But in fifteen more minutes his inventive genius was rewarded. From a considerable distance, but each time more distinctly, now came the repeated call of "Whip-poor-will," and in less time than it seemed possible that they could make it, the other group had returned.
In low commands the lieutenant then directed affairs, and in exactly the way that he had been carried out of the hold of the Everett on the verge of suffocation, so they carried poor Tom Rawle back to their own lines.
And when he had been placed upon a cot in the first emergency hospital, Lieutenant Mackinson hurried off to make his report, in the honor of which all shared.
For not only had they found a location from which to wireless advance-line communications to field headquarters, but they had also intercepted a message, knowledge of which resulted in a quick change of plans by which the Americans were able to beat the enemy at his own game on the morrow.
"Rawle was suffering more from loss of blood than from any seriousness of the injury itself," the surgeon told them when they asked there of their friend's condition, on their way to their own quarters. "He will be around all right again in a week's time."
And so, much desperate work accomplished on their first night within the firing lines, the lads threw themselves upon their cots to dream of spies and captured Germans and injured soldiers and calls for help by new methods in wireless.