Cash at sound of the running footsteps jumped to his feet. The man he had attacked was lying very still, in a crumpled and yet sprawling heap—in a posture never designed by Nature.
With one wild sweep of his windmill arms Cash grabbed up the sheet of paper on which Von Scheurer had made his life’s last sketch. With a simultaneous sweep he knocked the glass-bulbed torch from the sentinel, just as a rifle or two were centering their aim toward him; and, head down, he tore into the group of men who blocked the dugout entrance.
Cash had a faintly conscious sense of dashing down one passageway and up another, following by forestry instinct the course he noted when he was led into the colonel’s presence.
He collided with a sentinel; he butted another from his flying path. He heard yells and shots—especially shots. Once something hit him on the shoulder, whirling him half round without breaking his stride. Again something hot whipped him across the cheek. And at last he was out, under the foggy stars, with excited Germans firing in his general direction and loosing off star shells.
Again instinct and scout skill came to the rescue as he plunged into a bramble thicket and wriggled through long grass on his heaving stomach.
An hour before dawn Cash Wyble was led before his sleepy and unloving company commander. The returned wanderer was caked with dirt and blood. His face was scored by briers. Across one cheek ran the red wale of a bullet. A very creditable flesh wound adorned his left shoulder. His clothes were in ribbons.
Before the captain could frame the first of a thousand scathing words Cash broke out pantingly: “Stick me in the hoosgow if you’re a mind to, Cap! Stick me there for life. Or wish me onto a kitchen-police job forever! I’m not kickin’. It’s comin’ to me, all right, arter what I done.
“I git the drift of the hull thing now. I’m onter what it means. It—it means Old Glory! It means—this!”
He stuck out one muddy hand wherein was clutched a wad of scratch-pad paper.
Then the company commander did a thing that stamped him as a genius. Instead of administering the planned rebuke and following it by sending the wretch to the guard house he began to ask questions.