IN THE ENEMY'S COUNTRY
Almost at the last moment Scout-Master Durland, or Captain Durland, as he was again for this week, had decided not to send Jack Danby on his trip into the enemy's country alone. Seated beside Jack, therefore, under the protective hood of the scout car, was little Tom Binns.
"Keep your eye on your watch, Tom," said Jack. "We don't want to make any mistake and cross the line too soon—but we don't want to be late, either. This job is too important to run any risks of bungling it. I'd hate to think that I'd been trusted with something really big for the first time and then fallen down on it."
"Where will you cross the line, Jack?" asked Tom. "I should think it would be pretty hard to tell just where the boundary was."
Jack pointed to a road map, on a slightly smaller scale than the one from which Captain Durland had given him his course, which was pasted right before his eyes on the metal dashboard of the car.
"I can't lose my way with that, Tom," he said. "See, there's a road that we're getting pretty near to now. It crosses the State line about six miles east of Bremerton, if you'll notice the map, at a little village called Mardean. That's all on this side of the line. They may be watching the road there, so what we want to do is to get where we can't be seen, and then, about a minute before noon, go ahead as fast as the car will carry us. That ought to take us through all right, even if they've got a guard on duty. Then we can circle around in a big sweep and come down to Hardport from behind. The country people ought to be able to tell us part of what we want to know, and we can confirm what they tell us by what we can see ourselves."
"They wouldn't lie to us, would they, Jack?"
"You couldn't call it regular lying if they gave us false information about their own army, Tom. Remember that this is supposed to be like a real war, and in a war the invading army wouldn't expect to get correct information from the people along the roads. On the contrary, they'd do their best to delay the enemy, and make all the trouble they could, and they'd be patriotic. So we've got to be mighty careful this next week about how we take any information we pick up in that fashion. If the people on the farms take the game seriously, and enter into the spirit of it, they'll do all they can to harass us and bother us."
Jack drove his car well and carefully, but made no great attempt to get high speed out of it, though it was, as he knew, capable of going three or four times as fast as he was driving it. But there is always a certain danger in driving an automobile at high speed, and Jack saw no use in taking any risk that was not necessary.
"You can go a lot faster than this, can't you, Jack?" asked Tom, as they bowled along easily, at little more than fifteen miles an hour.