At Camp Lee he had learned to comport himself more or less like a civilized recruit because there was no breach of discipline worth the penalty of the guardhouse. Out here it was different.
That night Private Cassius Wyble got hold of two other men’s emergency rations, a bountiful supply of water and a stuffing pocketful of cartridges. With these and his adored rifle he eluded the sentries—a ridiculously easy feat for so skilled a woodsman—and went over the top and on into No Man’s Land.
By daylight he had trailed and potted a German sniper.
By sunrise he had located the man against whom he had sworn his strategy feud—the German who had put him on his mettle two days before.
Cash did not see his foe. And when from the edge of a rock he fired at a puff of smoke in a clump of trees no resultant body came tumbling earthward. And thirty seconds later a bullet from quite another part of the clump spatted hotly against the rock edge five inches from his head.
Cash smiled beatifically. He recognized the tactics of his former opponent. And once more the merry game was on.
To make perfectly certain of his rival’s identity Cash wiggled low in the undergrowth until he came to a jut of rock about seven feet long and two feet high. Lying at full length behind this low barrier, and parallel to it, Cash put his hat on the toe of his boot and cautiously lifted his foot until the hat’s sugar-loaf crown protruded a few inches above the top of the rock.
On the instant, from the tree clump, snapped the report of a rifle. The bullet, ignoring the hat, nicked the rock comb precisely above Cash’s upturned face. He nodded approval, for it told him that his enemy was not only a good forest fighter but that he recognized the same skill in Wyble.
Thus began two days of delightful pastime for the exiled mountaineer. Thus, too, began a series of offensive and defensive maneuvers worthy of Natty Bumppo and Old Sleuth combined.
It was not until Cash abandoned the hunt long enough to find and shoot another German sniper and appropriate the latter’s uniform that he was able, under cover of dusk, to get near enough to the tree clump for a fair sight of his antagonist. At which juncture a snap shot from the hip ended the duel.