"How far is it to the place they're digging here?" he asked.

"Just there, beyond this wall--but a little ways," she pointed in the
direction from which the sentry had come.

"How many are there?"

"I could not say, Monsieur; but few, assuredly, as I saw quite as many
as I thought were in the ground, and more, slip away after dark with the
guns and spades and boxes."

"Then wait very quietly till I come back," he lifted her from his lap,
but she clung desperately and would have cried had he not promised to
return safely.

She let him go then and he crawled away, passing just outside the door
to see if the street were clear. Skirting the torn walls and keeping in
the heavier shadows, creeping over piles of rubble as silently as a rat,
he came at last to a point which overlooked the hole where men toiled,
wearily, though in desperate haste. The sentry paced back and forth
within a hundred feet of him, sometimes speaking in monosyllables to his
comrades below.

At highest tension Jeb waited, until he felt not only sure of their
strength but reasonably certain that no others remained in the lower
strata of catacombs; because they rested at frequent intervals, implying
a state of exhaustion, and this, in turn, indicated an absence of relief
shifts. Fifteen men in all were there, besides the sentry. On the street
level their rifles had been stacked. The hole--a machine-gun
redoubt--in which they dug was about five feet deep; the sides were
steep; the only weapons near at hand were picks and spades.

Tingling with excitement, he stole carefully back to the ruined door and
entered, bringing with him a stout club picked from the debris. The
girl's arms flew about him at once, and the wan voice whispered
tremulously:

"Oh, Monsieur, if you had not come!"

"But I did come," he took her again upon his lap, seeming in a much
better humor than when he had gone out. "We're about to get away, little
one; are you big enough to do just what I say?"

There was a look of reproach in her eyes which he could not, of course,
have seen, but he felt her arms tighten.

"Everything," she whispered. "Can Monsieur carry the little sisters?"

"Monsieur can, but he isn't going to," he muttered fiercely. "They'll
have two-legged horses to ride, and so will you. Now, I'm going over by
the door, and when I get there I want you to give a loud cry."

"Oh, Monsieur," she trembled, "he will come and--and----"

"I want him to come, but he