No use! What could men avail against a force like this, a force mocking at their puny efforts, sweeping on, on——
It had leapt across the trench, caught the first draft from the treacherous gully, with a roar like a roar of a maddened bull it started up the mountainside, driving men before it, threatening to wind its deadly robes about them even as they ran——
“Back, back!” was shouted hoarsely from parched throats. “More trenches—more sacks—more—more——”
Choking, stumbling, gasping, the boys ran with the rest.
“Our radio!” cried Bob, in a rasping voice that he himself did not know. “We’ll have to get the set out of danger! Then we can come back!”
The boys nodded and turned their stumbling steps in the direction of the lodge. Blindly they made their way through heavy underbrush and over fallen trees, one thought uppermost in their minds—to get their radio set to a place of safety while there was yet time.
They had gone a considerable distance before they were out of reach of the flying embers of the fire, before they found relief from the suffocating smoke of it.
Then they paused for a moment, exhausted, and sank down upon the ground. They brushed the hair back from their hot faces, wiped the perspiration from their eyes and stared at each other. So begrimed were they, so soot-blackened and altogether disreputable, that it would have been hard to recognize them as the same boys that had left the lodge so short a time before.
Herb grinned with something of his old, unquenchable humor.
“I guess our own families wouldn’t be able to recognize us now,” he said. “We sure are some mussed up.”