"Phew! I think you mentioned wild-cat exploits the other day. What sort of cat exploit is this?"
"It must be carefully planned beforehand."
"Humph! Trains filled with troops passing every five minutes; the lines thick with guards. It'll want careful planning—and a trifle more. In fact, it'll need the devil's own luck. What say you, boys?"
"No matter, Corp," cried Peck testily. "Give the lad his head. We ain't particular, so long as it's a fust-class scrap."
"It'll be all that," grunted Shaw.
"Did we expect to git out of this show alive?" retorted Peck. "What's the odds? Let the lad 'ave his way—he's grubbed us well anyhow."
The other men murmured an assent, and it was clear that most of the band were quite ready to follow Max in an attempt, however desperate, on the Germans' main line of communication. The Frenchmen were quite ready to agree to anything that would lead to another encounter with the enemy in company with their British comrades, and so Max was left in possession of the field and charged with full responsibility for the tremendous task before them.
Two days later the whole of the band arrived safely within a mile or so of the great main line which runs between Aix-la-Chapelle and Liége, and then on through Namur to Paris. A stoppage to their communications on this line would disconcert the Germans in a way that hardly anything else could do, and Max, from the knowledge he had gained, while at Liége, of the great trains loaded with troops and munitions that constantly passed through at all hours of the day and night, was very well aware of it. Next to his darling scheme for the frustration of the Germans' plans as regards the Durend works, the breaking of the great railway through the town had seemed the most serious blow that could be aimed at the Germans by a few men working independently of the great military forces of the Allies. It was a difficult matter, but not impossible. That was enough.
Max and Dale, accompanied by Shaw, reconnoitred the railway after hiding their men well away out of sight. The first point reached Max did not consider suitable, and it was not until they had approached the line at several different places that he found a spot that satisfied him. This spot was one where the line passed along a fairly deep cutting, the sides of which were thickly overgrown with bushes with here and there a young tree. It was a spot at which it would be easy to approach the line unseen. And yet this was not Max's chief reason for selecting it. His design had been to find a spot where the line at night-time would have dark patches of shadow cast upon it here and there.