“Now, that’s a good idea, Jack, only we’d better be mighty careful about showing ourselves too recklessly, you know.”
“You mean that there might be German raiding parties skirmishing around this section of country, don’t you, Amos?”
“Well, we’ve had to hide twice today when we glimpsed suspicious squadrons galloping across the fields, or covering some far-off road. And you remember that one of them bore the stamp of Uhlans in their lances with the fluttering pennons, their dirt-colored uniforms, and the spiked helmets.”
“Oh! we’ll try and not show ourselves, Amos; but since we’re a little mixed up in our bearings this seems too good a chance to lose.”
“These Dutch-style windmills we’ve run across in this strip of Belgium do make mighty good lookouts and observation towers. I warrant you some of them have figured heavily in the ebb and flow of the war.”
“This one has for a fact, Amos,” remarked the young fellow called Jack, as he pointed at numerous jagged holes in the concrete foundation, where evidently a storm of bullets had struck. “You can see how it’s been bombarded on all sides; and that top corner on the left was torn off by a passing shell. Here inside is a pile of empty brass cartridge-cases that tells the story as plain as print.”
“Made in Germany they were as sure as you live, and used in a rapid-fire gun at that, Jack. Yes, it’s all written out before us. Here in this concrete base of the windmill tower, some daring gun squad of the Kaiser’s men took up their stand with their outfit, and held the Allies off as long as their ammunition lasted. I wonder what happened then, Jack?”
“I’ve got a hunch we’ll find out something after we get up where we can look around a bit. But come on, let’s climb this ladder to the upper part of the windmill. Have a care how you trust your whole weight on anything, because they’ve riddled the place for keeps.”
While the two boys climb upwards with the intention of taking a look around and getting their bearings, we might as well become better acquainted with them, and learn what sort of mission it was that brought two American lads over to the battle-scarred fields of Southwestern Belgium at such a perilous time.
Jack Maxfield and Amos Turner were first cousins, and the latter lived in one of the best-known suburbs of Chicago; while Jack, being an orphan, was in the habit of saying that “his home was wherever he happened to hang his hat.”