Then he crept slowly around the bushes of the nest and forward in the darkness of underbrush until he could almost touch the five men there, every one of them like a blackened sweating devil, pouring lead at the American flag. And here in his narrative John paused, having learned much of the proper telling of a story; looked at the choked, almost anguished, suspense in the faces around him. “Then what?” asked one in a whisper. Then, John said, carefully building his legend, he examined his pistols and cocked them; and when all five men were busy, working like fiends out of hell, he sprang to his feet and covered the distance in one bound; brought his guns crashing upon the skulls of two of them; kicked a third in his belly and sent him over the machine-gun; and jammed the pistol barrels into the bellies of the fourth and fifth. The third, knocked into the line of fire, was slain by his own gun, and the first and second rose, with blood gushing from their skulls, and reached for the sky. He marched the four of them, gory with wounds, out across the surging hell of no-man’s-land, and that was the end of a nest that had taken thousands of American lives. It was the end, John learned to understand, of the most villainous bandits on the whole western front.... The news of John spread, and three months after his return the local paper announced: JOHN BENTON TO SPEAK John Benton, one of the greatest heroes in the World War, and Idaho’s native son and our own fellow-townsman, will address a mammoth meeting tonight in the Paramount Theater and relate some of his most dramatic experiences. He will tell of his capture, alone and unaided and in a veritable deluge of bursting shellfire, of the most murderous and treacherous machine-gun nest on the whole German front. And John did. The audience went wild with applause and he was again a hero. On the following Sunday he had dinner at the mayor’s home and repeated his story to nine distinguished guests; and when one of them, Harry Cuthwright, a banker, declared that Germany was a degenerate nation and that America had entered the war with the noblest of motives, John hastily agreed. Within a month he was the most respected person in his home city. The girls looked at him with coy admiration and the men deferred to him when he spoke. Though happy and proud, he was troubled, too: he no longer knew what the truth was or was not, and with obstinate ardor he strove not to care. And he blundered again.