As soon as I had fully made up my mind what I wanted to do, I went on my good behaviour, got into the “trusty” class, and was one of the first picked for outside work when the call came for English prisoners to help in harvesting and road-making. I had a good chance to practise my German during the harvest work, but the prospects for making good after a “get-away” were not very promising, and I had sense enough to bide my time. But when I got switched on to road work, and when almost the first thing I saw was a bunch of Huns clustered round an old Holt “Caterpillar” tractor that had got stalled on them, I felt that time was drawing near. Now a “Caterpillar” is just about the finest tractor in the world for general purposes, provided it is run by a man that has had plenty of experience with its funny little ways; in the hands of any one else--even a first-class engineer that is quite at home with a wheel tractor--it is the original fount of trouble. To me the machine was an old friend, however, for I had run one for two or three seasons in the West and worked for a winter in one of the company’s factories in Illinois. I took the first opportunity to let the Huns know my qualifications, and when they saw me start in to true up the wobbly “track,” they just about fell on my neck then and there. They had seized the machine in a Belgian sugar-beet field a few days after the outbreak of the war, they explained, and it had been used for a while to haul heavy artillery in the drive into France. After a time the hard usage had begun to tell on the “track,” and--as they had no new parts to replace worn ones with--it had been giving about as much trouble as it was worth ever since. When I told them that it was adjustment rather than replacement that was needed, and that in a few days I could have the machine as good as new, they fairly tumbled over themselves to “borrow” me for the job. As a matter of fact, the old “crawler” was just about on its last legs, but I knew in any case that I could tinker it into some kind of running shape, and the comparative freedom of the job was what I wanted. This worked out even better than I expected, for after the first day or two, in order to save the time taken up by returning me to the prison camp at night and bringing me back in the morning, they arranged for me to bunk in in the road camp. They were too much occupied in hustling the job along to think about asking me for my parole--a lucky thing, for I should have had a hard time to keep from breaking it.