"Pick your men!" Lieutenant Mackinson ordered, in a whisper. "Fire!"
Their automatics let out a fusillade of bullets. Two of the shadows jumped slightly into the air, and then rolled over. The third man rose and started to run toward the enemy line. Frank Hoskins took deliberate aim and fired. The man dropped and lay still.
"Looks as though we got them," said Lieutenant Mackinson, "but they may be only pretending. Do not move for a few minutes."
While they were thus waiting, the enemy trenches sent up a glaring rocket. It fell shorthand failed to reveal them, but it plainly showed three German soldiers lying prone upon the ground, all of them apparently instantly killed.
"That's the part of it I don't like," muttered Slim with a shudder. "It isn't so bad when you are firing into a whole company or regiment and see men fall. At least, it doesn't seem so bad, for you don't know just which ones you hit and which ones some one else bowled over. But in this individual close-range stuff it leaves a nasty feeling."
"You are right," whispered Frank Hoskins, "but you'd better not talk any more about it now or some Boche may try the same close-range stuff on us."
Warned to silence by the lieutenant, they continued to creep along, only a foot or so at a time, stopping every few minutes to listen intently to see if their presence had been discovered.
On the night before they had been upon fairly level ground, but this night they were in a section that was all hills and hummocks and hollows. They would creep cautiously up the side of one mound, not knowing but that on the other side lay a group of Germans, perhaps out upon a similar mission.
For no one can tell what may happen in No Man's Land—that section belonging to neither side, before and between the front-line trenches of the opposing armies.
"With that star as my guide, I am certain that we have not turned from the proper direction," Lieutenant Mackinson whispered, as they came to a halt in a secluded spot that seemed as safe from attack as from observation. "We have passed the fifth hill. Fifteen more minutes should bring us to the place which Major Jones indicated on the map. It is a sort of natural trench. If we reach it all right we are to string a wire from there to our first observation trench to the northwest of it. I believe that the same place has been used for the same purpose before, during the long time that all this has been contested ground. An outpost there can observe and report every activity of the enemy in daylight, without himself being seen."