“Look!” was all he could say for the moment, and Harper, following Tom’s bidding, drew in his breath sharply, then gave a low whistle.
They had made a discovery of tremendous moment! But had they made it in time?
“Out! Out!” Tom ordered. “We may be blown to atoms any second if we stay here.”
And indeed it was true. The sharp turn in the tunnel brought them into a great cavernous chamber in which there must have been at least fifty tremendous bombs, all connected by copper wires with a heavy cable which hung suspended from the ceiling. It was obvious that during their long occupancy of the St. Mihiel salient the Germans had dug this tunnel and planted these mines, for just such a contingency as now existed—enemy occupation of Thiaucourt. And while neither lad was an engineer, both knew sufficient about bombs to realize that there were enough there to blow the whole town site off the map and annihilate every person within a radius of more than half a mile.
“Ten thousand men are quartered on the space that those bombs would blow up, and the Germans may touch them off at any time! Run! Run!” Tom ordered, and, setting the example, he bounded by Harper, the searchlight held out before him, tearing toward the mouth of the tunnel as fast as his legs would carry him.
“They’re probably waiting for that German lieutenant to return,” Tom managed to speculate jerkily, without in the slightest reducing speed. “It’s pretty clear now that he was down here—to see that everything was all right—and put on—finishing touches.”
“Yeh,” agreed George, “and it just occurs to me now that he wore the insignia of the Signal Corps.”
“Wanted those papers,” Tom supplemented, “so as to know when the largest number of our men would be over the spot.”
“Uh-huh,” from Harper, but by this time neither had further breath to spare on conversation. They were forcing themselves forward with every ounce of energy they possessed.
As a gray light, barely discernible, loomed in the distance, they knew that at last they were approaching the mouth of the tunnel, and that the first streaks of dawn had appeared.