"Anyone at home?" enquired Penfold.

He pushed aside the covering to the sloping tunnel and entered the dug-out, which in point of size and contents was much the same as his demolished mud-hole—the damp steaming straw, the pungent fumes of the charcoal brazier, the moisture dripping through the timber-shored roof, and the guttering candle—a typical Tommy's barrack-room on the Somme Front.

Seated on an upturned ammunition-case and with his feet resting on another tin box, in order to keep them out of the slime, was a young, pale-faced, dark-haired soldier He was busily engaged in writing with an indelible pencil certain words of deeper violet hue, betraying the fact that the paper shared the general failing of the subterranean abode—it was moist: uncommonly so.

So engrossed was the writer that for some moments he "carried on" with his task. Then looking up, and seeing strange faces, he exclaimed, in a lisping drawl:

"I say, you've made a mistake. This isn't your caboodle."

"No mistake, chummy," replied Penfold firmly. "We've been shelled out. We crave your hospitality. How many men in this dug-out?"

"There were eight this morning," replied the youth:

"Where are the others?"

"Ask me another."

"I will," rejoined Penfold, depositing his rifle on a bench. "Have they left any grub?"

"Wish they had," was the grim answer. Then, with more eagerness than he had hitherto shown, he asked: "Have you any food? I haven't had a bite since this morning. Finished the whole of my ration, including jam, thinking that the fresh stuff would be in—but it isn't!"

"You're welcome to a share of ours, laddie," remarked Alderhame, "which happens to be nixes."

Ralph sat down on a bundle of straw, having first appropriated the late occupant's pack as a pillow. He was feeling horribly tired. His feet and hands were numbed with the cold. His saturated clothes were throwing off wisps of muggy vapour. Even a huge rat pattering on the muddy floor and scampering through the straw hardly troubled him, and a few hours previously he would have gone twenty yards to avoid one.

In his drowsiness he found himself contemplating the latest of his many new comrades.

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