Dan nodded his willingness, and soon they were creeping along the course indicated. After they had left a considerable screen of bushes behind, they stood erect and looked carefully about them; then continued their descent. They stopped, however, several times on the way, looking about and listening intently for evidence of the presence of enemy soldiers. In one of these precautionary halts, Phil said to his companion scout:
“I don’t believe this is a stonequarry at all. It’s a big sandpit, according to my notion. And this is a path used by the workmen who live up on the higher ground. I bet it leads right down to the entrance of the pit.”
“I believe you’re right,” Dan returned. “There’s so all-fired much sand around here, it can’t be otherwise. How far do you think we’d better go? Everything looks clear in this direction.”
“Let’s go down to the foot of this hill and see how things look there before we go back,” Phil proposed in reply.
They continued to the bottom of the hill and found themselves at the wide entrance of a huge sandpit with bushes growing in abundance along the border nearest their approach. Here they stood close to a clump of bushes, listening and peering cautiously in all directions for warning sounds or signs indicating the presence of enemy soldiers in the vicinity.
The warning came almost immediately. The sound of voices in conversation only a few feet from them caused the boys to stand as still almost as the ground on which they stood. They held their breath, as it were, and listened eagerly to catch the words being exchanged by two men on the opposite side of the thicket.
Apparently the conference was very secret, for the principals had sought a dark and out-of-the-way place to “put their heads together,” and the eagerness of their tones indicated the degree of importance they placed on the purpose of the interview. But it was in German, and although both of the listeners had studied that language at school, they were unable to form a clear idea as to the main purpose of the conversation.
It did not take Phil long, however, to identify one of the men. His high-pitched voice and tripping utterance, little short of a stutter, could hardly have been duplicated by another. Without a doubt he was the oddly proportioned commissioned officer who had been in charge of the squad of boches that Phil had captured at Belleau Woods and who later, with the assistance of another, had turned the tables on him.
“It’s my boaconstrictor evil genius,” Phil mused, although not very apprehensively. “How I wish I could make out what they are talking about.”
He did, however, catch a few words that intensified his curiosity, although they carried to his mind little or no enlightenment. Considerable was said about an aeroplane and “the Americans” and bombs. Phil and Dan both strained their ears and their imagination to put these and other single-word ideas together and uncover the meaning of the interview, but in vain. Both had studied “literary German” at school, but their knowledge of conversational Prussian was exceedingly limited.