“Go on, Sim,” he whispered to me.

We had agreed that if anything happened to one of us, the others were to go on.  We could not hope to help each other against such numbers.

When we got opposite the wood, we made a dash for it.

I think it was then that Bromley went back and gave himself up.  I often wondered what he told them about the other men they had seen.  Whatever he thought was best for our safety, I am sure of that, for Bromley was a loyal comrade and the best of chums.

* * *

We lay there for a while, wondering what to do.  We were about in the middle of a very small grove, and knew it was a poor place to stay in, for it was a thin wood, and the daylight was not far distant.

Edwards, who was right beside me, whispered that he had just seen a soldier climb a tree and another one handing him a gun.  This decided us to crawl to the edge of the wood again.  But when we reached it, Edwards, who was ahead, whispered back to me that he saw three civilians right in front of us.

This began to look like a tight corner.

We determined to take a chance on the civilians’ not being armed, and make a dash for it.  We did, and “the civilians” turned out to be a group of slim evergreens.  We saw a forest ahead, and made for it.  The ground was sandy and poor, and the trees were scattered and small, and grew in clumps.  The going was not hard, but the loss of Bromley had greatly depressed us.

Once we met a man—­ran right into him—­and probably scared him just as much as he did us.  He gave us a greeting, to which we grunted a reply, a grunt being common to all languages.

We saw the headlight of a train about three o’clock in the morning, reminding us of the railroad to the south of us.

Coming to a thick spruce grove, we decided to take cover for the day.  The morning was red and cloudy, with a chilly wind crackling the trees over our heads, but as the day wore on, the wind went down and the sun came out.  It was a long day, though, and it seemed as if the night would never come.  It was too cold to sleep comfortably, but we got a little sleep, some way.

When we started out at night, we soon came to a ditch too wide to jump, and as our feet were dry we did not want to wet our socks, so took them off and went through.  January is a cold month for wading streams, and a thin crust of ice was hard on the feet.  They felt pretty numb for a while, but when we had wiped them as dry as we could and got on our socks and boots again, they were soon all right.  But our care for our feet did not save them, for the muddy ground, full of bog-holes, which we next encountered, made us as wet and miserable as we could be.

One large town—­it may have been Soegel—­gave us considerable trouble getting around it.

The time of year made the going bad.  There were no vegetables in the gardens or apples on the trees; no cows out at pasture.  Even the leaves were gone from the trees, thus making shelter harder to find.  The spruce trees and Scotch fir were our stronghold, and it was in spruce thickets we made our hiding-places by day.