“Wasser!” moaned one of the wounded men, whom Jack recognized as one of his guards. The boy sped to the well and hastened back with the big earthen pitcher from which they had refreshed themselves earlier that day.
But he was too late. Even as the boy held the cooling draught to the sentry’s lips, the man died. The other was already dead when the boy dropped to the ground, his body frightfully shattered by the aerial bomb.
There was still the third man lying by the house and Jack, thinking he might be able to minister to him, hurried over. But here, too, the bomb had struck fatally.
A shaft of moonlight fell through the poplars and illumined the man’s face. It was Radwig, struck down in death even as he had planned a cruel revenge for another. Jack covered the dead professor’s face with the man’s huge blue cloak and then stood silent for a moment. The rapidity with which it had all happened almost stunned him.
Fifteen minutes before he had been a prisoner with the hideous sounds of spade and mattock in his ears. Now he was, by nothing short of a miracle, free again. He raised his face to the sky and his lips moved silently. Then, with a last look about the place, he prepared to leave, fervently hoping that before another day had passed he would be with his friends once more in Louvain.
All at once he heard a loud whinny. One of the dead troopers’ horses had been left behind in the mad flight from the farmhouse. It was saddled and bridled, although the girth had been loosened. Jack untied it, tightened the girths, and mounted. He did not know much about riding, but somehow he managed to stick to the animal’s back as he directed it down the road.
Every now and then he drew rein and listened. He had no desire to encounter prowling bands of Uhlans or to run into the small force that had evacuated the farmhouse, no doubt believing him to be dead. But dawn broke while he was still traveling, not at all certain that he was going in the right direction.
Jack decided to abandon his mount. Taking off its bridle so that it could find forage along the roadside, he patted its neck and said:
“Thanks for the ride, old fellow.”
Then bareheaded, and tired almost to exhaustion by all he had gone through, yet driven on by dire necessity of reaching the Belgian lines, the lad struck off across a wheat field into a path of woodland. On the edge of the field he shrank suddenly back into the tall wheat. There lay a man’s coat, a stone jug and a basket. No doubt the man was close at hand. But although he crouched there for a long time, nobody came, nor was there any sound of human life. Birds twittered and once a rabbit cocked an inquisitive eye at the lad as he lay crouched in the wheat.