come on this job alone."

"Are you playing up for the V.C.?" he heard his cousin say, but he made
no answer, and at the end of another couple of minutes he paused to take
breath.

"Talk abart a bloomin' obstacle race--I got fust prize at Aldershot at
the regimental sports--but this 'ere takes the cake," said Harry Hawke,
as he and Tiddler overtook them.

"Hawke!" said Dennis sharply, "we're going to turn here and make for our
own trench. Do you know any signal or any call that would prevent our
platoon blazing at us?"

"Let's get a bit nearer fust," replied Harry Hawke. "Then I'll tip 'em a
whistle. Wust of it is, the Boches are so bloomin' ikey--they 'aven't
'arf played us up before--but we'll try it on," and he said something to
his companion.

Still on their faces, but swinging round at right angles now, the little
party groped its perilous way towards their own sandbags, hearing the
roar of the fight apparently limited in their direction by the spot on
which the German machine-gun was working.

In front of them all was quiet.

The whole air trembled with the roar of firing, but perhaps the most
trying thing to the nerves was the sudden transition from brilliant
glare to black darkness in the momentary intervals between the
extinguishing of one star-shell and the bursting of the next. For an
instant they would see the line of their trench standing out as clear as
at noonday, with the glint of bayonets above the sandbags, and then it
would be blotted out, to be lit up again the next moment.

When they had crawled to within fifty yards of it, Harry Hawke thrust
two fingers into his gash of a mouth and let loose a piercing whistle.

"Now, Tiddler, pipe up!" he shouted, and their two voices rose in a
discordant rendering of a popular trench song, their rifles waving
wildly the while.

At any other time Dennis would have been constrained to laugh at the
incongruity of their choice, but Harry Hawke knew what he was doing, and
that no German could have imitated the Cockney twang in which they
brayed their chant at the top of their strident voices.

"There's a silver linin'--froo the dyark clard shinin',
Turn the dyark clard inside art till the boys come 'ome!"

they howled, and as a fresh star-shell lit up the trench they saw a man
in khaki thrust his head and shoulders over the topmost bag and look
under his hand in their direction.

"Cut it out, 'Arry--there's Ginger Bill, and 'e's 'eard!" cried
Tidd