gent in Dunkirk after we've
arrived there. The general will send a message over to us which we're to
deliver at the same time we give up the machine."

"Great work, Tom! I've always said you'd make a mighty fine diplomatic
agent, if ever you tried, and now I know it."

"No soft-soap business, please. If it had been anybody but the general
I'd have surely fallen down on my job. But you know he's always had an
interest in us, Jack."

"Do you think he suspected anything?" asked the other.

"Sure he did, but not _the_ thing, for nobody in the wide world would
ever dream we were planning such an unheard of thing as a non-stop flight
across the Atlantic."

Tom dropped his voice to a whisper when he said this; not that there
seemed to be any particular need of caution, but simply on general
principles. They could not afford to take any chance of having their
great plan discovered in these early stages of the game.

"Well, I don't know how I'm going to hold out much longer," complained
Jack. "I can't keep still five minutes, but have to jump up and walk it
off. Let's see--two o'clock you said, didn't you? That'll be nearly three
long hours more. It's simply terrible, Tom! Sixty minutes in each hour!"

"But then we'll have to eat our regular midday meal, remember," Tom tried
to cheer his companion up by saying. "If you prefer it, we might walk
over to the field-hospital, which, by the way, I hear is to be moved
ahead to-night, to keep in closer touch with the wounded straggling back
from the front. The Y hut's close by, too, and we'd enjoy an hour or so
with the girls. Nellie told me she expected her brother, Harry, to be
back on our sector any day now, and if he should come before we clear out
we'd be mighty glad to see him."

Jack hesitated.

"Gee! you do tempt a fellow, Tom," he finally remarked, as though coming
to a conclusion. "Nothing I'd like better than to chat with Bessie and
have a few of those Salvation Army girls' doughnuts to munch. But I guess
it would be foolish in our laying off just now."

"You mean the notifications might arrive while we were gone?" remarked
Tom, nodding his head, pleased because the other took such a sensible
view of the matter.

"Yes. We might lose a whole hour, perhaps two, by being away,"
explained Jack. "That would be too bad; it might even turn out a
catastrophe, if in the end that hour would save us from being beaten in
the race against time."

"All right, then, we'll han