Page:Cather--One of ours.djvu/382

368 to a group of his friends as they sat about a shell-hole pool where they had been washing their socks. He had just finished the story of how the Tommies had found a few mud huts at the place where the original Garden of Eden was said to have been,—a desolate spot full of stinging insects—when Oscar Petersen, a very religious Swedish boy who was often silent for days together, opened his mouth and said scornfully,

“That’s a lie!”

Dell looked up at him, annoyed by the interruption. “How do you know it is?”

“Because; the Lord put four cherubims with swords to guard the Garden, and there ain’t no man going to find it. It ain’t intended they should. The Bible says so.”

Hicks began to laugh. “Why, that was about six thousand years ago, you cheese! Do you suppose your cherubims are still there?”

“’Course they are. What’s a thousand years to a cherubim? Nothin’!”

The Swede rose and sullenly gathered up his socks.

Dell Able looked at his chum. “Ain’t he the complete bonehead? Solid ivory!”

Oscar wouldn’t listen further to a “pack of lies” and walked off with his washing.

Battalion Headquarters was nearly half a mile behind the front line, part dugout, part shed, with a plank roof sodded over. The Colonel’s office was partitioned off at one end; the rest of the place he gave over to the officers for a kind of club room. One night Claude went back to make a report on the new placing of the gun teams. The young officers were sitting