired than his body, he dashed awkwardly to one side and seized in his teeth the crumpled piece of paper that had caused Jimmie’s tumble. The paper, its mission accomplished, had lodged at the base of a rock. Thence Emp dragged it and, professing to recognize in it a deadly yet very conquerable foe, shook it fiercely, accompanying his shakes with short, breathless growls of extreme fury. “Here, you!” exhorted Jimmie, pouncing on Emp and forcibly taking the wad of paper from the dog’s reluctant paws, seeking to mask his own fall-shaken nerves under a display of juvenile bombasity. “Here, you; Emperor Napoleon Pete Bub Bonaparte Brinton Dog, Esq., you drop that! It’s a war-relic, and I’m a goin’ to keep it and show it to my grand-children. “I’m goin’ to say to ’em: ‘You little numskulls, just you gaze on this yellowed sheet of parchment. Your grandfather had been a-ridin’ horseback, man and boy, for pretty near six months, when this priceless relic gave him his first fall.’ I’m going to inscribe on it--on it-- “Why, hello! There _is_ something written on it already. I’ll have to rub it out and write my inscription over it.” He had partly unfolded the paper as he meandered on. Now he read aloud, slowly, and with difficulty deciphering the half-chewed screed: