An hour after dark the three slipped quietly over the parapet and out through the barbed wire, dragging a stretcher after them. It was a fairly quiet night, with only an occasional rifle cracking and no artillery fire. A bright moon floated behind scudding clouds, and perhaps helped the adventure by the alternate minutes of light and dark and the difficulty of focusing eyes to the differences of moonlight and dark and the blaze of an occasional flare when the moon was obscured. Behind the parapet the Towers waited with rifles ready, and stared out through the loopholes; and behind them the French artillery officer, and his signalers standing by their telephone, also waited with the loaded guns and ready gunners at the other end of the wire. The watchers saw the dark blot of men and stretcher slip under the wires, and slowly, very slowly, creep on through the long grass. Half-way across, the watchers lost them amidst the other black blots and shadows, and it was a full half-hour after when a private exclaimed suddenly: "I see them," he said. "There, close where we saw the hand."
The moon vanished a moment, then sailed clear, throwing a strong silvery light across the open ground, and showing plainly the German wire entanglements and the black-and-white patchwork of their barricade. There were no visible signs of the rescue party, for the good reason that they had slipped into and lay prone in the wide shell crater that held the wounded Frenchman. Far spent the man was when they found him, for he had lain there three nights and two days with a bullet-smashed thigh and the scrape across his skull that had led the rest of his night patrol to count him dead and so abandon him.
Now the moon slid again behind the racing clouds, and patches of light and shadow in turn chased across the open ground.
"Here they come," said the captain of B Company a few minutes later. "At least I think it's them, altho' I can only see two men and no stretcher."
"Do you see them?" said an eager voice in French at his ear, and when he turned and found the gunner captain and explained to him, the captain made a gesture of despair. "Perhaps it is that they cannot move him," he said. "Or would they, do you think, return for more help? I should go myself but that I may be needed to talk with the battery. Perhaps one of my signalers——"
But the Englishman assured him it was better to wait; they could not be returning for help; that the three could do all a dozen could.
Again they waited and watched in eager suspense, glimpsing the crawling figures now and then, losing them again, in doubts and certainty in swift turns as to the whereabouts and identity of the crawling figures.
"There is one of them," said the captain quickly; "there, by himself, in those cursed red breeches. They show up in the flarelight like a blood-spot on a clean collar. Dashed idiot! And I was a fool, too, to let him go like that."
But it was plain now that 'Enery Irving was dragging his red breeches well clear of the others, although it was not plain, what the others had done with the stretcher. There were two of them at the length of a stretcher apart, and yet no visible stretcher lay between them. It was the sergeant who solved the mystery.
"I'm blowed!" he said, in admiring wonder; "they've covered the stretcher over with cut grass. They've got their man too—see his head this end."