d miserably on in that sunken sewer. He dropped a lucky
one through a barn the same afternoon and lobbed a few wides over
during the next night, but again nothing out of the ordinary.

"We were more and more puzzled. Then, just about breakfast-time on
the second morning, in walks de Blavincourt himself, green as to the
complexion and wounded in the arm, but otherwise intact. I leapt upon
him, snarling, 'Where's that map?'

"'I got 'im, Sir,' he gulped, 'safe' (gulp).

"This was his story. He had remembered the corporal shouting
something, but so intent on his work was he that he hardly noticed the
warning until suddenly, to his horror, he perceived a party of Huns
creeping out of a passage _behind him_. He was cut off! They had not
seen him for the moment, so quick as thought he slipped into the
nearest house, turned into a front room--a sort of parlour place--and
crouched there, wondering what to do.

"He was not left wondering long, for the Bosches followed him into
that very house. There was a small table in one corner covered with
a large cloth. Under this de Blavincourt dived, and not a second too
soon, for the Bosches--seven of them--followed him into that very room
and, setting up their machine gun at the window, commenced to pop
off down the street. Charming state of affairs for little de
Blavincourt--alone and unarmed in a room full of bristling Huns with
that fatal map in his possession.

"Sweating all over he eased the map out of his pocket and slowly and
silently commenced to eat it.

"You know what those things are like. A yard square of tough paper
backed by indestructible calico--one might as well try to devour a
child's rag book.

"Anyhow that's what de Blavincourt did. He ate it, and it took him
forty hours to do the trick. For forty hours day and night he squatted
under that table, with the Huns sitting upon and around it, and gnawed
away at that square yard of calico.

"Just before the dawn of the third day he gulped the last corner down
and peeped out under the tablecloth. The Bosch on guard was oiling
the lock of the machine-gun. Two more he could hear in the kitchen
clattering pots about. The remaining four were asleep, grotesquely
sprawled over sofas and chairs.

"De Blavincourt determined to chance it. He could not stop under the
table for ever, and even at the worst that map, that precious map, was
out of harm's way. He crept stealthily from his hiding-place, dealt
the kneeling Bosch