"I haven't been able to find out a great deal about that particular movement," Hardy went on, "but they'd carried a salient and had been too busy to send in a mopping-up party. They thought the thing was finished, and that boy of mine was helping with the wounded, when he ran across a Prussian officer. That hulk of hate was lying there, like a dog with rabies, with an automatic under his belly. When my boy stooped down, to give him first aid, that overlooked mass of hate turned and shot him through the stomach, shot him abominably, uselessly!"
His voice trailed off, and for only a second or two he sat inert. Then he pulled himself together, grasped his gear-shift, and let in his clutch. Some inner commotion of his mind seemed to expend itself in the fury with which he raced his car-engine as they got under way again and went rocking and slewing down into the wide valley before them.
"And all this that you have been telling me," the wistful-eyed man at his side finally observed, "it means nothing to you, now of all times? It means nothing to you to-day, when you can so confidently tell me that this Canada of yours is a great country?"
Hardy, slowing up at the outskirts of the city, frowned a little.
"I can't say that I see any particular connection between saying I'm proud of my country and a mopping-up operation that failed to put in an appearance two years ago over in Flanders," protested the man of business as he crossed a canal-bridge and tooled his car in through the trim gateway of The Works where his day's duties awaited him.
"But have we not dreamed," began the man at his side, with a singular note of earnestness in his quiet-toned voice. "That our work is done, our work for this wide Dominion, before what you have spoken of as the mopping-up has taken place? The enemies of our Empire have gone down in defeat, and the big fire is out, as you have said. But how about the salvage-corps and the cleaning up after the tumult and the fever and the smoke? This country, I am told, is calling on you. It is calling on you, not for help, but for sagacity. It is calling on you to organize a victory so that the fruits of it may be your own. It is calling on you to consolidate a position which has been paid for in blood, and dearly paid for, so that peril may not reappear in your path and disaster may not slink up on you in the dark. It is calling on you, not for a renewal
