“‘Hello!’ says I.  ’What the deuce are you doing here?’—­’Holding the hill, Sir,’ says he, in good United States.  ‘Not all alone?’ says I. He shrugs his shoulders at that.  ‘The others were killed or hurt,’ says he.  ’The Red Cross people took them all away last night,—­Lieutenant, Sergeant, everyone.  But our battery must keep the hill.’  ‘Where’s the rest of the advance, though?’ says I.  ’I don’t know,’ says he.  ‘And you mean to say,’ says I, ’you’ve been here all night with the Turkish artillery hammering away at you?’ ’They are bad shots, those Turks, very bad,’ says he.  ’Also they send infantry to drive me away, many times.  See!  There come some more.  Down there!  Ah-r-r-r!  You will, will you?’ And with that he turns loose his big pepperbox on a squad that had just started to dash out of a ravine and rush him.  They were coming our way on the jump.  Scared?  Say, if there’d been anything to have crawled into, I’d have been in it!  As there wasn’t, I just flattened myself on the ground and waited until it was all over.

“Oh, he crumpled ’em up, all right!  He hadn’t ground out one belt of cartridges before he had ’em on the run.  But I want to tell you I didn’t linger around to see how the next affair would turn out.  I legged it back where I’d come from, and by nine o’clock I was behind our own lines, trying to find out what sort of campaign this was that left one machine gun to stave off the whole Turkish army.  Of course no one knew anything very definite.  The best guess was that our advance had been swung off for a flank movement, and that this particular one-man battery had been overlooked.  I don’t even know whether he was picked up again, or whether the Turks finally got him; but let me tell you, talk as much about your gallant Bulgarians as you like, some of those little Greeks were good fighters too.  Anyway, I’ll take off my hat any day to that one on the hill.”

“Gee!” I breaks out.  “Some scrapper, what?”

At which Mr. Robert swings around and gives me a look.  “Ah!” says he.  “I hadn’t realized, Torchy, that we still had the pleasure of your company.”

“Don’t mention it,” says I.  “I was just goin’ to—­er—­by the way, Mr. Robert, there’s a poor scrub waitin’ outside for a word with you, an old club waiter.  Says you knew him as Mike.”

“Mike?” says he, looking blank.

“His real name sounds like Popover,” says I.  “It’s a case of retrievin’ a lost job.”

“Oh, very well,” says Mr. Robert.  “Perhaps I’ll see him later.  Not now.  And close the door after you, please.”

So I’m shunted back to the front office, so excited over that war story that I has to hunt up Piddie and pass it on to him.  It gets him too.  Anything in the hero line always does, and this noble young Greek doin’ the come-one-come-all act was a picture that even a two-by-four imagination like Piddie’s couldn’t fail to grasp.

“By Jove, though!” says he.  “The spirit of old Thermopylae all over again!  I wish I could have seen that!”