“I came to just as you and your captors were leaving and followed to help you, but was captured, put to work on the soup truck, and escaped tonight,” said Tim.
“We tunneled out of our prison, came here to see if the coast was clear, and are going back now to get a bunch of prisoners who are waiting for our report,” said Phil.
“Go on, and I’ll wait till you get back this way,” Tim proposed.
“All right,” Phil assented. “We must hustle along to see if those two boches stumble into our tunnel. It caved in before we finished it.”
That ended the conversation, and the two prisoner-scouts hastened up the hill after the two enemy soldiers, whose mysterious conference, held under appearances of the most careful secrecy, caused Phil and Dan to wonder more and more as they puzzled over the few words they had been able to understand. Halfway up the incline they caught sight of the worthy pair, walking leisurely and almost arm-in-arm, totally unsuspicious, it appeared, of the proximity of any unfriendly humans at large.
Near the top of the hill they turned to the right and soon were moving along a highway that led into the heart of the town. The two scouts were greatly relieved by this, as it virtually precluded any possibility of their discovering the escape tunnel leading from the cellar of the prison and overlooking the sandpit. The shorter route for them would have been across the unfenced yard into which the tunnel had been cut.
A minute later Phil and Dan were back again in the basement and reporting the success of their scouting expedition. The prisoner of the prisoners had been bound and gagged and lay like a mummy in one corner, scowling weirdly in the dim candle light. After inspecting his bonds and gag to make certain that he was not likely to work loose or raise an alarm with his voice, Phil announced that all was ready for a departure. This announcement was communicated to the prisoners upstairs and presently all were assembled in the cellar and ready to file out through the tunnel.
Phil desired very much to talk over plans with the other escaping prisoners, but the presence of the captured boche advised him that it was not well to run the risk of his being able to understand English. So they filed out with only a “follow the leader” understanding.
Phil and Dan led the way down the hill to the point where Corporal Tim waited for their reappearance. Then they selected a sequestered nook, partly shielded with a growth of high bushes near the mouth of the sandpit and there held a conference.
“It seems to me that this is a case of every man for himself,” Evans remarked after several of the boys, with less constitutional initiative, had put, or seconded, the question, “What shall we do next?”