"No, sirr. I doubt I was away at the 'phone."

"Well, now you are here, wait inside this doorway, where you can see
Sergeant Mucklewame's party, and look out for signals. M'Snape, let us
find that machine-gun."

The pair made their way to the hitherto blind side of the building,
and cautiously peeped through a much-perforated shutter in the
living-room.

"Do you see it, sirr?" inquired M'Snape eagerly.

Angus chuckled.

"See it? Fine! It is right in the open, in the middle of the street.
Look!"

He relinquished his peep-hole. The German machine-gun was mounted
in the street itself, behind an improvised barrier of bricks and
sandbags. It was less than a hundred yards away, sited in a position
which, though screened from the view of Angus's platoon farther down,
enabled it to sweep all the ground in front of the position. This it
was now doing with great intensity, for the brief public appearance
of Angus and M'Snape had effectually converted intermittent into
continuous fire.

"We must get the Lewis gun over at once," muttered Angus. "It can
knock that breastwork to pieces."

He crossed the house again, to see if any of Mucklewame's men had
arrived.

They had not. The man with the Lewis gun was lying dead halfway across
the street, with his precious weapon on the ground beside him. Two
other men, both wounded, were crawling back whence they came, taking
what cover they could from the storm of bullets which whizzed a few
inches over their flinching bodies.

Angus hastily semaphored to Mucklewame to hold his men in check for
the present. Then he returned to the other side of the house.

"How many men are serving that gun?" he said to M'Snape. "Can you
see?"

"Only two, sirr, I think. I cannot see them, but that wee breastwork
will not cover more than a couple of men."

"Mphm," observed Angus thoughtfully. "I expect they have been left
behind to hold on. Have you a bomb about you?"

The admirable M'Snape produced from his pocket a Mills grenade, and
handed it to his superior.

"Just the one, sirr," he said.

"Go you," commanded Angus, his voice rising to a more than usually
Highland inflection, "and semaphore to Mucklewame that when he hears
the explosion of _this_"--he pulled out the safety-pin of the grenade
and gripped the grenade itself in his enormous paw--"followed,
probably, by the temporary cessation of the machine-gun, he is to
bring his men over here in a bunch, as hard as they can pelt.