Presently the leader stopped. They waited a moment while he fumbled along the boarded side of the trench. Then a plank slid back. It was the door of a dugout.
"This way, Major," the man said in French.
The major pushed Ruth through the narrow opening. The plank door was closed. It was a vile-smelling place.
A match was scratched, a tiny flame sprang up, and then there flared a candle—one of those trench candles made of rolled newspapers and paraffin. It illumined the dugout faintly.
There were bunks along the walls, and in the middle of the planked cave was a rustic table and two benches. Evidently the men who sometimes occupied this trench had spent their idle hours here. But to Ruth Fielding it seemed a fearful place in which to sleep, and eat, and loaf away the long hours of trench duty.
"All ready for us, Tremp?" asked Major Marchand of the man who had led them to this spot.
The American girl now saw that the man was a squat Frenchman in the horizon blue uniform of the infantry and with the bars of a sergeant. He was evidently one of the French officers assigned to teach the Americans in the trenches.
In his own tongue the man replied to his superior. He drew from one of the empty bunks two bulky bundles. The major shook them out and they proved to be two suits of rubber over-alls and boots together—a garment to be drawn on from the feet and fastened with buckled straps over the shoulders. They enclosed the whole body to the armpits in a waterproof garment.
"A complete disguise for you, Mademoiselle—with the helmet," Major Marchand suggested. "And a protection from the water."
"The water?" gasped Ruth.