steady, pointed low at a great gray bulk, and fired.  That Hun pitched down out of the gray advancing line.  The sight almost overcame Dorn.  Dizzy, with blurred eyes, he leaned over his gun.  His abdomen and breast heaved, and he strangled over his gorge.  Almost he fainted.  But violence beside him somehow, great heaps of dust and gravel flung over him, hoarse, wild yells in his ears, roused him.  The boches were on the line!  He leaped up.  Through the dust he saw charging gray forms, thick and heavy.  They plunged, as if actuated by one will.  Bulky blond men, ashen of face, with eyes of blue fire and brutal mouths set grim—­Huns!

Up out of the shallow trench sprang comrades on each side of Dorn.  No rats to be cornered in a hole!  Dorn seemed drawn by powerful hauling chains.  He did not need to climb!  Four big Germans appeared simultaneously upon the embankment of bags.  They were shooting.  One swung aloft an arm and closed fist.  He yelled like a demon.  He was a bomb-thrower.  On the instant a bullet hit Dorn, tearing at the side of his head, stinging excruciatingly, knocking him down, flooding his face with blood.  The shock, like a weight, held him down, but he was not dazed.  A body, khaki-clad, rolled down beside him, convulsively flopped against him.  He bounded erect, his ears filled with a hoarse and clicking din, his heart strangely lifting in his breast.

Only one German now stood upon the embankment of bags and he was the threatening bomb-thrower.  The others were down—­gray forms wrestling with brown.  Dixon was lunging at the bomb-thrower, and, reaching him with the bayonet, ran him through the belly.  He toppled over with an awful cry and fell hard on the other side of the wall of loaded bags.  The bomb exploded.  In the streaky burst Dixon seemed to charge in bulk—­to be flung aside like a leaf by a gale.

Little Rogers had engaged an enemy who towered over him.  They feinted, swung, and cracked their guns together, then locked bayonets.  Another German striding from behind stabbed Rogers in the back.  He writhed off the bloody bayonet, falling toward Dorn, showing a white face that changed as he fell, with quiver of torture and dying eyes.

That dormant inhibited self of Dorn suddenly was no more.  Fast as a flash he was upon the murdering Hun.  Bayonet and rifle-barrel lunged through him, and so terrible was the thrust that the German was thrown back as if at a blow from a battering-ram.  Dorn whirled the bloody bayonet, and it crashed to the ground the rifle of the other German.  Dorn saw not the visage of the foe—­only the thick-set body, and this he ripped open in one mighty slash.  The German’s life spilled out horribly.