until dark before attempting to proceed further.  All the rest of the day they lay in the moist, muddy ditch-bottom.  Bob had torn a map from the back of an old railway guide he had seen in the house in which he had slept, and it was to prove of inestimable value to him.  To strike north, edging west, and reach one of the larger Belgian towns was the first plan.  What they should do once they had accomplished that, time must tell them.  So far they had been blessed by the best of fortune, and the part of the country in which they had descended did not seem to hold very many German troops.  Even Bob began to hope.

CHAPTER XI

THROUGH THE LINES

It was stiff, tiresome work lying quiet in the ditch that day, but with brambles pulled over them the boys were in comparatively little danger of discovery.  At dusk they crawled cautiously out of their hiding-place and slowly headed northward.  Every sound meant Germans to them, and their first mile was a succession of sallies forward, interspersed with sudden dives underneath the hedge by the roadside.  The moon came up.  The clank of harness and the gear of guns and wagons told of approaching artillery or transport, or both.  From the shelter of the hedge the boys watched long lines of dusty shapes move slowly past.  They seemed to be taking an interminable time about it.  Now and then a rough guttural voice rasped out an order.

The boys waited for what seemed hours to them, and the very moment they would move, along would come another contingent of some sort.  They had evidently struck a corps shifting southward.  At last a good sized gap in the long, ghostly line gave them courage to cross.  They got through safely enough, and kept on steadily for a time across country.  They skirted two villages, and reached a haystack near a river-bank before daybreak.  Out toward the east they saw the faint outlines of a fairly large town.  Before them lay the river, spanned by a bridge guarded at each end by a German sentry.  Hope fell several degrees.

The boys had climbed upon the stack and pulled the straw well over them.  As they lay looking toward their goal, to the north, the home of the owner of the stack was at their backs.  He made his appearance at an early hour, and came not far distant.  After a whispered conference, Bob hailed him in a low tone.  First the little man bolted back into his house without investigating the whereabouts of the mysterious voice.  After a time he reappeared, and when Bob again sung out to him, he gingerly approached the stack, staring at it like mad, in spite of Bob’s continuous warnings that he should not do so.  Finally Bob induced him to mount the slight ladder by which the boys had climbed to their point of vantage.