“In the meantime, you and Ned can wait here for me. If I’m still alive and at liberty, I’ll be back here by sun-up sure. If I don’t show up by then, you can rest assured that something unforeseen has happened to detain me. In case anyone comes snooping around here while I am gone, you boys had better go aloft in the Flyer and return here again for me to-morrow night. But be sure and wait here until daylight for me, unless you are discovered.”
This plan was about the best that any of the boys could suggest, so Buck donned the old clothes he had found, dirtied his face with dust from the roadway and bade his chums good-bye cheerfully. They stared regretfully after his retreating figure in the gloom.
“If anything happens to him, I never shall forgive myself,” said Ned.
Alan laughed in a brave attempt to seem lighter-hearted than he was.
“If anybody can come through this stunt safely, it’s Buck Stewart,” he said. “Mark my words, he’ll be back here chipper as a sparrow by sunrise, with a full plan of how and when we are to rescue Bob.”
“I certainly hope so,” muttered Ned, doubtfully.
Meanwhile, Buck was striding rapidly along the road into town, with his cap pulled low over his eyes and his right hand nursing the handle of a big revolver in his hip pocket. He skulked mostly along the side of the way, where the black shadows from the hedges tended to conceal him. His eyes kept shifting warily from left to right and his ears were strained to catch any sound that might warn him of other prowlers on the road.
Frequently he passed wayside graves—sometimes a single mound of earth; at other times a number of them side by side. Every somber mound of earth was marked by a wooden cross, on the apex of many of which the fallen soldier’s hat was hung. Buck noticed that in many cases, the rough cap of a French infantryman hung side by side with battered German helmets. The German army does everything neatly, thoroughly. Whenever there is time it buries the fallen enemy as well as its own dead.
By and by little gloomy houses began to appear straggling along the wayside and Buck knew then that he was in the outskirts of the town. No lights were shown in any of the windows. Not a cow lowed, nor dog barked. The hush of either dread or desertion seemed heavy in the dark night air.
Buck had not gone much farther when he was startled by a sharp: