sped as he ran up
the hill, with the patter of the bursting shrapnel, with its load of
slugs and bullets, nails and pieces of iron, all about him. He had seen
a man stumble, the one man in uniform.

"Is Captain Obrenovitch the one who was in uniform?" he asked.

"Yes, Dick. Why? Was he hit? Did you see him go down?"

"I'm afraid so, yes. Here, I'm going to find out!"

Before Steve realized what he was doing, Dick had turned and plunged
back in the direction from which he had just come.

"Dick!" cried Stepan. "Where are you going? What are you doing?"

"I'm going after him!" Dick shouted back.

"Wait! That's madness! Let me go with you!"

But if he heard, Dick made no answer. He did hear, but he paid no
attention, and scarcely understood the words. All that Dick knew was
that he had run away from a man who had been wounded because he had
braved death to save his, Dick's, life. He had seen him fall, as he
understood now, and he had not stopped to see if he could help! Dick
felt a surge of shame. He felt as if he could never respect himself
again unless he tried to make atonement now for having run on! It was
fantastic, quixotic, absurd perhaps, but it was Dick Warner's way, as
anyone who had known him at home in New York would have realized at
once!

"I saw him fall. I know just where he is," Dick told himself again and
again, as he ran on, stumbling over roots, tripping repeatedly in his
hasty descent of the slope that had seemed so hard to climb a few
moments before. "It's up to me to find him and make up to him for
sticking to that rope!"

That was Dick's thought. He owed his life to this man Obrenovitch, whose
very face he would not know if he saw him now. And that life, he felt,
would be of no use to him if he kept it at the expense of leaving his
debt of gratitude to Obrenovitch unpaid.

The Servian captain had fallen out in the open, and Dick came to him at
last. The searchlight was still playing. It lit up the body for a
moment, and then winked away again. But Dick had his own pocket
flashlight out in a second, and in its light he saw that the captain, if
he was not dead, was in a bad way. Like all scouts, Dick knew something
of the first aid, and a very hasty glance showed him just what had
happened. Obrenovitch lay straight out, and the blood was gushing out
from his leg above the knee. One of the great arteries had been cut. In
a few minutes he would bleed to death if help did not come to him.

"