t
and shadow in turn chased across the open ground.

"Here they come," said the captain of B Company a few minutes later.
"At least I think it's them, altho' I can only see two men and no
stretcher."

"Do you see them?" said an eager voice in French at his ear, and when
he turned and found the gunner captain and explained to him, the
captain made a gesture of despair. "Perhaps it is that they cannot move
him," he said. "Or would they, do you think, return for more help? I
should go myself but that I may be needed to talk with the battery.
Perhaps one of my signalers----"

But the Englishman assured him it was better to wait; they could not be
returning for help; that the three could do all a dozen could.

Again they waited and watched in eager suspense, glimpsing the crawling
figures now and then, losing them again, in doubts and certainty in
swift turns as to the whereabouts and identity of the crawling figures.

"There is one of them," said the captain quickly; "there, by himself,
in those cursed red breeches. They show up in the flarelight like a
blood-spot on a clean collar. Dashed idiot! And I was a fool, too, to
let him go like that."

But it was plain now that 'Enery Irving was dragging his red breeches
well clear of the others, although it was not plain, what the others
had done with the stretcher. There were two of them at the length of a
stretcher apart, and yet no visible stretcher lay between them. It was
the sergeant who solved the mystery.

"I'm blowed!" he said, in admiring wonder; "they've covered the
stretcher over with cut grass. They've got their man too--see his head
this end."

Now that they knew it, all could see the outline of the man's body
covered over with grass, the thick tufts waving upright from his hands
and nodding between his legs.

They were three-quarters of the way across now, but still with a
dangerous slope to cross. It was ever so slight, but, tilted as it was
towards the enemy's line, it was enough to show much more plainly
anything that moved or lay upon its face. They crawled on with a
slowness that was an agony to watch, crawled an inch at a time, lying
dead and still when a light flared, hitching themselves and the
dragging stretcher onwards as the dullness of hazed moonlight fell.

The French captain was consumed with impatience, muttering exhortations
to caution, whispering excited urgings to move, as if his lips were at
the creepers' ears, his fingers twitching