He laughed.
"Thank me later," he said. "Stiff time coming in front line. Must be fit. May save your lives."
And he fell his party in and marched it back to the lines.
The position was fast becoming impossible. Bill's determination not to trust himself in the line under Stockley's command had become a raging obsession, and yet he could see no way of getting the Button. That night he morosely watched his unconscious friend making himself into a chrysalis for the night.
"Alf," he said with guile, "don't you feel it 'orrid 'ot these nights, rolled up in a great thick blanket like that?"
"I likes to be warm at night," answered a muffled voice from within the folds.
"But it's so un'ealthy," urged Bill.
Alf's tousled head and astonished face appeared at one end of the cocoon.
"Ho!" he said suspiciously. "And since when 'ave you been troubling your 'ed about my 'ealth, eh?"
Bill abandoned the topic, feeling very annoyed. If the simple Alf was beginning so readily to question the purity of his motives, he foresaw that he would have to take desperate risks. He would have to lure his friend into a remote spot and extract the Button from him by the old "Stand-and-Deliver" method. But this method had the disadvantage that Bill was not at all sure that, man to man, Alf was not the stronger of the two. He must rely on the essence of strategy—surprise. But how? And when?... He passed a disturbed night; and the sounds of peaceful slumber proceeding from the apparently hermetically sealed bundle at his side failed to soothe him in any way.