o let Roscoe know that all was well.

Tom Slade had used his first bullet and it had saved hundreds of lives.

"They're both dead," he said, as Roscoe came quickly through the
underbrush in the gathering dusk. "Did the officer put his head up?"

"Mm-mm," said Roscoe, examining the two victims.

"You always kill, don't you?" said Tom.

"I have to, Tommy. You see, I'm all alone, mostly," Roscoe added as he
fumbled in the dead officer's clothing. "There are no surgeons or nurses
in reach. I don't have stretcher-bearers following _me_ around and it
isn't often that even a Hun will surrender, fair and square, to one man.
I've seen too much of this '_kamarad_' business. I can't afford to take
chances, Tommy. But I don't put nicks in my rifle butt like some of them
do. I don't want to know how many I beaned after it's all over. We kill
to save--that's the idea you want to get into your head, Tommy boy."

"I know it," said Tom.

The officer had no papers of any importance and since it was getting
dark and Tom must report at headquarters, they discussed the possibility
of upsetting these murderous hogsheads, and putting an end to the
danger. Evidently the woods were not yet wholly cleared of the enemy who
might still seek to make use of these agents of destruction.

"There may be stragglers in the woods even to-morrow," Roscoe said.

"S'pose we dig a little trench running away from the brook and then turn
on the cock and let the stuff flow off?" suggested Tom.

The idea seemed a good one and they fell to, hewing out a ditch with a
couple of sticks. It was a very crude piece of engineering, as Roscoe
observed, and they were embarrassed in their work by the gathering
darkness, but at length they succeeded, by dint of jabbing and plowing
and lifting the earth out in handfuls, in excavating a little gully
through the rising bank so that the liquid would flow off and down the
rocky decline beyond at a safe distance from the stream.

For upwards of an hour they remained close by, until the hogsheads had
run dry, and then they set out through the woods for the captured
village.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE GUN PIT

"I think the best way to get into the village," said Roscoe, "is to
follow the edge of the wood around. That'll bring us to the by-path that
runs into the main road. They've got the woods pretty well cleared out
over that way. There's a road a little north of here and I think the
Germans have withdrawn acros