"How many are there?"
"I could not say, Monsieur; but few, assuredly, as I saw quite as many as I thought were in the ground, and more, slip away after dark with the guns and spades and boxes."
"Then wait very quietly till I come back," he lifted her from his lap, but she clung desperately and would have cried had he not promised to return safely.
She let him go then and he crawled away, passing just outside the door to see if the street were clear. Skirting the torn walls and keeping in the heavier shadows, creeping over piles of rubble as silently as a rat, he came at last to a point which overlooked the hole where men toiled, wearily, though in desperate haste. The sentry paced back and forth within a hundred feet of him, sometimes speaking in monosyllables to his comrades below.
At highest tension Jeb waited, until he felt not only sure of their strength but reasonably certain that no others remained in the lower strata of catacombs; because they rested at frequent intervals, implying a state of exhaustion, and this, in turn, indicated an absence of relief shifts. Fifteen men in all were there, besides the sentry. On the street level their rifles had been stacked. The hole—a machine-gun redoubt—in which they dug was about five feet deep; the sides were steep; the only weapons near at hand were picks and spades.
Tingling with excitement, he stole carefully back to the ruined door and entered, bringing with him a stout club picked from the débris. The girl's arms flew about him at once, and the wan voice whispered tremulously:
"Oh, Monsieur, if you had not come!"
"But I did come," he took her again upon his lap, seeming in a much better humor than when he had gone out. "We're about to get away, little one; are you big enough to do just what I say?"
There was a look of reproach in her eyes which he could not, of course, have seen, but he felt her arms tighten.
"Everything," she whispered. "Can Monsieur carry the little sisters?"