t is this?"

"It must be carefully planned beforehand."

"Humph! Trains filled with troops passing every five minutes; the lines
thick with guards. It'll want careful planning--and a trifle more. In
fact, it'll need the devil's own luck. What say you, boys?"

"No matter, Corp," cried Peck testily. "Give the lad his head. We ain't
particular, so long as it's a fust-class scrap."

"It'll be all that," grunted Shaw.

"Did we expect to git out of this show alive?" retorted Peck. "What's
the odds? Let the lad 'ave his way--he's grubbed us well anyhow."

The other men murmured an assent, and it was clear that most of the band
were quite ready to follow Max in an attempt, however desperate, on the
Germans' main line of communication. The Frenchmen were quite ready to
agree to anything that would lead to another encounter with the enemy in
company with their British comrades, and so Max was left in possession
of the field and charged with full responsibility for the tremendous
task before them.

* * * * *

Two days later the whole of the band arrived safely within a mile or so
of the great main line which runs between Aix-la-Chapelle and Liege, and
then on through Namur to Paris. A stoppage to their communications on
this line would disconcert the Germans in a way that hardly anything
else could do, and Max, from the knowledge he had gained, while at
Liege, of the great trains loaded with troops and munitions that
constantly passed through at all hours of the day and night, was very
well aware of it. Next to his darling scheme for the frustration of the
Germans' plans as regards the Durend works, the breaking of the great
railway through the town had seemed the most serious blow that could be
aimed at the Germans by a few men working independently of the great
military forces of the Allies. It was a difficult matter, but not
impossible. That was enough.

Max and Dale, accompanied by Shaw, reconnoitred the railway after hiding
their men well away out of sight. The first point reached Max did not
consider suitable, and it was not until they had approached the line at
several different places that he found a spot that satisfied him. This
spot was one where the line passed along a fairly deep cutting, the
sides of which were thickly overgrown with bushes with here and there a
young tree. It was a spot at which it would be easy to approach the line
unseen. And yet this was not Max's chief rea