e heard voices--smothered voices--not a yard away and
apparently below the ground. He instantly jumped to what this must
mean. It was a Turkish trench--a communication trench. Peter didn't
know much about modern warfare, but he had read in the papers, or heard
from me, enough to make him draw the right moral. The fresh dead
pointed to the same conclusion. What he had got through were the
Turkish support trenches, not their firing-line. That was still before
him.

He didn't despair, for the rebound from panic had made him extra
courageous. He crawled forward, an inch at a time, taking no sort of
risk, and presently found himself looking at the parados of a trench.
Then he lay quiet to think out the next step.

The shelling had stopped, and there was that queer kind of peace which
falls sometimes on two armies not a quarter of a mile distant. Peter
said he could hear nothing but the far-off sighing of the wind. There
seemed to be no movement of any kind in the trench before him, which
ran through the ruined building. The light of the burning was dying,
and he could just make out the mound of earth a yard in front. He
began to feel hungry, and got out his packet of food and had a swig at
the brandy flask. That comforted him, and he felt a master of his fate
again. But the next step was not so easy. He must find out what lay
behind that mound of earth.

Suddenly a curious sound fell on his ears. It was so faint that at
first he doubted the evidence of his senses. Then as the wind fell it
came louder. It was exactly like some hollow piece of metal being
struck by a stick, musical and oddly resonant.

He concluded it was the wind blowing a branch of a tree against an old
boiler in the ruin before him. The trouble was that there was scarcely
enough wind now for that in this sheltered cup.

But as he listened he caught the note again. It was a bell, a fallen
bell, and the place before him must have been a chapel. He remembered
that an Armenian monastery had been marked on the big map, and he
guessed it was the burned building on his right.

The thought of a chapel and a bell gave him the notion of some human
agency. And then suddenly the notion was confirmed. The sound was
regular and concerted--dot, dash, dot--dash, dot, dot. The branch of a
tree and the wind may play strange pranks, but they do not produce the
longs and shorts of the Morse Code.

This was where Peter's intelligence work in the Boer