Bruce was still further aided by the shell-plowed condition of the hillside. Again and again he had to break his stride, to leap some shell-hole. Often he had to encircle such holes. More than once he bounded headlong down into a gaping crater and scrambled up its far side. These erratic moves, and the nine-hundred-yard distance (a distance that was widening at every second) made the sharpshooters' task anything but an exact science.
Mahan's gaze followed the dog's every step. Bruce had cleared more than three-fourths of the slope. The top-sergeant permitted himself the luxury of a broad grin.
"I'll buy Vivier all the red-ink wine he can gargle, next pay-day!" he vowed. "He was dead right about the dog. No bullet was ever molded that can get--"
Mahan broke off in his exultation, with an explosive oath, as a new note in the firing smote upon his trained hearing.
"The swine!" he roared. "The filthy, unsportsmanly, dog-eating Prussian swine! They're turning MACHINE-GUNS on him!"
In place of the intermittent rattle of rifleshots now came the purring cough of rapidfire guns. The bullets hit the upper hillside in swathes, beginning a few yards behind the flying collie and moving upward toward him like a sweeping of an unseen scythe.
"That's the wind-up!" groaned Mahan. "Lord, send me an even break against one of those Hun machinegunners some day! If--"
Again Mahan failed to finish his train of thought. He stared open-mouthed up the hill. Almost at the very summit, within a rod or two of the point where the crest would intervene between him and his foes, Bruce whirled in mid-air and fell prone.
The fast-following swaths of machine-gun bullets had not reached him. But another German enemy had. From behind a heap of offal, on the crest, a yellow-gray dog had sprung, and had launched himself bodily upon Bruce's flank as the unnoticing collie had flashed past him.
The assailant was an enormous and hyena-like German police-dog. He was one of the many of his breed that were employed (for work or food) in the German camps, and which used to sneak away from their hard-kicking soldier-owners to ply a more congenial trade as scavengers, and as seekers for the dead. For, in traits as well as in looks, the police-dog often emulates the ghoulish hyena.