er. North or south or east or west, he could go no farther.
Capture or firing squad or starvation and death from exhaustion, he
could go no farther. His name would not be sent home on the casualty
lists, any more than Archer's would, but they had _tried_, and done
their bit as well as they could.

There was one faint hope left; perhaps this house was not occupied, or
if it was on the Alsatian side of that terrible river (a true Hun river,
if there ever was one) it might be occupied by a Frenchman. Scarcely
knowing what he was doing, Tom pushed the door open and staggered
inside. Dazed and suffering as he was, he was conscious of the rain
pelting on the roof above him and sounding more audibly than outside
where the boisterous river drowned the sound of the downpour.

Something big and soft which caught in his feet was directly before him
and he stumbled and fell upon it. And there he lay, pressing his
throbbing forehead, which seemed bursting with fresh pain from the force
of his fall.

He had a reckless impulse to end all doubt by calling aloud in utter
abandonment. But this impulse passed, perhaps because he did not have
the strength or spirit to call.

Soon, from mere exhaustion, he fell into a fitful, feverish slumber
accompanied by a nightmare in which the lashing of the wind and rain
outside were conjured into the clangor and hoof beats of cavalry and he
was hopelessly enmeshed in a barbed-wire entanglement.

With the first light of dawn he saw that he was lying upon a mass of
fishnet and that his feet and arms were entangled in its meshes.

He was in a small, circular apartment with walls of masonry and a broken
spiral stairway leading up to a landing beside a narrow window. Rain
streamed down from this window and trickled in black rivulets all over
the walls. A very narrow doorway opened out of this circular room, from
which the door was broken away, leaving two massive wrought-iron hinges
sticking out conspicuously into the open space. As Tom's eyes fell upon
these he thought wistfully of how eagerly Archer would have appropriated
one of them as a "souveneerr." Poor, happy-go-lucky Archer!

"I thought he was a good swimmer," Tom thought, "because he lived so
near Black Lake.[A] It was all my fault. He probably just didn't like to
say he wasn't----"

[Footnote A: The lake on the shore of which Temple Camp was situated.]

He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to ease the pain in his head and
collect h