ut
they had seen him and gave chase. He dared not stop. On he ran, hoping
that the Russians were nearer than their fires.

CHAPTER XVII

AN OLD ENEMY

Suddenly over Fred's head there was a peculiar whistling. He had never
heard that sound before, but somehow he knew by instinct what it was. He
was under fire! Behind him were the shots, but the firing was wild and
at random. He plunged into the bushes now, for to do so was to choose
the lesser of two evils. He was fairly safe, so sheltered from the
bullets, since if they could not see him, the Uhlans would not be likely
to fire at him at all. And while it was certain that they could follow
him in and catch him if he stayed in the brush, he would delay them at
least, and the Russians were so near that they might hear the firing and
come up.

That came about even sooner than he had thought possible. He stopped,
panting. The Uhlans were close on his trail by this time, and he heard
them coming up. But then came a sudden shouting of orders, and, a
moment later, a furious fusillade that was answered from the Russian
side. Over the rattle of the firing, too, came a sound he remembered
well, though he had heard it only once before--the yelling of charging
Cossacks. For the second time the wild Russian horsemen had come to his
rescue in the nick of time!

But this time there was more of a fight, since the two little bodies of
horsemen were far more evenly matched than had been the case when
General Suvaroff had led his daring raid behind the German lines in the
effort to capture von Hindenburg. For five minutes the fighting was fast
and furious. Fred could hear the clash of steel against steel and the
spiteful spitting of revolvers and automatic pistols. Then the wild
Russian shout of victory arose, and he heard sounds of galloping fast
dying away. Even though he could see nothing, he knew which side had
won.

"Thank Heaven!" he said to himself. "I wonder if they couldn't chase
them and raid the culvert. There aren't so many troops there! Then we
could surely get Boris away from them."

But the first thing to do, of course, was to come out of his cover and
make himself known to his rescuers. There was a certain risk in even
that simple procedure, and Fred was not so carried away by the
excitement of the fight as to forget it. There was more than a chance
that if he broke out, the Russians would mistake him for some German who
had tried to escape by taking refug