"I shouldn't wonder," said Dempsey. "I got a dippy kind of feelin' inside my own headpiece--piece of shell casin' come and beaned me. It don't amount to much, though; just enough to get me a wound stripe. You're the lucky guy, sarge. Maybe it's so you won't have to go back and prob'ly I will." The speaker sighed and grinned and then confessed to a great perception which many before him had known and which many were to know afterward, but which some--less frank than he--have sought to conceal. "I'll go back of course if they need me--and if I have to--but I'd just as lief not. You kin take it from me, I've had plenty of this gettin' all-shot-up business. Oncet is enough for First-Class Private Dempsey. "Say," he went on, "looks like you and me are goin' partners a lot here lately. I get mine right after you get yours. We ride back here together in the same tin Lizzie--you and me do--and now here we are side by each again. Well, there's a lot of the fellows we won't neither of us see no more. But their lives wasn't wasted, at that. I betcher there's a lot of German bein' spoke in hell these last two or three days. "Oh, you ain't heard the big news, have you? Bein' off your dip and out of commission like you was. Well, we busted old Mister Hindenburg's line in about nine places and now it looks like maybe we'll eat Thanksgivin' dinner in Berlin or Hoboken--one." Dempsey went on and every word that he uttered was news--how the seemingly premature advance of the battalion had not been a mistake at all; how the only slip was that the battalion walked into a whole cote of unsuspected machine-gun nests, but how the second battalion going up and round the shore of the hill to the left had taken the boche on the flank and cleaned him out of his pretty little ambuscade; how there were tidings of great cheer filtering back from all along the line and so forth and so on. Ginsburg broke in on him: "How's Captain Griswold?" "Oh, the cap was as good as dead when this here guy, Goodman, fetched him in on his back after he'd went out after you fell and fetched you back in first. I seen the whole thing myself--it was right after that that I got beaned. One good scout, the cap was. And there ain't nothin' wrong with this Goodman, neither; you kin take it from me." "Goodman?" Ginsburg pondered. The name was a strange one. "Say, was it this Goodman that kicked me in the ribs while I was tryin' to pick up the captain?"