Part 5

And so it was. For the sixth advance of the German masses had carried them well into the Grande Place. McDermott, crouched at his window, cut loose with his gun at pointblank range as the first wave, five men deep, passed by him, splashing along the thick ranks from behind as one might sweep a garden hose down a row of vegetables. Taken thus in the rear, ambushed, with no knowledge of the strength of the attacking force behind them, the German shock troops swayed and staggered, faced about and fell and broke. For right into the milling herd of them, and into the second advancing wave, the British poured their bullets. The colonel, who had been about to order a retreat, ordered a charge, and before the stampeded remnant of the first two waves could recover themselves the British were on them with grenades and bayonets, flinging them back into the third wave, just advancing to their support, in a bleeding huddle of defeat.

McDermott saw the beginning of that charge, and with his bung starter in his hand he rushed from the door to join it. But he did not see the end of it, nor did he see the _poilus_, as they came slouching into the village five minutes later to give the repulse weight and confirmation, redolent of onions and strange stews, but with their bayonets--those bayonets that are part of the men who wield them, living things, instinct with the beautiful, straight, keen soul of France herself.

McDermott did not see them, for some more of the Hôtel Fauçon had fallen on him, crushing one of his ankles and giving him a clout on the head.

“Whoever it was turned loose that machine gun from the inn window, did the trick,” said the colonel, later. “It's hardly too much to say that he blocked the way to Hazebrouck--for the time, at least, if one man can be said to have done such a thing--what's that?”

“That” was McDermott, who was being carried forth, unconscious, to an ambulance. It was his blue overalls that had occasioned the colonel's surprise. He was neither French nor British nor German; palpably he was a civilian, and a civilian who had no business there. And in his hand he clasped a bung starter. His fingers were closed over it so tightly that in the base hospital later they found difficulty in taking it away from him.

Owing, no doubt, to the blow on his head, McDermott was unable to recall clearly anything that had taken place from the moment he had first fallen asleep under the influence of French brandy until he awakened in the hospital nearly four weeks later. During this period there had been several intervals of more open-eyed dreaming, succeeded by lapses into profound stupor; but even in these open-eyed intervals, McDermott had not been himself. It was during one of these intervals that a representative of the French Government bestowed the Croix de Guerre upon McDermott, for it had been learned that he was the man behind the machine gun that had turned the tide of combat.

McDermott, his eyes open, but his mind in too much of a daze even to wonder what the ceremony was about, sat in a wheel chair, and in company with half a dozen other men selected for decoration, listened to a brief oration in very good French, which he could not have understood had he been normal. In answer he muttered in a low tone, rubbing his broken and bandaged head: “I think maybe I will jine that war, afther all!”

The French officer assumed that McDermott had spoken some sort of compliment to France and kissed McDermott on both cheeks, in front of the hospital staff, several American reporters, and as much of the French army as qould be spared to do honor to the occasion. The _Croix de Guerre_ made no impression upon McDermott, but the kiss briefly arrested his wandering consciousness, and he cried out, starting up in his chair and menacing the officer: “Where is me bung starter?” Then he fainted.

A good many thousands of people in France and England and America learned from the newspapers the story of the nondescript in the blue overalls, who had behaved so gallantly at the crucial moment of a crucial fight. But McDermott never did. He seldom read newspapers. No one had been able to learn his name, so the reporters had given him a name. They called him “Dennis.” And it was “Dennis” who got the fame and glory. McDermott would not have identified himself with Dennis had he seen the newspapers. When he awakened from his long, broken stupor, with its intervals of dazed halfconsciousness, the first thing he did was to steal away from that hospital; he left without having heard of Dennis or of the decoration of Dennis.

There was one thing that he had experienced that did live hazily and confusedly in his memory, however, although he could not fix it in its relationship to any other thing. And that was the fact that he had met Gustave Schmidt. Three or four months after he slipped away from the hospital--a period of unchronicled wanderings, during which he had tried unsuccessfully to enlist several times--he limped into a saloon on the Brooklyn water front and asked Tim O'Toole, the proprietor, for his usual. He had just got back to Brooklyn, and he carried his earthly possessions in a bundle wrapped in brown paper.

“I hear Yordy Crowley isn't givin' his racket this year,” said McDermott, laying his bundle on the bar and pouring out his drink.

“He is not,” said Tim. “He is in France helpin' out thim English.”

“Yordy will make a good sojer,” said McDermott. “He is a good man of his fists.”

“The Irish is all good sojers,” said Mr. O'Toole, sententiously. “There was that man Dinnis, now, that was in all av the papers.”

“I did not hear av him,” said McDermott. “An' phwat did he do?”

“He licked th' entire German army wan morn-in',” said O'Toole, “an' saved England, an' the Quane of France kissed him for it. 'Twas in all the papers. Or, maybe,” said Mr. O'Toole, “it was the King av Belg'um kissed him for ut. Anny-way wan of thim foreign powers kissed him wid the whole world lookin' on.”

“An' phwat did this Dinnis do thin?” asked McDermott.

“He attimpted to assault the person that kissed him,” said O'Toole. “Maybe 'twas the King av Italy. 'Twas in all the papers at th' time. Some wan told me ye were in France y'rsilf, Paddy.”

“I was that,” said McDermott. “I wint wid mules.”

“Did ye see annything av the war?”

“I did not,” said McDermott. “Divil a bit of ut, barrin' a lot o' racket an' a big roarin' divil av a stame-boiler thing that come bustin' through th' air an' took away the mules that was me passport. But I come near seein' some av ut, wan time.”

“An' how was it that ye come near it, an' missed it?” inquired Tim.

“I wint to slape,” said McDermott. “The war was slapin', an' I laid m'silf down b' the side av ut an' took a nap, too. Later, I woke up in the hospital, some wan havin' stipped on me whilst I was slapin', or somethin'. They was afther keep-in' me in th' hospital indefinite, an' I slipped away wan mornin', dodgin' the orderlies an' nurses, or I might have been there yet eatin' jelly an' gettin' me face washed f'r me. An' afther I got back here I thried to jine that war, but th' Amurrican Army w'u'd not have me.”

“And phwy not?”

“Because av me fut.”

“And how did ye hurt y'r fut?”

“Divil a bit do I know how,” said McDermott. “I'm tellin' ye 'twas done whilst I was aslape. I remimber gettin' soused in wan av thim Frinch barrooms, an' I w'u'd think it was a mule stipped on me fut whin I was slapin' off me souse, excipt that thim mules was gone before I got me souse.”

“An' ye saw naught av the war?” Tim was distinctly disappointed.

“But little of ut, but little of ut,” said McDermott. “But, Timmy,--wan thing I did whilst I was in France.”

“An' phwat was that?”

“I avened up an ould grudge,” said McDermott. He put away a second drink, rolling it over his tongue with satisfaction. “Do ye mind that Goostave Schmidt that used to kape bar acrost the strate? Ye do! Do ye mind th' time he hit me wid th' bung starter? Ye do!”

“Phwat thin?”

“Well, thin,” said McDermott, “I met up wid him ag'in in wan av thim Frinch barrooms. I do not remimber phwat he said to me nor phwat I said to him, for I was soused, Timmy. But wan word led to another, an' I give him as good as he sint, an' 'twas wid a bung starter, too. I brung it back wid me as a sooveneer av me travels in France.”

And, undoing his brown paper bundle, McDermott fished forth from among his change of socks and shirts and underwear the bung starter of the Hôtel Fauçon and laid it upon the bar for his friend's inspection. Something else in the bundle caught O'Toole's eye.

“An' phwat is that thing ye have there?” asked Tim.

“Divil a bit do I know phwat,” said McDermott, picking the article up and tossing it carelessly upon the bar. “'Twas layin' by me cot in the hospital, along wid m' bung starter an' me clothes whin I come to m'silf, an' whin I made me sneak from that place I brung it along.”

It was the _Croix de Guerre_.

V.--Looney the Mutt

|Looney had but one object in life, one thought, one conscious motive of existence--to find Slim again. After he found Slim, things would be different, things would be better, somehow. Just how, Looney did not know.

Looney did not know much, anyhow. Likely he would never have known much, in the most favorable circumstances. And the circumstances under which he had passed his life were scarcely conducive to mental growth. He could remember, vaguely, that he had not always been called Looney Hogan. There had been a time when he was called Kid Hogan. Something had happened inside his head one day, and then there had come a period of which he remembered nothing at all; after that, when he could remember again, he was not Kid any more, but Looney. Perhaps some one had hit him on the head. People were always hitting him, before he knew Slim. And now that Slim was gone, people were always hitting him again. When he was with Slim, Slim had not let people hit him--often. So he must find Slim again; Slim, who was the only God he had ever known.

In the course of time he became known, in his own queer world, from Baltimore to Seattle, from Los Angeles to Boston, as Slim's Lost Mutt, or as Looney the Mutt. Looney did not resent being called a dog, particularly, but he never called himself “The Mutt”; he stuck to “Looney”; Slim had called him Looney, and Looney must, therefore, be right.

The humors of Looney's world are not, uniformly, kindly humors. Giving Looney the Mutt a “bum steer” as to Slim's whereabouts was considered a legitimate jest.

“Youse ain't seen Slim Matchett anywheres?” he would ask of hobo or wobbly, working stiff or yeggman, his faded pale-blue eyes peering from his weather-worn face with the same anxious intensity, the same eager hope, as if he had not asked the question ten thousand times before.

And the other wanderer, if he were one that knew of Looney the Mutt and Looney's quest would answer, like as not:

“Slimmy de Match? Uh-huh! I seen Slim last mont' in Chi. He's lookin' fer youse, Looney.” One day the Burlington Crip, who lacked a hand, and who looked so mean that it was of common report that he had got sore at himself and bitten it off, varied the reply a bit by saying:

“I seen Slim las' week, an' he says: 'Where t' hell's dat kid o' mine? Youse ain't seen nuttin' o' dat kid o' mine, has you, Crip? Dat kid o' mine give me de slip, Crip. He lammistered, and I ain't seen him since. If youse gets yer lamps on dat kid o' mine, Crip, give him a wallop on his mush fer me, an' tell him to come an' find me an' I'm gonna give him another one.'”

Looney stared and wondered and grieved. It hurt him especially that Slim should think that he, Looney, had run away from Slim; he agonized anew that he could not tell Slim at once that such was not the truth. And he wondered and grieved at the change that must have taken place in Slim, who now promised him “a wallop on the mush.” For Slim had never struck him. It was Slim who had always kept other people from striking him. It was Slim who had, upon occasion, struck other people to protect him--once, in a hangout among the lakeside sand dunes south of Chicago, Slim had knifed a man who had, by way of jovial byplay to enliven a dull afternoon, flung Looney into the fire.

It never occurred to Looney to doubt, entirely, these bearers of misinformation. He was hunting Slim, and of course, he thought, Slim was hunting Looney. His nature was all credulity. Such mind as the boy possessed--he was somewhere in his twenties, but had the physique of a boy--was saturated with belief in Slim, with faith in Slim, and he thought that all the world must admire Slim. He did not see why any one should tell lies that might increase Slim's difficulties, or his own.

There was a big red star he used to look at nights, when he slept in the open, and because it seemed to him bigger and better and more splendid than any of the other stars he took to calling it Slim's star. It was a cocky, confident-looking star; it looked as if it would know how to take care of itself, and Slim had been like that. It looked good-natured, too, and Slim had been that way. When Looney had rustled the scoffin's for Slim, Slim had always let him have some of the best chow--or almost always. And he used to talk to that star about Slim when he was alone. It seemed sympathetic. And although he believed the hoboes were telling him the truth when they said that they had seen Slim, it was apparent even to his intelligence that they had no real sympathy with his quest.

Once he did find a certain sympathy, if no great understanding. He worked a week, one Spring, for a farmer in Indiana. The farmer wished to keep him, for that Summer at least, for Looney was docile, willing enough, and had a natural, unconscious tact with the work-horses. Looney was never afraid of animals, and they were never afraid of him. Dogs took to him, and the instant liking of dogs had often stood him in good stead in his profession.

“Why won't you stay?” asked the farmer.

“Slim's lookin' fer me, somewheres,” said Looney. And he told the farmer about Slim. The farmer, having perceived Looney's mental twilight, and feeling kindly toward the creature, advanced an argument that he thought might hold him.

“Slim is just as likely to find you if you stay in one place, as if you go travelin' all over the country,” he said.

“Huh-uh,” said Looney. “He ain't, Mister. It's this way, Mister: every time I stop long any-, wheres, Slim, he passes me by.”

And then he continued, after a pause: “Slim, he was always good to me, Mister. I kinda want to be the one that finds Slim, instead of just stayin' still an' waitin' to be found.”

They were standing in the dusk by the barn, and the early stars were out. Looney told him about Slim's star.

“I want to be the guy that does the findin',” went on Looney presently, “because I was the guy that done the losin'. One night they was five or six of us layin' under a lot of railroad ties we had propped up against a fence to keep the weather off, an' we figgered on hoppin' a train fer Chi that night. Well, the train comes along, but I'm asleep. See? The rest of t' gang gits into an empty in de dark, an' I don't wake up. I s'pose Slim he t'inks I'm wit' t' gang, but I don't wake up under them ties till mornin'. I went to Chi soon's I could, but I ain't never glommed him since, Mister. I didn't find him dere. An' dat's t' way I lost Slim, Mister.”

“Maybe,” suggested the farmer, “he is dead.”

“Nit,” said Looney. “He ain't dead. If Slim was croaked or anything, I'd be wised up to it. Look at that there star. Dat is Slim's star, like I told youse. If Slim had been bumped off, or anything, Mister, that star wouldn't be shinin' that way, Mister.”

And he went back to his own world--his world--which was a succession of freight and cattle cars, ruinous sheds and shelters in dubious suburbs near to railroad sidings, police stations, workhouses, jails, city missions, transient hangouts in bedraggled clumps of wood, improvised shacks, shared with others of his kind in vacant lots in sooty industrial towns, chance bivouacs amidst lumber piles and under dripping water tanks, lucky infrequent lodgings in slum hotels that used to charge fifteen cents for a bed and now charge a quarter, golden moments in vile barrooms and blind tigers, occasional orgies in quarries or gravel pits or abandoned tin-roofed tool houses, uneasy, loiterings and interrupted slumbers in urban parks and the squares or outskirts of villages. Sometimes he worked, as he had with the Indiana farmer, with the wheat harvesters of the Northwest, or the snow shovelers of the metropoli, or the fruit gatherers of California; but more often he loafed, and rustled grub and small coin from the charitably disposed.

It all seemed the natural way of life to Looney. He could not remember anything else. He viewed the people of the world who did not live so, and whom he saw to be the majority, as strange, unaccountable beings whom he could never hope to understand; he vaguely perceived that they were stronger than he and his ever-hiking clan, and he knew that they might do unpleasant things to him with their laws and their courts and their strength, but he bore them no rancor, unlike many of his associates.

He had no theories about work or idleness; he accepted either as it came; he had little conscious thought about anything, except finding Slim again. And one thing worried him: Slim, who was supposed to be looking for Looney, even as Looney was looking for Slim, left no mark. He was forever looking for it, searching for the traces of Slim's knife--a name, a date, a destination, a message bidding Looney to follow or to wait--on freight sheds and water tanks, and known and charted telegraph poles and the tool houses of construction gangs. But Slim, always just ahead of him, as he thought, continually returning and passing him, ever receding in the distance, left no mark, no wanderer's pateran, behind. Looney left his own marks everywhere, but, strangely enough, it seemed that Slim never saw them. Looney remembered that one time when he and Slim were together Slim had wished to meet and confer with the Burlington Crip, and had left word to that effect, penciled and carved and sown by the speech of the mouth, from the Barbary Coast to the Erie Basin. And the Burlington Crip, with his snaggle teeth and his stump where a hand had been, had joined them on the Brooklyn waterfront within two months. It had been simple, and Looney wondered why Slim omitted this easy method of communication. Perhaps Slim was using it and Looney was not finding the marks. He knew himself for stupid, and set his failure down to that, never to neglect on Slim's part. For Slim was Slim, and Slim could do no wrong.

His habit of searching for some scratched or written word of Slim's became known to his whole section of the underworld, and furnished material for an elaboration of the standing jest at his expense. When ennui descended upon some chance gathering in one of the transient hangouts--caravanserai as familiar to the loose-foot, casual guests, from coast to coast, as was ever the Blackstone in Chicago or the Biltmore in New York to those who read this simple history--it was customary for some wag to say:

“Looney, I seen a mark that looked like Slim's mark on a shed down in Alexandria, Virginny, right by where the Long Bridge starts over to Washington.”

And it might be that Looney would start at once, without a word, for Alexandria. Therein lay the cream of this subtle witticism, for its perpetrators--in Looney's swift departures.

Or it might be that Looney would sit and ponder, his washed-out eyes interrogating the speaker in a puzzled fashion, but never doubting. And then the jester would say, perhaps: “Why don't you get a move onto you, Looney? You're gonna miss Slim again.”

And Looney would answer, perchance: “Slim, he ain't there now. The' was one of them wobblies' bump-off men sayin' he seen Slim in Tacoma two weeks ago, an' Slim was headin' this way. I'm gonna wait fer him a while longer.”

But he never waited long. He could never make himself. As he had told the Indiana farmer, he was afraid to wait long. It was the Burlington Crip who had made him afraid to do that. The Crip had told him one time: “Looney, Slim went through here last night, while youse was asleep over on that lumber pile. I forgets youse is lookin' fer him or I'd a tipped him off youse was here.”

Slim had been within a hundred yards of him, and he had been asleep and had never known! What would Slim think, if he knew that? So thereafter he was continually tortured by the fancy that Slim might be passing him in the night; or that Slim, while he himself was riding the rods underneath a railway car, might be on the blind baggage of that very train, and would hop off first and be missed again. From day to day he became more muddled and perplexed trying to decide whether it would be better to choose this route or that, whether it would be better to stop here a week, or go yonder with all possible speed. And from month to month he developed more and more the questing, peering, wavering manner of the lost dog that seeks its master.

Looney was always welcome In the hang-outs of the wandering underworld. Not only was he a source of diversion, a convenient butt, but few could rustle grub so successfully. His meager frame and his wistfulness, his evident feebleness of intellect, drew alms from the solvent population, and Looney faithfully brought his takings to the hangouts and was dispatched again for more. Servant and butt he was to such lords as the Burlington Crip and the English Basher. But he did not mind so long as he was not physically maltreated--as he often was. The occasional crimes of his associates, the occasional connection of some of them with industrial warfare here and there, Looney sometimes participated in; but he never understood. If he were told to do so and so, for the most part he did it. If he were asked to do too much, or was beaten up for his stupidity, and he was always stupid, he quietly slunk away at his first opportunity.

The English Basher was a red-faced savage with fists as hard and rough as tarred rope; and he conceived the idea that Looney should be his kid, and wait upon him, even as he had been Slim's kid. Looney, afraid of the man, for a time seemed to acquiesce. But the Basher had reckoned without Looney's faculty for blundering.

He dispatched Looney one day, ostensibly to bum a handout, but in reality to get the lay of a certain house in a suburb near Cincinnati, which the Basher meditated cracking the next convenient night. Looney returned with the food but without the information. He had been willing enough, for he admired yeggmen and all their ways and works, and was withheld by no moral considerations from anything he was asked to do; but he had bungled. He had been in the kitchen, he had eaten his own scoffin's there, he had talked with the cook for twenty minutes, he had even brought up from the cellar a scuttle of coal for the kitchen range to save the cook's back, but he actually knew less about that house, its plan, its fastenings, its doors and basement windows than the Basher had been able to gather with a single stroke of the eye as he loitered down the street.

“Cripes! Whadje chin about with the kitchen mechanic all dat time, you?” demanded the Basher.

“She was stringin' me along,” said Looney humbly, “an' I spilled to her about me an' Slim.”

“Slim! ------ -------- yer, I've a mind t' croak yer!” cried the Basher.

And he nearly did it, knocking the boy down repeatedly, till finally Looney lay still upon the ground.

“'S'elp me,” said the Basher, “I've a mind to give yer m' boots! You get up an' beat it! An' if I ever gets my lamps onto you again I _will_ croak you, by Gawd, an' no mistake!”