Page:Toilers of the Trails.djvu/40

 lery he had known nothing and this ceaseless thundering of the great guns, this taking to earth, like a fox to his burrow, when the high-explosive shells shrieked over, harassed his pride; this wiping out of men with shrapnel and machine guns was like emptying a charge of shot into a flock of bewildered yellow-legs on the James Bay marshes—it was not man's work.

But at length fate smiled on the one who had waited long. From the day that the —d Battalion reached the front, tales of the night forays of a neighboring Gurkha regiment had travelled to them down the trenches. In twos and threes these little brown men of Nepal, armed only with their terrible native kukeri, had been wriggling over on black nights, like snakes through the grass, to the advanced trenches and listening posts of the enemy. A leap, a thrust in the dark, a groan, and the stabbed men lying stiff in the gray dawn alone told the relief that the Gurkhas had been out again.

That these miniature men from far Himalayan foot-hills, whom he could toss with one hand, as he tossed the fur packs of the Great Company on a summer portage, should show the way to the German trenches to a dog-runner of the Rupert Land trails rankled sorely in the heart of the proud Cree.

"I know," replied his lieutenant, when asked for leave to go out on the next dark night, "but they haven't got a listening post or advanced trench in front of us; they're too far away and you can't expect to pile into a main trench full of Boches and not get wiped out. You're crazy, and besides, we need you."