eft of the
willow stump, and they generally shove one of their posts out in front
of that, sir."

"I won't forget," said Dennis. "Come on, Dan! Over we go!" And the next
moment four dark forms clambered across the parapet and dropped on to
their faces on the other side.

A little way out, glued to the ground with their eyes and ears wide
open, our listening post lay, and as they crawled towards it one of the
men tapped with the toe of his boot to let them know that their coming
had been heard.

A long way off to southward, so far that it came only as a dull booming,
the German guns were shelling the French lines intermittently, and there
was the sharp bark of rifles to the north.

"How long do you calculate it will take us to reach their wire, Baker?"
whispered Dennis to the last man of the listening post as he crawled up
beside him.

"Somewhere about ten minutes, sir," was the reply. "There's one biggish
crump-hole straight ahead, and two more on the left a bit farther on,
and there's a tidy lot of dead lying out there."

Shoulder to shoulder Dennis and Dan crept forward across that No Man's
Land, the wind rustling in the tangled grass, bringing with it the acrid
odour of unburied corpses. Dan's hand encountered one of them, and he
nudged his cousin to work away more to the right.

This brought them to the edge of the first crump-hole, and glancing
every few yards at the luminous dial, they kept on for some distance
unchecked.

"We ought to be on it now," murmured Dennis. "It's a quarter of an hour
since we left the listening post." And he felt cautiously to the full
extent of his arms, but without encountering an upright standard.

They did not know it, but they had passed through a gap!

"Hold on!" whispered the Australian; "I thought I heard something quite
close on the left there."

Dennis heard it, too, at the same moment. It was like the solemn rattle
of earth falling into a newly made grave.

"It's only the chalk settling in those other crump-holes Baker warned us
about," he said, after they had listened breathlessly for a few moments.
"Our two fellows must have gone wide and struck them."

But he was wrong. The crump-holes were on the left, far behind, if they
had only known it; and it was from their right rear that a sudden
muffled exclamation came out of the stillness.

"'Evins!" said Tiddler, as he felt the sharp barbs of a low-stretched
strand bury themselves in the slack of his pants. "'A