"You have suggested enough," said the captain. "Your idea alters much. Meet me in half an hour. Everything will be prepared."
He named a place and left the hut.
Jean Brosseau bent forward in bed, his eyes burning.
"When Captain O'Neill gives you final instructions he may tell you to employ certain people on the other side. Here!" he motioned for the map again, "I shall point out to you where they are."
He took a pencil and made a dot toward the corner of one of the squares.
"In the old military maps a house stood there," he said. "My father's house it was. There was also a stable; there was also a cellar, which the Germans have discovered, but beyond it was an old cellar quite concealed. Our people, at different times, have hidden there. There are both men and women there now. They will help you if they can."
Jean Brosseau fell back on the bed and closed his eyes.
An hour later Hal climbed into the pilot seat of the biplane that Captain O'Neill had placed at their disposal. He felt somewhat uncomfortable in his ragged attire, but he knew that he could not be attired in better costume for the undertaking. Chester also had discarded his civilian clothes and donned rags.
The big "bus," as the airplanes were called, with propeller whirling, lumbered over the ground; the smoothness of flying came to it and, deafened to everything but the clatter of the motor and the thrash of the air-screw, Hal gazed down. Points of light, yellow and red and some almost white, glowed on the ground. Some of these marked villages, encampments; others signified nothing at all—decoys to attract the "eggs" of the German night flying falcons.
They neared the lines, and the strip of "No Man's Land," with the pocked and pitted streaks of defenses on both sides, gleamed white and spectral green under the star-dashed shells. An infantry attack was going on; Hal could see the shapes of men as they flattened; they were pinched to dots when they jumped up and then they spread out again.