res. The lieutenant had drawn on
a rubber glove. In his gloved hand he grasped a strip of steel which he
held in front of him, like a wand, fanning the air with it.

As he came to the entanglement, he probed the barbed wire carefully
with his wand, watching for an ensuing spark. For the Germans more than
once had been known to electrify their wires, with fatal results to
luckless prowlers.

These wires, to-night, were not charged. And, with pliers, the
lieutenant and Mahan started to cut a passageway through them.

As the very first strand parted under his pressure, Mahan laid one hand
warningly on the lieutenant's sleeve, and then passed the same
prearranged warning down the line to the left.

Silence--moveless, tense, sharply listening silence--followed his
motion. Then the rest of the party heard the sound which Mahan's keener
ears had caught a moment earlier--the thud of many marching feet. Here
was no furtive creeping, as when the twelve Yankees had moved along.
Rather was it the rhythmic beat of at least a hundred pairs of
shapeless army boots--perhaps of more. The unseen marchers were moving
wordlessly, but with no effort at muffling the even tread of their
multiple feet.

"They're coming this way!" breathed Sergeant Mahan almost without
sound, his lips close to the excited young lieutenant's ear. "And
they're not fifty paces off. That means they're boches. So near the
German wire, our men would either be crawling or else charging, not
marching! It's a company--maybe a battalion--coming back from a
reconnaissance, and making for a gap in their own wire some where near
here. If we lay low there's an off chance they may pass us by."

Without awaiting the lieutenant's order, Mahan passed along the signal
for every man to drop to earth and lie there. He all but forced the
eagerly gesticulating lieutenant to the ground.

On came the swinging tread of the Germans. Mahan, listening
breathlessly, tried to gauge the distance and the direction. He
figured, presently, that the break the Germans had made in their wire
could be only a few yards below the spot where he and the lieutenant
had been at work with the pliers. Thus the intruders, from their
present course, must inevitably pass very close to the prostrate
Americans--so close, perhaps, as to brush against the nearest of them,
or even to step on one or more of the crouching figures.

Mahan whispered to the man on his immediate left, the rookie from
Missouri: