CHAPTER XI In the Nick of Time

HOW long they had been asleep Tom had not the faintest idea when with a sudden, startled jump, he came to a bewildered wakefulness. He felt deeply depressed, and he was distinctly aware of a feeling of alarm and a sense of impending danger. He could not account for any of the sensations. Whether someone had touched him, or he had been awakened by a sound, he did not know. Perhaps he had been dreaming. He could not tell that, either. Indeed, it was a full minute after he came back to consciousness before he recognized his surroundings and realized where he was.

Then he remembered that George and Ollie had been with him. He reached over, touched them both. Ollie groaned slightly in his troubled sleep, and Harper turned restlessly. They were safe, anyway. Tom tried to fathom the strange feeling that possessed him, but he could no more come to an explanation of what caused it than he could shake it off.

He peered into the darkness. Nothing there to cause alarm, so far as he could see, but still that disconcerting feeling of some unknown, unplaced menace. Tom decided to waken his pals. He was not afraid, in the sense of being a physical coward. It was the baffling mystery of the thing and what it might portend that was so disquieting. Perhaps it was just overwrought nerves; or maybe the strange surroundings in which he found himself when he awakened. He tapped Ollie two or three times upon the shoulder, and nudged George Harper with his foot. He disliked to deprive them of their sleep, but he felt that he must. It was not only the necessity of talking to them about this strange feeling that he could not get rid of; it was even more imperative that they return and join their company, which at any hour now might suddenly be ordered to renew the action.

But even as Ollie and George almost simultaneously grunted sleepy and impatient objections to this treatment, although at the same time opening their eyes and starting upright, Tom would have given a great deal had he left them to their sleep—and silence.

For, hardly the fraction of an instant before they had given half conscious utterance to their plaintive growls, Tom had seen, as clearly as though it had been daylight, the head, then the shoulders and half the body of a man rise suddenly from a shell hole ahead, as though directly at the sound.

Instinctively Tom knew by the way the man moved that he was not wounded. Equally obvious was it that whoever he was he was not an American, for all this territory now was held by those forces, and one had no need to hide if he was a friend.

This man was in the very act of swiftly climbing out of his hiding place when Tom spied him. At the first sound of the sleepy voices he had as suddenly dropped back and out of sight.

Never for a second taking his eyes from the spot, Tom warned his two friends to silence in a way that quickly brought them to their senses, and they crept close to hear his briefly whispered statement of what he had seen.

Unquestionably it was the same man they had been seeking before they dropped off to sleep. Each had a feeling of shame that they should have weakened that way when there was an urgent necessity before them. How long had they slept? It was a useless question. Two facts were apparent, however. It was still night, so they could not have been out of the hunt for long; and they knew the whereabouts of the enemy they sought.

One method of capture presented itself to them, and that was to creep forward in a surrounding movement and then lay there, as close to the hole as they might, without themselves being discovered, and wait for the man to make his reappearance. They were without bombs and could not attack that way. They had no rifles, either, and were entirely dependent upon their automatics. Even with these, they realized, there was danger to themselves in the positions they would be in, in any cross firing.

However, there was no other way open.

Caution, already a sort of second nature to them, was sharpened by the knowledge that their presence also was known, and by the realization, too, that this German—for there no longer was any doubt in their minds as to that—should not elude them a second time, possessing as he did information which must not fall into the hands of the Boche commanders.

As it turned out later, however, the man in hiding had good reason for electing to take his chances on escape, rather than lay there until daylight, when capture would be inevitable if he was then still alive.

While the three lads were yet some distance from the spot, proceeding in a spread-eagle movement, Harper in the centre, the fellow made a wild jump from the hole. Three shots rang out almost simultaneously. With a groan the man crumpled up on the edge of what had been his hiding place. The lads waited for a moment, to make sure it was not a ruse, then swiftly ran upon him, all three covering him with their pistols.

Considering the darkness and the quickness of the shots their marksmanship had been highly creditable. One bullet had hit the German in the right hip, another in the calf of the left leg, while the third had grazed his neck. He was painfully, although not critically wounded; but he was entirely out of the fighting for the time being.

Tom stripped him of his automatic and made sure he had no other weapons, but even wounded as the fellow was he tried to put up a resistance when Ollie opened his blouse and abruptly drew forth a packet of papers.

“That means your finish, Fritz,” Harper ejaculated, but the wounded man only grunted viciously.

“Search him carefully and see what else he has collected in the way of valuable souvenirs for his superiors,” Tom instructed; and Ollie continued to investigate every possible hiding place in or under the German lieutenant’s clothing.

Evidently he had canvassed a large stretch of ground, for he was a veritable walking library of secret orders, maps and photographs taken from American officers. While Ollie was doing this, and Harper was discouraging any resistance by a threatening play of his automatic, Tom walked around to take a look into the shell hole. It had just occurred to him that the captured German might not have been working alone.

In the darkness Tom took a false step. Before he could regain his balance he went feet first into the hole and disappeared completely from sight. When he landed it was with a grunt that told that the breath had been pretty well jarred out of his body, and the Hun, even in the pain of his wounds, laughed outright.

Ollie leaned over the hole and looked in. He expected to see Tom’s face almost on a level with his. Instead, he could but dimly discern him, several feet below.

“Holy smoke!” he ejaculated, involuntarily. And then, “Oh, Tom, are you hurt?”

“No,” came the response, “only jarred. But this is some shell hole. I’m just beginning to get my breath. Felt as if I was dropped from an aeroplane. My searchlight seems to be burned out. Drop yours down to me; I want to look around. Easy now—reach down as far as you can and then let it go. I’ll try to catch it.”

By mere good fortune he did. In an instant he had switched it on, and its glare was followed by a quick gasp from Tom and an involuntary expression of surprise.

“What is it?” asked Ollie, still leaning over the edge of the pit.

“What is it?” Tom repeated. “I don’t know yet, but it’s not a shell hole, that’s one thing certain. There’s a long tunnel that leads away under the ground here, and it’s big enough for a man to walk through. It runs almost due north from here, so far as I can see, but the light’s not strong enough to show how far it goes.”

“A tunnel!” Harper repeated, at the same time fixing the German with a severe stare. But if the prisoner understood, he gave no sign. His only expression was one of pain.

“Ollie,” said Tom, who now as a sergeant could command the other two, although he had no disposition for any unkind or unjustified use of his authority, “you’d better stay there and watch Fritz, while Harper drops down here with me. We’ll trail along the secret passageway that the Germans didn’t build for nothing, and see just where it leads.”

“I’ll keep an eye on him, you can bet,” Ollie answered, as Harper, by the aid of the light Tom threw upward, dropped warily into the deep entrance to the secret tunnel.

In another moment Ollie was left alone with his prisoner, and Sergeant Tom and George Harper had disappeared from sight and sound, Tom in the lead, flashing the searchlight’s rays before them as they went, Harper following close behind.

They found the artificial passageway to be at no point less then five feet in height, and on the dirt surface of the flooring were imprints leading them to believe that many persons had passed back and forth through there at a comparatively recent date. Its course was almost directly northward, and the lads could at all times see some distance ahead. Nevertheless they proceeded warily, not knowing what sort of a trap might be set for them. The air was heavy and damp, but gave them no great discomfort until they had proceeded for several hundred yards, and then they concluded that the tunnel, whatever its purpose, had but one outlet, and that was the one through which they had entered.

“Do you realize where this is leading?” Tom asked presently, as he half turned toward Harper.

“Unless my sense of direction is all off,” George responded, “directly under Thiaucourt.”

“Straight as an arrow,” Tom added, “and we ought to be almost under the town by this time.”

No longer could they hear the dull rumble of the guns, and their own voices echoed and re-echoed down the cavernous passageway, the only interruptions in an otherwise dead silence.

“Hello!” exclaimed Tom suddenly, in a note of new surprise, and an instant later the far wall flung back the word at them as though someone there were repeating it in mockery. There was something unpleasant about the situation. It was like wandering around aimlessly in the dead of night in an abandoned house reputed to be haunted, not knowing what startling surprises awaited one at any moment.

Tom’s exclamation escaped him when he noticed that the tunnel apparently came to a dead end about twenty-five feet ahead. A moment later, however, it was apparent they were approaching a right-angled turn.

Tom extinguished his own light to see if any ray came from down this new passageway, but there was nothing but pitch blackness, in which neither lad could discern the outline of the other.

Snapping it on again they proceeded slowly until Tom stood within a foot of the abrupt turn in the wall. The new tunnel ran directly to the right of the direction in which they had been approaching. With a sudden forward thrust of his head, Tom took a quick survey of what lay beyond.

He drew back with a gasp, and his free hand fell upon Harper’s arm.

“Look!” was all he could say for the moment, and Harper, following Tom’s bidding, drew in his breath sharply, then gave a low whistle.

They had made a discovery of tremendous moment! But had they made it in time?

“Out! Out!” Tom ordered. “We may be blown to atoms any second if we stay here.”

And indeed it was true. The sharp turn in the tunnel brought them into a great cavernous chamber in which there must have been at least fifty tremendous bombs, all connected by copper wires with a heavy cable which hung suspended from the ceiling. It was obvious that during their long occupancy of the St. Mihiel salient the Germans had dug this tunnel and planted these mines, for just such a contingency as now existed—enemy occupation of Thiaucourt. And while neither lad was an engineer, both knew sufficient about bombs to realize that there were enough there to blow the whole town site off the map and annihilate every person within a radius of more than half a mile.

“Ten thousand men are quartered on the space that those bombs would blow up, and the Germans may touch them off at any time! Run! Run!” Tom ordered, and, setting the example, he bounded by Harper, the searchlight held out before him, tearing toward the mouth of the tunnel as fast as his legs would carry him.

“They’re probably waiting for that German lieutenant to return,” Tom managed to speculate jerkily, without in the slightest reducing speed. “It’s pretty clear now that he was down here—to see that everything was all right—and put on—finishing touches.”

“Yeh,” agreed George, “and it just occurs to me now that he wore the insignia of the Signal Corps.”

“Wanted those papers,” Tom supplemented, “so as to know when the largest number of our men would be over the spot.”

“Uh-huh,” from Harper, but by this time neither had further breath to spare on conversation. They were forcing themselves forward with every ounce of energy they possessed.

As a gray light, barely discernible, loomed in the distance, they knew that at last they were approaching the mouth of the tunnel, and that the first streaks of dawn had appeared.

Winded as they were, neither had the strength to climb the smooth-sided hole as the German evidently had done, by the main strength of the pressure of his legs against the walls as he made his way upward.

George squared himself with widespread feet, and Tom mounted to his shoulder. Ollie, who was still guarding the prize prisoner and awaiting their return, began popping questions, even as he helped Tom out of the hole, but the latter had no time for more than the essential facts then.

“Use your jacket as a rope and give Harper a lift out of that hole,” he instructed, and while this was being done he partially regained his breath.

“Now Ollie,” he continued, “go like the wind to the first officer of Engineers you can find, tell him we’ve discovered that everything under Thiaucourt is mined, and get back here with the necessary men as soon as you can.”

He turned to Harper. “You stay here and watch this German. I’ve still got breath enough left to make brigade headquarters in a very few minutes. Don’t let Fritz get away under any circumstances.”

And at the same instant Tom and Ollie sped away in opposite directions—Tom for the highest commanding officer he could find; Ollie back over the ground they had traversed, past the grave they had dug, and into the wood in search of an officer of Engineers.

Both knew that thousands of lives were at stake. Both put forth their bravest effort. For both realized that if they succeeded at all it would only be in the nick of time.