“Yes, sir, he’s wounded,” the lad responded.
“Well, he’ll probably wish he had been killed outright,” was the colonel’s cryptic comment.
As if in reply to that remark, German guns far to the north let go a salvo of shells, several of which fell uncomfortably near. The colonel glanced in the direction from which the projectiles seemed to come, but his pace never wavered.
“Fritz seems to be out of bed, anyway,” was all he said, as another shell exploded not a hundred yards to the left of them, throwing up a veritable geyser of dirt and rock and splinters of steel.
As they came over a little knoll, Ollie pointed out where the tunnel entrance was, and the colonel raised his glasses to get a better view as he walked.
Approaching, from an about equal distance beyond the spot where Harper and his prisoner sat, were the general and members of his staff. It was when both parties were within fifty feet of the entrance to the passageway that a shell exploded with such violence and in such proximity that it knocked both Harper and his prisoner on their backs. For a moment everyone thought they had been killed.
It was Ollie, who with a feeling of dread, realized the real damage that that shell might have done; and as misfortune would have it his surmise was right. It had landed directly over the tunnel, a few yards beyond its entrance, and with such force as to cave the whole thing in!
As the general and colonel arrived almost simultaneously, the situation and its necessities became clear. It required but a moment’s investigation by one of the members of the Engineers Corps to verify the fact that the passageway had been effectually blocked by a great wall of earth caved in by the shock of the exploding shell.
The general held a short consultation with the colonel of Engineers, and then called both Tom and Harper to them.
“Young men,” he said, “we are going to place a great deal of reliance upon your judgment and sense of direction. A straight line drawn from the entrance of this tunnel to the spot where the shell caused a cave-in shows that you were right in saying that it ran almost directly north from where you started. You are sure it takes no turns?”