"I was back with the guns you had given me when I heard that you were taking my place. Then I thought, can I be worthy of this--of what you have done for me, giving me back my own world, your world? I vowed I would be worthy--worthy of you. Heavens! How I made the guns play--bang-bang-bang!" He cupped his bands over his eyes as an imaginary range-finder, sweeping the field. "Oh, they are beautiful guns, these new models! With a battalion I won a regiment. I asked Lanny to tell you; did he?" "Yes, and also of the iron cross." "A fine bit of metal, the cross, and they have not been giving them too promiscuously, either," said Feller. "But they're not gun-metal! That is the real metal. It was my guns that closed the gate to the pass," he went on, swept by the flood of enthusiasm. "I didn't open fire till I could concentrate so as to make a solidly locked gate. I tell you, the guns are the thing! You ought to have seen that retreat curl up on itself. And where the shells struck on the hard road--phew! They lifted the Grays upward to meet shrapnel pounding them from the sky! We could have torn the whole Column to pieces if they hadn't surrendered. What a bag of rifles and guns and stores is going to our capital! Oh, our friends the Grays were a little too fast! They didn't know what the guns meant in defence. The guns--they are back to their old place of glory! They rule!" "Was it your guns that fired into the mêlée there by the gate?" Marta asked. "Yes. I saw that soft target early. They put up a Red Cross flag at first, but I soon realized that it wasn't any dressing station; only stragglers; only the kind that run away without orders. So I let them have it, for that's the law of war, and the way they would give it to us and did, more than once. But I took care that no shots were fired at the house, though if it had not been your house I'd have sent a shell or two on the chance that some of the Gray staff might still be there. Then, after the surrender, I kept spanking that lot with intermittent shells till I was sure the Red Cross flag was justified." "The fire was very accurate, as I happen to know, for it wounded me," said Marta. So intent had he been in talking to his audience, to her eyes, that now for the first time he noticed the bandage on her forearm. His impressionable features were as struck with alarm and horror at sight of the tiny red spot as if she had been in danger of immediate death. "You--you were down by the road?" he gasped. "My guns were firing at you? Why--how?" "Helping with the wounded." "The Gray wounded?" "Yes." "Of course, you would--with any wounded!" he cried. "Splendid! Like you! It is not bad? It does not pain you?" He bent over the red spot, his lips very near it and twitching, all his volatile force melting into solicitude and his voice taut, as if he himself were suffering the anguish of a dozen wounds. "Only a scratch. Don't worry about it!" she assured him soothingly, with a peculiar smile.