e, speeding through the night with a blue-clad
German beside him,--a German suffering, by the way, from a headache,
the last stages of a nosebleed, and a pronounced dislike for me as the
agency responsible for his ailments,--was really Devereux Bayne. But the
air was cold on my face; a revolver pressed my side; I saw three set,
hard profiles. It was not a dream; it was a dash for safety. And it was
engineered by anxious, desperate men.

Blenheim, hunched over the steering wheel, had settled to his business.
Certainly his nerve was going; the mania for escape had caught him;
he took startling chances on his curves and turns. Still, he knew the
country, it seemed. We drove on, fast and furiously, by lanes, by
mere paths set among thickets, by narrow brushwood roads. Sometimes
we skirted the river, which shone silver in the moonlight, lined with
rushes. Again, we could see nothing but a roof of trees overhead.

We emerged into a wider road, and I became award of various noises; a
booming, clear and regular; the sound of voices; the rumbling of
many wheels. We must be nearing the Front; we were rejoining the main
highroad. My guess was proved correct at the next turning, where a
sentry barred our path.

The sight of his honest French face was like a tonic to me. In some
welcome way it seemed to hearten me for my task. The pistol of my friend
in the tonneau bored through his cape into my side; I sat very quiet. If
I did this four, five, perhaps six times, they might think me cowed
and relax their vigilance. Their suspicions would be lulled by my
tractability and their contempt. Then my hour would strike.

Satisfied with the safe-conducts, the sentry gestured us forward, and
his figure slipped out of my vision as the gray car purred on. The man
beside me chuckled.

"Behold this Yankee! He is as good as gold, my captain. He sits like a
mouse," he announced in his own tongue.

"He'll be wise," Blenheim announced, "to go on doing so." The threat was
in English for my benefit and came from between his teeth.

In front of us the noise was growing. With our next turn we entered the
highroad, taking our place in a long rumbling line of ambulances and
supply-carts and laboring camions, or trucks. We glimpsed faces,
heard voices all about us. The change from solitude to this unbroken
procession was bewildering. But we did not long remain a part of it; we
turned again into narrower lanes.

The control was growing stricter. Fou