o enter.

A man's head was looking down, and Hawke fired at it.

The head remained where it was, but the marksman chuckled, knowing his
own powers; and as he stepped inside the doorway something splashed on
to the pavement where he had stood, something wet that shone very red in
the sunshine.

Their haversacks and water bottles brushed against the narrow sides of
the winding stairway; and as Rogerson reached the last step a revolver
cracked out, and he threw up his arms.

Tiddler immediately behind him caught the falling body on his head and
shoulder, and passed his rifle to Dennis.

"Poor old Jim!" muttered Tiddler, as he gripped the dead weight in both
hands, and, using the body as a shield, staggered into the bell chamber.

There, in the full blaze of the sun, the bells still dangled from a huge
transverse beam; but everything else had been carried away, and the
floor presented an open platform exposed to the sky, with a screen of
sandbags at its western edge, through which the Germans had worked a
Nordenfeldt.

There were only two men, and the one who had emptied his revolver into
Jim Rogerson held up his hands, crying in a terrified voice: "Mercy,
Kamerad!"

"Yus!" hissed Tiddler, dropping the dead man and snatching his rifle
from Dennis's hand before he could interfere. "The mercy you showed to
my mate!" And he ran him through.

As the grim khaki figures sprang out on to the platform, the other
German clubbed his rifle and made a dart for the head of the stairs, but
the man Hawke had shot lay between him and liberty; and, tripping up, he
plunged over the edge into space, clutched wildly at a broken beam that
still spanned the ruined walls, and dropped with a sickening crash on to
the floor below.

"Reckon he won't do that any more, sir," chuckled Harry Hawke; but
Dennis had already jumped on to the sandbags, and was semaphoring wildly
with both arms.

"Guns captured! Come on, you chaps!" he signalled. And as the message
was seen and understood, a wild cheer rose from the other end of the
street as the Highlanders and his own battalion jumped from their cover
and tore forward at the double.

He would have liked to linger on that point of vantage, which afforded a
fine view of the surrounding country; but their work was done, and he
followed the others down the stair again, only pausing for a moment to
secure poor Rogerson's identification disc as he passed him.

He found Hawke waiting at the stair-