"One! Two! Three!"——
Without a word of command the man on the left started, and Henri, at the far end of the line, announced his own number. It was twenty.
"Good!" he told them. "More than I thought. Twenty resolute men fighting for France, for la belle France, my comrades——"
"Ah! For la belle France, for home, for victory!" the veteran shouted.
"Yes, for victory. And listen, my friends; we may help towards it," Henri told them. "Resolute men, if they can reach some strong position in that fort, may well assist our friends battling farther back on the plateau. Well, now, there are twenty of us, and I see that there are half a dozen or more ammunition-boxes."
"Ten," the veteran corrected him instantly; "ten, Monsieur Henri"—it had come to "Monsieur" now, such was the veteran's opinion of our hero.
"Good! Ten boxes of cartridges is it? Ten thousand rounds. Now let's see to the water-bottles. How many are there?"
The men, on returning to the spot where Henri stood, had at once deposited their finds at the bottom of the trench, so that there was no difficulty in making an inventory; and now a mere glance discovered the fact that there were more than two water-bottles per man, all filled, as Henri was assured, and all big ones.
"One bottle will last a careful man, say, two days, eh?" he asked.
"In the dungeons of the fort, three days, Monsieur Henri," the veteran replied; "and, besides, it's bitterly cold weather, when a man does not need to drink so much."