They all heard at once the snuffing of a dog, and with the sight of its black head stuck into the bull's-eye window, Billy dropped into the flood, breast deep, and struck out for the wall, up which he swarmed, regardless of scrape or strain.
He had seen the ambulance dogs in camp, and knew of the breed and their doings. Holding onto the narrow ledge like grim death with one hand, he used the other and his teeth in tearing out the scarlet lining from his cap, which he twisted around the dog's collar band. Blitz—for Blitz it was—whined his receipt for the red token, backed from the aperture, and padded away like the wind.
Two hours later the trap was lifted, and the exhausted survivors of this desperate adventure were hauled into daylight, joyfully greeted by a goodly company, including Roque. Stanislaws, sanitary officers, pioneers, and last, but not least, Blitz, tugging at the line by which he led the rescue party to the scene of his original discovery.
CHAPTER XV.
DUEL TO THE DEATH.
Schneider was a very walking furnace, with his burning desire to meet again, on equal footing, any individual of the Cossack band that had thrust him, lamblike, into the stone tomb under the farmhouse, and, particularly, the fake peasant for whose wiles he had so foolishly fallen.
"Give us a biplane hunt for that gang," he importuned Roque, "or I will never get the red out of my eyes. Filimonoff himself might have been in the crowd, for all I know, and you ought to be doing some tall bidding for his headdress. It was just like one of his tricks."
The firebrand felt that he had hit the mark with the last part of his heated argument. Roque would have counted full reward for the chase in the bagging alone of the wily chieftain of the strange horsemen.
He turned to Stanislaws, remarking: "You men for awhile will have to resume the use of your own machines in the carrying service. I have concluded to give Schneider a chance to retrieve his blunder and return a lesson that will stick into savage hides."