They saw the dim shape, moving noiselessly, halt. The dim figure seemed to be casting about for something. It went down on hands and knees and crawled forward. The two infantrymen crept after it. It stopped, and turned around. The two dodged to one side in haste. The enemy infantryman crawled off in another direction, the two Americans following him as closely as they dared.
He halted once more, a dim and grotesque figure in the fog. They saw him fumbling in his belt. He threw something, suddenly. There was a little tap as of a fountain pen dropped upon concrete. Then a hissing sound. That was all, but the enemy infantryman waited, as if listening....
The two Americans fell upon him as one individual. They bore him to the earth and Coffee dragged at his gas-mask, good tactics in a battle where every man carries gas-grenades. He gasped and fought desperately, in a seeming frenzy of terror.
They squatted over him, finally, having taken away his automatics, and Coffee worked painstakingly to get off his gas-mask while Wallis went poking about in quest of tobacco.
"Dawggone!" said Coffee. "This mask is intricate."
"He ain"t got any pockets," mourned Wallis.
Then they examined him more closely.
"It"s a whole suit," explained Coffee. "H-m.... He don"t have to bother with sag-paste. He"s got him on a land diving-suit."
"S-s-say," gasped the prisoner, his language utterly colloquial in spite of the beady eyes and coa.r.s.e black hair that marked him racially as of the enemy, "say, don"t take off my mask! Don"t take off my mask!"
"He talks an" everything," observed Coffee in mild amazement. He inspected the mask again and painstakingly smashed the goggles. "Now, big boy, you take your chance with th" rest of us. What" you doin" around here?"
The prisoner set his teeth, though deathly pale, and did not reply.
"H"m-m...." said Coffee meditatively. "Let"s take him in the pill-box an" let Loot"n"t Madison tell us what to do with him."
They picked him up.
"No! No! For Gawd"s sake, no!" cried the prisoner shrilly. "I just ga.s.sed it!"
The two halted. Coffee scratched his nose.
"Reckon he"s lyin", Pete?" he asked.
Corporal Wallis shrugged gloomily.
"He ain"t got any tobacco," he said morosely. "Let"s chuck him in first an" see."
The prisoner wriggled until Coffee put his own automatic in the small of his back.
"How long does that gas last?" he asked, frowning. "Loot"n"t Madison wants us to report. There"s some fellers in there, all ga.s.sed up, but we were in there a while back an" it didn"t hurt us. How long does it last?"
"Fur-fifteen minutes, maybe twenty," chattered the prisoner. "Don"t put me in there!"
Coffee scratched his nose again and looked at his wrist-watch.
"A"right," he conceded, "we give you twenty minutes. Then we chuck you down inside. That is, if you act real agreeable until then. Got anything to smoke?"
The prisoner agonizedly opened a zipper slip in his costume and brought out tobacco, even tailor-made cigarettes. Coffee pounced on them one second before Wallis. Then he divided them with absorbed and scrupulous fairness.
"Right," said Sergeant Coffee comfortably. He lighted up. "Say, you, if y" want to smoke, here"s one o" your pills. Let"s see the gas stuff. How" y" use it?"
Wallis had stripped off a heavy belt about the prisoner"s waist and it was trailing over his arm. He inspected it now. There were twenty or thirty little sticks in it, each one barely larger than a lead pencil, of dirty gray color, and each one securely nested in a tube of flannel-lined papier-mache.
"These things?" asked Wallis contentedly. He was inhaling deeply with that luxurious enjoyment a tailor-made cigarette can give a man who had been remaking b.u.t.ts into smokes for days past.
"Don"t touch "em," warned the prisoner nervously. "You broke my goggles. You throw "em, and they light and catch fire, and that scatters the gas."
Coffee touched the prisoner, indicating the ground, and sat down, comfortably smoking one of the prisoner"s cigarettes. By his air, he began to approve of his captive.
"Say, you," he said curiously, "you talk English pretty good. How"d you learn it?"
"I was a waiter," the prisoner explained. "New York. Corner Forty-eighth and Sixth."
"My Gawd!" said Coffee. "Me, I used to be a movie operator along there. Forty-ninth. Projection room stuff, you know. Say, you know Heine"s place?"
"Sure," said the prisoner. "I used to buy Scotch from that blond feller in the back room. With a benzine label for a prescription?"
Coffee lay back and slapped his knee.
"Ain"t it a small world?" he demanded. "Pete, here, he ain"t never been in any town bigger than Chicago. Ever in Chicago?"
"h.e.l.l," said Wallis, morose yet comfortable with a tailor-made cigarette. "If you guys want to start a extra war, go to knockin" Chicago. That"s all."
Coffee looked at his wrist-watch again.
"Got ten minutes yet," he observed. "Say, you must know Pete Hanfry-"
"Sure I know him," said the enemy prisoner, scornfully. "I waited on him. One day, just before us reserves were called back home...."
In the monster tank that was headquarters the general tapped his fingers on his knees. The pale white light flickered a little as it shone on the board where the bright sparks crawled. White sparks were American tanks. Blue flashes were for enemy tanks sighted and reported, usually in the three-second interval between their identification and the annihilation of the observation-post that had reported them. Red glows showed encounters between American and enemy tanks. There were a dozen red glows visible, with from one to a dozen white sparks hovering about them. It seemed as if the whole front line were about to burst into a glare of red, were about to become one long lane of conflicts in impenetrable obscurity, where metal monsters roared and rumbled and clanked one against the other, bellowing and belching flame and ramming each other savagely, while from them dripped the liquids that made their breath mean death. There were nightmarish conflicts in progress under the blanket of fog, unparalleled save perhaps in the undersea battles between submarines in the previous European war.
The chief of staff looked up; his face drawn.
"General," he said harshly, "it looks like a frontal attack all along our line."
The general"s cigar had gone out. He was pale, but calm with an iron composure.
"Yes," he conceded. "But you forget that blank spot in our line. We do not know what is happening there."
"I am not forgetting it. But the enemy outnumbers us two to one-"
"I am waiting," said the general, "to hear from those two infantrymen who reported some time ago from a listen-post in the dead area."
The chief of staff pointed to the outline formed by the red glows where tanks were battling.
"Those fights are keeping up too long!" he said sharply. "General, don"t you see, they"re driving back our line, but they aren"t driving it back as fast as if they were throwing their whole weight on it! If they were making a frontal attack there, they"d wipe out the tanks we have facing them; they"d roll right over them! That"s a feint! They"re concentrating in the dead s.p.a.ce-"
"I am waiting," said the general softly, "to hear from those two infantrymen." He looked at the board again and said quietly, "Have the call-signal sent them. They may answer."
He struck a match to relight his dead cigar. His fingers barely quivered as they held the match. It might have been excitement-but it might have been foreboding, too.