Then came a cockney voice, "Cheer-o, mitey! We're friends, ammies! Damn it all, you ain't tikin' us for Boshes, are yer?"
Irene laughed--yes, laughed, though two men had died before her eyes!--at the amazement conveyed by the Walloon's gruff yelp.
"Don't be alarmed! These are friends, British soldiers," went on Dalroy.
"I thought they were devils from hell," was the candid answer.
Jan was unquestionably frightened. For one thing, his hands were tied behind his back, and he was being led by a halter fashioned out of a heel-rope, a plight in which the Chevalier Bayard himself might have quaked. For another, he had been plodding along at the side of one of the horses, thinking bitterly of the fair Léontine, whose buxom waist he would never squeeze again, when a beam of dazzling light revealed a crouching, nondescript being which flung itself upward in a panther-like spring, and buried a bayonet to the socket in the body of the nearest trooper. No wonder Jan was scared.
The soldiers had caught both horses. Dalroy, a cavalryman, had abandoned the earlier remounts with a twinge of regret. He thought now there was no reason why he and Irene should not ride, as the day's tramp, not to speak of the strain of the past hour, might prove a drawback before morning.
"Can you sit a horse astride?" he asked her.
Bates offered no objection, as long as they followed in rear. The hussar's cloaks came in useful, and Dalroy buckled on a sword-belt. Jan announced that he was good for another twenty miles provided he could win clear of those _sales Alboches_. He was eager to relate his adventures, but Dalroy quieted him by the downright statement that if his tongue wagged he might soon be either a prisoner again or dead.
A night so rife with hazard could hardly close tamely. The rain cleared off, and the stars came out ere they reached the ferry on the Schelde, and a scout sent ahead came back with the disquieting news that a strong cavalry picket, evidently on the alert, held the right bank. But the thirteen had made a specialty of disposing of German pickets in the dark. In those early days of the war, and particularly in Flanders, Teuton nerves were notoriously jumpy, so the little band crept forward resolutely, dodging from tree to tree, and into and out of ditches, until they could see the stars reflected in the river. Dalroy and Irene had dismounted at the first tidings of the enemy, turning a pair of contented horses into a meadow. They and Maertz, of course, had to keep well behind the main body.