Twice during the day we heard guns at a distance, and that confirmed my idea that others besides ourselves had escaped, and by widening the chase it gave me greater hopes.  But it was weary work lying there, and more and more painful as regards our stomachs, which from crying came to clamour, and from clamour to painful groanings, and a hollow clapping together of their empty linings.

Not till nightfall did we dare to move, and very grateful we were that the night was fine with a glorious show of stars.  By them we steered due east, but still had to keep to the marsh-lands and away from the roads.  And now, from lack of food, our hearts were not so stout, and the going seemed heavier and more trying.  It brought back to me the times we had in the Everglades of Florida, and I told Le Marchant the story, but it did not greatly cheer him.

Once that night, in our blind travelling, we stumbled out into a road, and while we stood doubtful whether we might not dare to use it for the easement of our bodies, there came along it the tramp of men and the click of arms, and we were barely in the ditch, with only our noses above water, when they went noisily past us in the direction of the prison.

We made a better course that night, in the matter of direction at all events, but our progress was slow, for we were both feeling sorely the lack of food, and our way across the flats was still full of pitfalls, into which we fell dully and dragged ourselves out doggedly.  We had been thirty hours without a bite, and suffered severe pains, probably from the marsh water we had drunk and had to drink.

“Two hundred kegs of fine French cognac we dropped overboard outside Poole Harbour,” groaned Le Marchant one time, “and a mouthful of it now—!” Ay, a mouthful of it just then would have been new life to us.  We stumbled on like machines because our spirits willed it so, but truly at times the weariness of the body was like to master the spirit.

“We must come across something in time,” I tried to cheer him with—­feeling little cheer myself.

“If it’s only the hole they’ll find our bodies in,” he said down-heartedly.

And a very short while after that, as though to point his words, we fell together into a slimy ditch, and it seemed to me that Le Marchant lay unable to rise.

I put my arms under him, and strove to lift him, and felt a shock of horror as another man’s arms round him on the other side touched mine, and I found another man trying to lift him also.

“Bon Dieu!” I gasped in my fright, and let the body go, as the other jerked out the same words, and released his hold also, and the body fell between us.

“Dieu-de-dieu, Carre!  But I thought this was you,” panted Le Marchant in a shaky voice.

“And I thought it was you.”

We bent together and lifted the fallen one to solid ground, but it was too dark to see his face.

“Is he dead?”