“I think it would be fatal to separate,” she agreed. “When all is said and done, what can they hope to accomplish without your help?”
Joos’s voice came to them in eager if subdued accents. He was telling his wife how accounts were squared with Busch. “I stuck him with the fork,” he chortled, “and he squealed like a pig!”
CHAPTER VII
THE WOODMAN’S HUT
The miller was cunning as a fox. He argued, subtly enough, that if a man just arrived from Argenteau was the first to discover the dead Prussians, the neighbourhood of Argenteau itself might be the last to undergo close search for the “criminals” who had dared punish these demi-gods. Following a cattle-path through a series of fields, he entered a country lane about a mile from Visé. It was a narrow, deep-rutted, winding way—a shallow trench cut into the soil by many generations of pack animals and heavy carts. The long interregnum between the solid pavement of Rome and the broken rubble of Macadam covered Europe with a network of such roads. An unchecked growth of briars, brambles, and every species of prolific weed made this particular track an ideal hiding-place.
Gathering the party under the two irregular lines of pollard oaks which marked the otherwise hardly discernible hedgerows, Joos explained that, at a point nearly half-a-mile distant, the lane joined the main road which winds along the right bank of the Meuse.
“That is our only real difficulty—the crossing of the road,” he said. “It is sure to be full of Germans; but if we watch our chance we should contrive to scurry from one side to the other without being seen.”
Such confidence was unquestionably cheering. Even Dalroy, though he put a somewhat sceptical question, did not really doubt that the old man was adopting what might, in the circumstances, prove the best plan.