I need hardly say that on a job of this sort one moves very slowly, and uses the utmost possible precaution to prevent noise. It was now absolutely dark, the moon having gone down and the sky being much overcast. But for my luminous-faced compass (which one consults under one's coat flap to prevent it from showing) we should have been helpless. As it was, on the bearings I worked out before starting, we steered comfortably and fairly accurately. All of a sudden came a shock, a rifle fired, as it seemed, under our noses, actually from about twenty-five paces ahead on the track we were making. "That's him, sir," breathed Hankin in my right ear. I looked at the compass. The shot came from dead on the spot where Hankin's third hole should be; the one we were making for then. "How about a little bomb for him, sir?" whispered the scout on my left. But I shook my head. Too much like looking for a needle in a bundle of hay, and too much like asking the Boche for machine-gun fire. It was fair to assume the Boche sniper who fired that shot would be facing our trenches; the same direction in which we were facing at that moment, since we were working back from the German wire towards our own. I pushed my lips close up to Hankin's ear and whispered: "We'll try stalking him." Hankin nodded, quite pleased. Then I whispered to the scout to follow us very, very carefully, and not too closely. I didn't want him to lose touch, but, for the sake of quietness, one would sooner, of course, go alone. We kept about six paces between us laterally, Hankin and myself, and we advanced by inches. I must say I should have been grateful for a shade more light, or less inky blackness. The edge of that sniper's hole was not sloping, but sheer; and, crawling slowly along, I struck my right hand clean over it into nothingness, letting my chest down with an audible bump. Right before me then I heard a man's body swing round on the mud, and the sniper let out some kind of a German exclamation which was a sort of squeal. It was, really, much more like some wild animal's cry than anything human. I had to chance it then. The sound was so amazingly close. I couldn't see him, but-- And when I sprang, the thing my hands gripped on first was not the beggar's windpipe or shoulders, as I had hoped, but his rifle, carried in his left hand on his left side.