"I can see you don't believe me," Sweeny replied, "but it's a fact. They came in a hamper, together with two bottles of real Munich beer, an assortment of Westphalian ham, cheese, honey, sandwiches of roast veal and white bread, a few slabs of K bread, some pipe tobacco, and some--what do you think?--hot dogs! As sure as you're born, Casey, and if you'll believe me, I went for those frankfurters first! Oh, how many nights I have sat out here and thought how good one of those hot dogs, with a big gob of mustard on it, would be! But I never thought I'd ever taste any in the trenches. Yet only just now I have demolished four of them." II--"LET SWEENY TELL IT" Here was the way of it, as Sweeny told it to me: "I started out about midnight with a patrol to have a look at a new German bayou between two fortlets beyond our lines. I strung my men out so as to give warning of any German patrol, and then led them past our sentries and the barbed wire. I was some distance ahead of my men, and had got well within the German lines without seeing or hearing anything of the Germans. "Now this was not the first time that I had ever penetrated that far into the German lines, but it was the first time on such a mission that I had not had to dodge a German patrol; and very often their bullets. These things ran in my head continually and made me think that I had fallen into a very neat trap which the Germans had laid for me. I expected to see them rise from anywhere any minute, and hear the banging of their guns and the whistling of their bullets (if I was lucky enough to hear them, that is), and I began to wish myself well out of my predicament and back again in the comparative safety of our trench. "This made me more cautious than ever, and presently I began to retreat. As I did so a round German helmet bobbed up out of a ravine not a dozen yards away. An instant later, at the other end of the ravine, another appeared. I squirmed away like a snake and got behind the only shelter in sight, a little scrubby tree, about three yards away. "As I lay there quaking, wondering why the Germans did not shoot--for they must have seen me--I happened to look up, and there, hanging to a branch of the tree, was a fat, clean-looking basket. I reached up, the limb on which it hung being only a few feet from the ground, and lifted the basket down. "Then in a flash the explanation of the puzzle was clear to me. The Germans had left that basket there and meant me to have it. "With the basket on my arm I got up, bowed low to the round hats, and walked back to our trench without ever being fired on. "Inside the basket was the assortment I have described to you. There was also a note something after this wise: