“We’re pretty far up for people of our exalted rank, George,” he said to his best friend.
“Ahead of the point, General.”
“It’s okay,” the Colonel had said. “Now we throw away the book and chase for keeps.”
“I couldn’t agree more fully, General. Because I wrote the book myself,” his best friend said. “But suppose they had left something there?”
He pointed to the logical place to defend.
“They didn’t leave anything there,” the Colonel had said. “They haven’t enough stuff left even for a chicken-shit fire-fight.”
“Everybody’s right until he’s wrong,” his best friend said, adding, “General.”
“I’m right,” the Colonel said. He was right, too, although in obtaining his exact knowledge he had not fulfilled the complete spirit of the Geneva Convention which was alleged to govern the operation of war.
“Let’s really chase,” his best friend had said.
“There’s nothing holding us up and I guarantee they won’t stop at either of those two. I didn’t get that from any kraut either. That’s from my head.”
He looked over the country once more, and heard the wind in the trees and smelled the heather under their boots and looked once more at the tracks in the wet sand and that was the end of that story.
I wonder if she’d like that? he thought. No. It builds me up too much. I’d like to get somebody else to tell it to her though and build me solid. George can’t tell it to her. He’s the only one that could tell it to her and he can’t. He sure as hell can’t.
I’ve been right over ninety-five percent of the time and that’s a hell of a batting average even in something as simple as war. But that five percent when you are wrong can certainly be something.
I’ll never tell you about that, Daughter. That’s just a noise heard off stage in my heart. My lousy chicken heart. That bastard heart certainly couldn’t hold the pace.
Maybe he will, he thought, and took two of the tablets and a swallow of gin and looked across the gray ice.
I’m going to get that sullen character in now and pick up and get the hell to the farm house or the lodge, I suppose that I should call it. The shooting’s over.
CHAPTER XLII
THE COLONEL had signalled the boatman in by standing up, in the sunken barrel, firing two shots toward the empty sky, and then waving him toward the blind.
The boat came in slowly, breaking ice all the way, and the man picked up the wooden decoys, caught the calling hen and put her in her sack, and, with the dog slithering on the ice, picked up the ducks. The boatman’s anger seemed to be gone and to be replaced by a solid satisfaction.
“You shot very few,” he said to the Colonel.
“With your help.”
That was all they said and the boatman placed the ducks carefully, breasts up, on the bow of the boat and the Colonel handed his guns and the combination cartridge box and shooting stool into the boat.
The Colonel got into the boat and the boatman checked the blind and unhooked the pocketed, apron-like device which had hung on the inside of the blind to hold shells. Then he got into the boat too and they commenced their slow and laborious progress out through the ice to the open water of the brown canal. The Colonel worked as hard with the poling oar as he had worked coming in. But now, in the bright sunlight, with the snow mountains to the north, and the line of the sedge that marked the canal ahead of them, they worked together in complete co-ordination.
Then they were into the canal, slipping breakingly in from the last ice; then, suddenly, light-borne and the Colonel handed the big oar to the boatman and sat down. He was sweating.
The dog, who had been shivering at the Colonel’s feet, pawed his way over the gunwale of the boat and swam to the canal bank. Shaking the water from his white bedraggled coat, he was into the brown sedge and brush, and the Colonel watched his progress toward home by the movement of the brush. He had never received his sausage.