With two men to help me, I took the tractor all down, “babbitted” up the bearings, readjusted the gears, and had it up and running at the end of a week. With a string back to the seat to open up the throttle for the sharp pulls, I had it snaking a string of ten waggon-loads of crushed rock where it had been stalling down on three before the overhauling. During that week I had also managed to pick up--no matter how--several marks in money, and had succeeded in concealing so effectually the greasy jacket of one of my assistants that he gave up hunting for it and got a new one. A machinist’s cap had already been given me, and the evening that the other helper washed out his overalls and flung them over his tent to dry, I--seeing a chance to complete my wardrobe--decided promptly that the time had come to make a move. They had offered me a steady job running the old “Caterpillar,” and at something better than ordinary “prisoner’s pay,” but as it would have kept me in the same neighbourhood, I could not figure how it would help my chances in the least to “linger on.” There was supposed to be a sentry watching the road machinery, and also keeping a wary eye on the tent where I bunked with a half-dozen of the engineers, but he did not take his job very seriously, and I knew I would have no difficulty avoiding him. We had had a hard day of it, and my tent mates were in bed by dark--about 8 o’clock--and asleep, by their deep breathing, a few minutes later. They all slept in their working clothes, else I could have made up my outfit then and there. But it did not matter, for within half a minute of the time I had slipped noiselessly under the loosened tent-flap, I was making off down the road with a full suit of German machinist’s togs under my arm. Five minutes later I stopped in the darker darkness under a tree by the roadside and slipped them on over my prison suit, rightly anticipating that the extra warmth of the latter might be very welcome if I had much sleeping out to do. It was partly bravado, probably, and partly because I felt that, if missed, I would be searched for in the opposite direction, that caused me to head for the two-mile-distant town of X----. And it was probably the same combination which led me, after passing unchallenged down the long main street, to march up to the wicket of a “movie” show, pay my twenty-five pfennig and pass inside. Had there been a “hue and cry” that night (which there was not), this was undoubtedly the last place they would have looked for me in.