Did he have the nerve? He saw that this first case was not a bad one and could stand a little jolting. He told the _brancardiers_ to load on their man and hop in. Then he turned his car across in line with the German fire. “I kin wait heah twill yuh come back. Yu ain’t got no special use fo’ me,” Wash began, but this time only a look from Don ended the negro’s protest. In three minutes he had reached the shell-hole by the trees. Half a dozen direct or ricocheting machine-gun bullets had hit the ambulance, but had done no more damage than to add to the holes and dents already in its sturdy sides. It was the work of but a few minutes for the two _brancardiers_ with their one stretcher, and Don and Wash with another, to get most of the wounded fellows into the ambulance, while shells and smaller calibre missiles flew and struck all round them. The last poor chap was suffering with a wound in the leg. Entirely out of his mind he fought against being moved, so Wash went back with the bearers to hold the soldier on the stretcher. As they started back, Don, who had been glancing at his carburetor, began to lower the hood over his motor. The sound of an approaching shell; nothing can describe it; the long swish of a carriage whip, the rush of water at high pressure from the nozzle of a hose, the wind singing past a kite string--these might barely suggest it. Hearing it once it is never forgotten. Don looked when he noticed it; one must do that when it is near, though. Trying to dodge a shell is as useless as ducking at lightning. Then came the thud of the projectile and the almost simultaneous explosion. The boy’s eyes, just above the hood, had been upon the approaching stretcher. The next instant the group of four--the _brancardiers_, Wash and the raving man--had ceased to exist amidst a furious upheaval of flame and earth and stones. Innumerable flying pieces struck the engine hood and Don’s helmet. The wounded men were protected by the sides of the ambulance. Don walked slowly over and looked down at the hole made by the shell; he glanced around at the torn and twisted bodies flung twenty feet away. Something like a sob choked him as he recognized the black face of his helper. Don had almost compelled him to come within this area of awful danger, else the poor fellow would have been living now. Flinging a suggestion of salt water from his eyes, the boy leaped to his seat and addressed the wounded men behind him: “Where was the nearest dressing station set up?” “Back of that low hill to the left,” a weak voice directed, and the car shot forward. “Get ’em in here! You bring in the biggest loads, so keep at it!” said the field-surgeon. “Others of your crowd are getting them back to the evacuation hospital all right. Go to it, boy!” And again Don went flying toward the fighting front, toward the level fields filled with crimson flowers, waving grass or ripening grain, stretched south and west from Belleau Wood.