Frank as usual was the first to recover his self-possession.
"No use crying over spilt milk, fellows," he said, trying to infuse cheerfulness into his tone. "We've got to try Billy's recipe and make lemonade from the lemon that the rats have handed us."
"It's a mighty big lemon," said Tom, "and I don't see much sugar lying around."
"How could the brutes have got at it without our hearing them, do you suppose?" questioned Bart.
"That doesn't matter much," replied Billy. "And there's no use holding post-mortems. The thing is, what are we going to do?"
"We're going to get out of here to-night without fail," said Frank decidedly. "The moon won't come up till late and if the night is cloudy it won't show up at all. At any rate we can't stay here. There isn't a chance on earth of there being anything left in these houses, or we might take a chance on foraging. The Huns have seen to that. The longer we stay here the weaker we'll get. We've just got to make a break and trust our wits and our luck to get back to the lines."
"I guess you're right, old man," agreed Bart. "We'll just move our belts up a hole and pretend we're not hungry. Tom here's getting too fat anyway, and it'll do him good to give his stomach a rest. And as for Billy, he can take a nap and dream of that stew he didn't get."
"There's another thing, too," remarked Frank. "Those rats are likely to come back to-night for more, and they may have spread the news and bring a whole rat colony with them. No doubt they're famished since there's nothing left in the town to eat, and if there are enough of them they might go for us. Of course we could beat them off, but we'd be apt to make a lot of noise in doing it, and that might bring the Huns down on us. There's no use talking, we've got to skip."
They all agreed to this, and they passed the rest of that day as best they could until the light faded from the hole in the floor and night settled down in a pall of velvet. They clambered out of their temporary prison, their hearts beating with high determination.
They ventured out at last into the darkness, slipping along from one projection of the ruined houses to another, moving as lightly and stealthily as cats.