"Sh-h-h-h!" warned Lieutenant Mackinson in a whisper, while Tom Rawle, quietly chuckling at the fat lad's misfortune, aided him to his feet. "Down flat!" said Mackinson again, as he discerned several shadows moving across a space a considerable distance to the north of them. For fully ten minutes, which seemed like an hour, they lay there, not daring to move. They watched the enemy scouting party get a like scare, and then, after what seemed to be a whispered consultation, turn back to the German lines. "What did you fall over?" the lieutenant finally asked of Slim, in a scarcely audible tone. "I just found it," replied Slim. "It's a wire. Here, let me have your hand." And he guided the lieutenant's fingers to that which had been the cause of his downfall. "Copper!" exclaimed the lieutenant. "Hoskins, let me have that kit." And without the aid of a light he extracted from the leather case which Hoskins gave him a very small telegraph instrument. The instant it was attached to the wire the receiver began to tick irregularly. Neither Rawle nor Hoskins understood German, but to the others they were words easy to translate. They had accidentally struck an enemy wire and had tapped it! That part of the message which they had intercepted read: "--lead enemy to believe whole attack centered from your position, but main assault will be a flank move around Hill 20" At that instant a fusillade of bullets cut the ground all about them, and the six men suddenly realized that they were under a pitiless and well-directed machine-gun fire. CHAPTER XII THE S O S WITH PISTOL SHOTS To move from the position they were in was impossible. All that they could do, imprisoned there as they were within a steel and leaden wall of rapidly falling machine-gun bullets, was to hope that the gunners would not change their aim, even by the fraction of a point, and that neither side would send up a torch rocket to divulge their exact whereabouts and bring sudden death or mortal injury to them all. They knew now that they had been discovered by the enemy scouting party which they had observed a short time before--as they thought, without the others knowing of their presence there in "No Man's Land." They also realized now, when it was too late, that the Germans had returned to their own lines, after that brief consultation, in order to procure the machine-gun with which to wipe them out. And through it all they dared not return the fire, could not even utter a word to each other without fear of giving the enemy a closer range upon them. It was a terrible three minutes for that isolated little group of Americans, for bullets were striking all around them, the nearest not more than ten feet away, and there was every possibility that another detachment might be flanking them, to cut them off later in their retreat, in case the machine-gun did not effectively do its deadly work.