CHAPTER TWELVE.
WHAT'S IN A NAME?
In Tom's visions of the great war there had been no picture of the sniper, that single remnant of romantic and adventurous warfare, in all the roar and clangor of the horrible modern fighting apparatus.
He had seen American boys herded onto great ships by thousands; and, marching and eating and drilling in thousands, they had seemed like a great machine.

He knew the murderous submarine, the aeroplane with its ear-splitting whir, the big clumsy Zeppelin; and he had handled gas masks and grenades and poison gas bombs.
But in his thoughts of the war and all these diabolical agents of wholesale death there had been no visions of the quiet, stealthy figure, inconspicuous in the counterfeiting hues of tree and rock, stealing silently away with his trusty rifle and his week's rations for a lonely vigil in some sequestered spot.
There was the same attraction about this freelance warfare which there might have been about a privateer in contrast with a flotilla of modern dreadnaughts and frantic chasers, and it reminded him of Daniel Boone, and Kit Carson, and Davy Crockett, and other redoubtable scouts of old who did not depend on stenching suffocation and the poisoning of streams.

It was odd that he had never known much about the sniper, that one instrumentality of the war who seems to have been able to preserve a romantic identity in all the bloody _melee_ of the mighty conflict.
For Tom had been a scout and the arts of stealth and concealment and nature's resourceful disguises had been his.

He had thought of the sniper as of one whose shooting is done peculiarly in cold blood, and he was surprised and pleased to find his friend in this romantic and noble role of holding back, single-handed, as it were, these vile agents of agonizing death.
Arsenic! Tom knew from his memorized list of poison antidotes that if one drinks arsenic he will be seized with agony unspeakable and die in slow and utter torture.

The more he thought about it, the more the cold, steady eye of the unseen sniper and his felling shot seemed noble and heroic.
Almost unconsciously he reached out and patted the rifle also as if it were some trusted living thing--an ally.
"Did you really mean you named it after me--honest ?" he asked.
Roscoe laughed again silently.