"What-oh, Fritz!" said Harry Hawke. "You shouldn't speak so loud. As you can't come art and I can't come in, 'ere's a little present for yer." And he stepped back with a loud chuckle.
"Hold on, Hawke, you ass!" shouted Dennis at the top of his voice, but he was too late. Harry Hawke had already drawn the pin and lobbed a hand grenade neatly through the crevice.
Dennis knew that there were less than five seconds between him and eternity, but bracing his foot against the side of the tunnel, he suddenly wrenched the German sniper on top of him and lay there.
"Ach, I have you now!" laughed the man triumphantly, but his words were drowned by the explosion, and as the end of the passage was blown into the open air, the steel grating with it, Dennis felt the man he clutched grow strangely limp in his hands, and his own face bathed as with a hot rain.
"That's the way to do 'em in, Tiddler. What-oh, it's put the tin hat on one of 'em, and not 'arf, it 'asn't!"
"Yes, you confounded jackass; and it's nearly put the tin hat on me!" exclaimed Dennis, rolling the thing which had once been a man to one side with a shudder.
Harry Hawke's face was a picture. Consternation at what might have happened, and a huge joy that it had not happened, struggled for mastery, and between the two the game little Cockney broke down and sobbed like a child.
"Why didn't yer sing out, sir?" he wailed.
"I did sing out, my boy, but you sang in! However, never mind. How is it going?" said Dennis, squeezing the disconsolate one's shoulder.
"We've got the trench, sir," said Tiddler, whose face was as white as Hawke's under the dirt that grimed it. "Our chaps are consolidating the position now."