Oh, I hope I'm in time!" cried Dick.

And then he wasted no more of the precious seconds. He knew that
Obrenovitch, as an officer, in uniform, and in time of war, would have
somewhere about him a Red Cross packet containing the absolute
essentials of first aid treatment. In a moment he had found this packet
and torn it open. He was close to the river, and in a twinkling he found
two small, flat stones. These he pressed into the open wounds where the
bullet had passed in and out, and then he drew a tight bandage about
them.

All this time, be it remembered, he was under heavy fire. Bullets
pattered about him constantly. Once a stick he was using in an effort to
improvise a still better tourniquet was shot right out of his hand. But
he never faltered. Fortunately the shooting was wild. The searchlight
had not picked him up, and so he was not a real target for the enemy, as
he might have been had they seen him in the glare of the great light.

The blood soon ceased to flow, and then Dick leaned over to listen for
the beating of the captain's heart. He caught it in a moment. It was
faint, but regular enough.

"I think he'll do all right now," said Dick to himself, with intense
satisfaction.

And then he had time to think of himself, and to realize that he was
tired and shaky about the knees. He collapsed for a moment, and lay
beside the wounded and unconscious officer. But he realized something
that was like a tonic; he had not been afraid, not once, while his work
remained unfinished! Perhaps it was just because he had been too busy in
his fight with the death that was reaching out to seize the Servian.
Whatever the reason, it was something to make him proud and happy, and
to fill him with a tingling sensation that was worth a night's sleep,
almost, in making him forget his own exhaustion.

"Now to get him away!" said Dick to himself. "There's no use in staying
here. Something is sure to hit one or both of us if I do."

But Obrenovitch was rather a heavy man. Dick could have dragged him
along, but he was afraid that that would start the bleeding of the wound
afresh, and he knew that if the Servian lost even a little more of the
blood that he had already shed so freely nothing could save him.

For a moment Dick was near to despair. There seemed nothing to do but
stay there and hope that the Austrian fire would slacken. Even so,
however, things were bad enough, for it was highly important, as Dick
understood very we