“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, was to be a factor in their obtaining entrance to Holland.  They knew little of the detail of what happened.  They were guided one night by a dwarfed cripple to a little wood, and there spent four hours in weary waiting in absolute silence.  Then the cripple returned and motioned them to follow him.  This they did, and when they reached the edge of the wood, commenced crawling on all fours, as their guide was doing.

They crawled for some hundreds of yards, winding about the scrub brush and tall grass, and then suddenly came upon a wire fence.  A dark shape loomed up on the far side of this barrier.  The cripple, aided by the man on the other side, held apart two strands of the wire, and cautioned the boys to step quickly through the opening.

The cripple disappeared in the black night, the dark form beside them motioned in a ghost-like way to the blackness ahead of them, and without a sound they pressed on, as though in a dream, hardly daring to hope all would come out well.

By daylight they were able to distinguish something of the general outlines of the country, which was flat, damp and fog covered.  A tall line of poplars led them toward a road.  As they reached it, in the gray of the morning, Bob turned to Dicky and said the first words either of them had spoken for more than an hour.

“Do you think we are really in Holland, and free?” he queried.

“The whole thing was done in such a mysterious fashion, and silence so rigidly enjoined by everybody, that I would not be surprised if we have been smuggled out of Belgium, Bob,” was Dicky’s reply.