"It's the same with young Catchpole," nodded Mr. Croucher significantly. "Time after time I've asked that boy to tell me in confidence things which I'm certain he knows—things about our ships and their mysterious movements, things about our awful disasters at sea which are being systematically hidden from us; but it's useless, Challis—useless, and we are kept in the dark; always kept in the dark."
"Talking about bein' in the dark, sir," resumed the constable, "have you seen the trench as the Scouts have been makin' in Mrs. Daplin-Gennery's kitchen-garden? You ought to. It's a room that you could live in, with four feet of sand piled on the roof as a refuge from bombs and shells. It's so comfortable and safe, sir, that Mrs. Daplin-Gennery threatens to invite her friends to take afternoon tea with her in it. And there's what they calls a sap trench—a tunnel leadin' from it right up to the kitchen door, so that the household can escape into it on the first alarm, and be as safe as a rabbit in its burrow."
"Indeed?" said Mr. Croucher. "But mightn't it fall in, as mine did?"
"Not a bit of it, sir," declared Chain's. "You could mount a 6-inch gun on top of it. Those Sea Scouts knew what they was doin' when they planned and built it. It's not an ordinary dug-out, sir, like yours and the vicar's. First of all they quarried a deep pit and shifted the bicycle shed into it. They packed the shed round with sandbags, roofed it with cross planks, covered it with brushwood, and then piled a mound of sea sand on top. Even supposin' a Zeppelin bomb was to drop on it, there'd be no explosion. If a shell from an enemy ship was to smash the house, the people in the underground shed would be safe, bein' too far off for the chimneys and bricks and things to fall on them. Of course, it can never be really needed. The Germans'll never come here."
"Don't be too sure about that, Challis," Mr. Croucher retorted warmly. "Mrs. Daplin-Gennery and her household may have to go into their refuge any day, any night. As I have argued all along, if the enemy's battleships break through, we are doomed. We can't resist them, either on sea or land, let alone the air. We are in constant danger. Look at what they're doing on the Continent! They've already occupied Brussels, you know. Antwerp has fallen, too. They will take the Channel ports next—Ostend, Calais, and Boulogne—and then, Challis, it will be the invasion of England, and they will serve us just as they have served the poor Belgians—perhaps worse."
Constable Challis shook his head and smiled compassionately upon the timid, old gentleman.
"You may take it from me, sir," he averred, "the Germans will never get to Calais. The Allies won't let 'em. And try how they will, they'll always be brought up against the British Navy. Not but what Mrs. Daplin-Gennery is quite right to have that trench made. It comforts her and her servants to know that it's there."
"They may have need for it much sooner than you think, Constable," declared Mr. Croucher, turning in at Mrs. Daplin-Gennery's gateway.
In the garden he encountered Seth Newruck.
"Is Redisham in the trench?" he inquired. "I have come to have a look at it."