If Slade had any suspicion that “Monsieur le Capitaine” was directly interested in the great gun which was concealed thereabout, he did not say so to old Grigou and his daughter. They, at least, knew nothing of any such gun in their neighborhood, but they told him of frightful explosions which made their cottage “shiver.” They seemed to think that such things were common along the entire front and they knew of houses which had been shaken down by distant explosions. Slade asked them if they had heard any of these explosions lately and they told him they had not—not for several days. “Only he shake his head—vere wise—so,” Jeanne volunteered. He said afterward that he had counted on the noise of the monster to guide him to it but that he supposed his visit was in an interval of disuse caused by the ever-increasing scarcity of ammunition.
Early in the morning he set forth with a little snack which Jeanne had prepared for him and following the woods path was soon lost in the hilly forest. I have myself seen this forest at its edge and how any human being could hope to locate a particular object in it is beyond my comprehension. The woods path which ends near Grigou’s cottage follows a meandering course over the densely wooded summit and winding down the western slope develops into the single street of Talois village. I should say it might be five miles over the hill as the crow flies and more than ten by the path.
It was long after dark when Slade returned, very weary and apparently discouraged. He had seen nothing but dead men in the woods, he said. Not a sign was there of any open way along which artillery might be hauled—not so much as a wagon track. He was in a very ill mood and Jeanne tried to console him by saying that as long as he tried it was not disgrace if he failed.
“Sure it’s a disgrace if you fail,” he answered in a surly tone.
“I tell him ziss is no—what you call—deesgrace.”
Then he made one of those puzzling observations of his—the kind which Archer was always quoting.
“You can’t disgrace yourself either without disgracing a lot of other people. If you could it wouldn’t be so bad. That’s why I wouldn’t want the place where I live disgraced—or the whole air service, either.”
Jeanne apparently did not appreciate this line of reasoning and probably thought Slade rather a queer fellow.
The next morning at daylight he set forth again and returned long after dark, dog tired. He had wandered over the west slope of the hill down as far as the village where he had talked with Germans, making his inquiries as plain as he dared. The sum total of the information he had gained was just nothing at all and he returned with the gloomy realization of the needle-in-the-haystack character of his quest. I suspect that Slade was not a good loser—perhaps because he was not accustomed to losing.
“I got one more day,” he said doggedly.
The next day he carried his explorations whither his fancy took him and hoped for luck. This hill, so called, is in reality a sort of jumble of hill. Deep gullies intervened to balk the traveller and the undergrowth and secondary slopes, if I may so call them, make an orderly exploration quite impossible. I do not see how it could have been otherwise. That he should stumble upon a piece of art............