Page:Frank Owen - Rare Earth, 1931.djvu/70



LL through his life Scobee had had one inseparable chum—Rad Graham. And Rad had been killed in the War. Scobee had been with him when he died. It had been an ordeal so frightful it had snapped his reason. Blind with fury, he had set off single-handed to vanquish that grim gray enemy that had dragged off his friend. Reward for his gallant effort had been a bursting shell—blindness. But the sea of blackness did not engulf him until he beheld a lovely vision, the vision of the mother he had never known. She was walking about the battlefields, stanching the wounds of the dying, pleading for the life of a young boy whom Scobee was about to impale with his bayonet. There was no hatred