"Where are Fritz & Co.? Where is our officer? How is it that I was next to him, and now Selwyn is nearer the door; while Joliffe, who is supposed to be on the way to the dressing-station, is here? And what about the fifty tons of explosives?"
M'Turk staggered to his feet and made his way to the entrance to the inner room. The door had been wrenched from its hinges; from the root ferro-concrete girders had fallen, bringing with them a pile of debris that completely covered the table. Of the Huns, all were buried beneath the mound of earth, unless they had been blown to pieces by the explosion.
"Not so much as a Hun's button left as a souvenir!" reported M'Turk. "Hope our mates haven't been kyboshed. Yet it seems to me that if fifty ton of stuff did go up we wouldn't be here now--except in little bits."
"That's what puzzles me," admitted Rifleman Carr. "Perhaps only a portion of the explosives went off. Again, who propped you and Selwyn up against the wall?"
M'Turk made another roll of crumpled paper.
"Won't last out much longer at that rate!" he remarked ruefully. "Hallo! What's that?"
A couple of dull concussions were distinctly felt. In the inner portion of the spacious dug-out more rubble slid noisily from the caving-in roof.
"Fritz getting to work again," said Malcolm. "They are shelling the captured position."
"And following it up with a counter-attack," added M'Turk. "Strikes me our chaps won't have any time to attend to us for a bit."
"I did the job properly that time--a bit too properly?" exclaimed Grouser Joliffe, who had recovered consciousness and was taking a lively interest in the conversation.