ed on.

Before dawn they took refuge in a shed behind a house whose stately
lines were marred by the marks of bombardment.

The owner of the half-ruined house and the shed where they had taken
refuge proved to be a fine old Belgian, courageous and full of resource.
As soon as he found that the boys were escaping American airmen he
brought food and drink to them in plenty. They were a long way from
the Holland line, he said, but they might, with care, get across.
Others had done so. He would look into the probabilities and
possibilities, and let them know.

The shed was a bare, small building of rude boards, with nothing in
it. A few boards were placed across the eaves, forming a sort of
loft extending for some seven feet from the end of the building.
It was on these boards that the boys spent their days while waiting
for an opportune moment to go further. Their host would not hear of
their suggestions that they should leave the shed until he had arranged
plans for their reception at a further station on their journey.

"I wonder why he does not ask us to come into his house?" queried
Dicky after the boys had been two days in the shed. "It seems to be
big enough---even what's left of it---to have plenty of hiding places
in it, judging from what I can see of it out of this hole in the roof."

"He probably has his reasons," was Bob's reply.

That he had was proven the next day, when a squad of German soldiers
came and spent an hour searching the house. One of them glanced in
the doorway of the shed, but did not come inside. Seeing the bare
surroundings, it evidently did not occur to him to glance upward.
That night, when the Belgian brought their food, he told them that
his house was searched periodically, though as yet no one had been
discovered in hiding there.

Impatiently, they spent a week on the hard boards of the loft in the
shed. At last their host was ready for them to move on. He gave
them a map of the country, on which he marked the route and their
stopping places. After six hours' steady march through a driving
downpour they found another shed, in just the place that had been
described to them before starting. It, too, had a hospitable loft,
and food was there in plenty.

Two more stopping places, always in sheds or outbuildings, and they
were very near that part of the Dutch frontier which their friends,
most of them unknown, were planning that they should cross. Money,
they were told, wa