He had just turned an awkward corner, narrowly avoiding a sideslip, and was congratulating himself on a few yards of straight track and a widening that gave hope of reaching an open road, when, amid the sound of guns, he caught another sound, which at first he mistook for the whirr of an aeroplane. In a moment, however, he recognised his error. It was the purring of a motor bicycle, and in front, approaching him. Almost as soon as he knew this, the machine came in sight at the far corner, perhaps a hundred yards away, running at no great speed. At the first glance he saw that the rider was a German; at the second that the German was not unprepared to meet him. He realised afterwards that, the wind being with him, the noise of his own swiftly running engine must have been heard first. Each had only a few moments to decide what to do. The German, the instant he recognised the approaching rider as a British soldier, screwed on his brakes, turned the bicycle across the lane, sprang off and drew a revolver, no doubt expecting that the Englishman would swerve at the obstacle, be forced into the hedge, and present an easy target. His reasoning, if such it was, would have been sound enough had it not proceeded from a faulty estimate of the English mind--an error into which the Germans have been betrayed many times since the Kaiser made his initial blunder in the same kind. The German is a master of the obvious, and imagines that what he would do is the best thing to be done, and that an Englishman will do it badly. Harry, however, was not committed by training or habit to either of the obvious courses: to allow himself to be forced into the hedge, or to stop dead and fight the German on foot. It seemed to him, in those few seconds that he had for deciding, better to clear the way for Kenneth, who, no doubt, was not far behind. A spill would at any rate not hurt his feelings, as it might a German’s. Accordingly, instead of applying the brakes, he opened the throttle, and bracing himself for the shock, drove his machine at ever-increasing speed straight for the enemy. This, of course, from the German point of view, was English madness. Still, it was unexpected, and when the German fired, at the distance of twenty paces, his aim was flurried by his natural surprise, and by the sudden realisation that his machine would certainly be smashed. Dropping his revolver, and shouting something that was far from complimentary, he tried to pull his bicycle clear; but his action was not only too late; like so many well-meant efforts to prevent mischief, it furthered it. His movement of a few inches caused Harry’s bicycle to strike the hub of the driving wheel instead of the middle of the machine, for which he was steering. Harry was flung over the handle-bars into the hedge, a few feet in advance of the bicycles, which lay mangled together, and not quite so far from the German, who had very luckily escaped being crushed beneath them.