"Might have expected this, really. Always had my suspicions, but hoped otherwise. Well," turning to Gaul, "did you really think——"
"If you suppose, Lieutenant, that that Dutchman could buy me, you fellows get another think. I was only strafing him a little. He wanted me to do this, but you don't think I would? Why, Corporal, you know me better'n that. Haven't I always——?"
"Corporal, it would have been better to have got up a pretended alarm and observed what this man would really have done. But I guess we have it on him all right, after what you heard. Anyway, we'll send him back when the patrol comes for the Huns. Take him and put him under guard now."
[CHAPTER XIV]
Life and Death
The night wore on. Clouds overhung the sky and it began to drizzle. Roy Flynn, on duty in No Man's Land, felt that in a little while he and Watson would need their slickers and he was about to return for them, believing that his comrade and two others on the watch could be certain of any improbable attempts of the Huns to make a raid, when a strange thing happened.
The ground was suddenly lighted up as though by flashes of fire; a tearing, ripping sound came to the two riflemen, and they saw bits of earth, stones, grass, bushes, torn, blown, lifted, and whizzing by them. Myriads of bullets sung mournful snatches of promised death and howled in derision of life as they struck the rocky earth and bounded onward.
"Back to the quarry! There's no place like home!" yelled Roy to Watson, and firing three shots into the air he turned to see the two Regulars who had also been out on the slope running for the pit. Watson also started and Roy felt conscious that, go as they might, he would not be the last to get under cover. And then suddenly he knew he would be the last and as the pain in his hip seemed to shoot up into his very vitals he wondered, as he pitched headlong, whether he would ever get under such cover again as would protect him from the barrage. Would he, indeed, have a chance to get behind some very nearby shelter while the innumerable bullets paved the way for a German attack on the pit? And, even so, would the coming Huns not find and kill him?