A little over half an hour later he was crouched in the dark doorway of a house and peering stealthily up the street at the figures of a German patrol moving away from him. He watched them until they were lost in the growing darkness. Then he slipped out onto the sidewalk, turned his back on the patrols and headed rapidly in the opposite direction. An hour later he was clear over on the other side of the city and hiding in a group of parked military cars. Tarpaulins had been pegged down over the cars, and he could tell that they had been there for weeks. There wasn't even a lone guard watching over them.
At any rate, it seemed a safe place to hide while he mapped out plans for further action. He was thankful to have slipped safely through the fingers of those patrols hunting him out, but at the same time he regretted that he had been forced to do so. Unless his memory picture of that part of Antwerp was all cockeyed, that detention prison hadn't been more than four or five blocks from Rue Chartres. Had those patrols let him alone, chances were that he would now be close to Number Sixteen Rue Chartres. As things stood, though, he was way over on the other side of the city.
"It's a cinch those patrols haven't given up yet," he pondered the problem to himself. "And ten to one even more patrols have been put on the job. Having a poor refugee give them the slip has probably burned them up plenty. And they're just mad enough to take this whole town apart for the satisfaction of finding me."
He nodded in silent emphasis, and then tackled the problem again. He had the choice of two things, and both were bad. He could start stealing back toward Rue Chartres right now and trust to luck that he would spot Germans wandering about before they spotted him. Or he could wait until daylight, when there would be other civilians on the streets, and take his chances then. Neither idea sounded so hot, but he had to do something.
Suddenly an idea hit him right between the eyes. He grinned, nodded, and silently snapped his fingers.
"Maybe!" he whispered excitedly. "There's just a chance!"
The excitement caused by the sudden thought was so great that for a moment he stood there trembling like a leaf. Then he got a firm grip on his jangling nerves and started thoroughly searching the parked cars. He had searched seven cars before Lady Luck cast her smile upon him. In the eighth car he found what he wanted. It was a staff car and in back was an officer's duffel bag. The bag was covered with dirt and smelled to high heaven, it had been left there so long. Inside the duffel bag Dave found his prize: a spare uniform of the owner, who was perhaps dead or maybe hundreds of miles away. And Lady Luck smiled on him twice, because he discovered with mounting joy that the uniform wasn't a bad fit at all. The service cap was a perfect fit.
Some ten or fifteen minutes later the poor little Belgian peasant refugee had disappeared from the face of the earth. In his place stood a young sub-lieutenant of German infantry. True, his uniform was badly creased, but the crease and the smell of age, Dave hoped, would come out in time. He fumbled through the rest of the duffel bag in the hope of finding the officer's Luger. However, Lady Luck wasn't letting him have everything his own way. There was no Luger, nor anything else that would be of any use.
He grinned and carefully folded his tattered peasant clothes and put them in the duffel bag. Then he fastened the bag tight and put it back exactly where he had found it. Finally he slipped out from under the pegged down tarpaulin.
"Will you get the shock of your life if you ever come back for your spare uniform!" he whispered to some unknown German. "And how, my Jerry lad, and how!"