He re-crossed the little river on the same high-arched bridge by which he had come, skirted the hospital camp, and then bore off toward the east.  It was past midnight, the skies were free from snow, but there were many low, hovering clouds which suited his purpose.  He was still back of the French lines, but his pass would take him through them at any time he wished.  The problem was how to pass those of Germany, and the difficulty was very great, because for a long distance here the hostile trenches were only three or four hundred yards apart.

He discerned to the eastward a dim line of hills which, as he knew, rose farther on into mountains, and it occurred to him that he might find it easier to get through in rough country than in the region of low, rounded hills, where he now stood.  He carried a knapsack, well filled with food, a blanket roll, and now he resolved to push on all night and most of the following day, before passing the French lines.

Keeping a watchful eye he pursued his steady course across the hills.  The depth of the snow impeded speed, but action kept his heart strong.  The terrible waiting was over, he was at least trying to do something.  Fresh interests sprang up also.  It was a strange, white, misty world upon which he looked.  He traveled through utter desolation, but to the east, inclining to the north was a limitless double line, which now and then broke into flashes of flame, while from points further back came that mutter of the big guns like the groanings of huge, primeval monsters.

It seemed to John barbarous and savage to the last degree.  He knew that he was in one of the most densely populated and highly cultivated portions of the world, but the dragon’s teeth were coming up more thickly even than in the time of old Cadmus.

He walked until it was almost morning without seeing a human being, and then, the snow having dragged on him so heavily, he felt that he must take rest.  Crawling into a hole in the snow that he scraped out under a ledge, he folded himself between his blankets and went to steep.

CHAPTER VII

THE PURSUIT

John Scott would not perhaps have slept so well in a hole in the snow if he had not been inured to life in a trench, reeking in turn with mud, slush, ice and water.  His present quarters were a vast improvement, dry and warm with the aid of the blankets, and he had crisp fresh air in abundance to breathe.  Hence in such a place in the Inn of the Hedge and the Snow he slept longer than he had intended.

His will to awake at the rising of the sun was not sufficient.  The soothing influence of warmth and the first real physical relaxation that he had enjoyed in three or four days overpowered his senses, and kept him slumbering on peacefully long after the early silver of the rising sun had turned to gold on the snow.

He had dug so deep a hole and he lay so close under the hedge that even a vigilant scout looking for an enemy might have passed within a dozen feet of him without seeing him.  Another drift of snow falling after he had gone to sleep had covered up his footsteps and he was as securely hidden as if he had been a hundred miles, instead of only a scant two miles, from the double French and German line.