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By Root 9135 0

pausing fearfully for seconds which elapsed into minutes while he lashed himself to advance again. Every insect, every tiny animal he roused in its burrow startled him, unmanned him with the noise of its movement. He played a continual deception with himself, deciding to go on only to the next bend in the pass, and when he had reached it and the ground traversed had been harmless, he would pick another objective and proceed on to it. In this way he covered perhaps a little over a mile in less than an hour, climbing upward almost all the time. He began to wonder how long the pass might be; despite his experience he was teasing himself with the old trick of imagining that each crest before him was the final one and beyond would be the jungle, the rear of the Japanese lines, and the sea.

As time passed without incident, as more and more of the pass was set behind him, he grew more confident, more impatient. His halts became less frequent, the distance he would traverse each time became greater. At one point the pass was overgrown with tall kunai grass for a quarter of a mile, and he plodded through it confidently, knowing he could not be observed.

Until now there had been no place where the Japanese could have established an outpost, and his caution, the elaborate observation he made, had been more from terror, more from the unassailable silence of the mountain and the pass, than from any suspicion of an enemy site. But the terrain was changing. The foliage had become thicker and covered more area; in several places it was extensive enough to conceal a small bivouac. He scouted them cursorily, entering the little groves in the shadow, moving in a few yards, and then waiting for several minutes to see if he could hear the inevitable sounds of men sleeping. When nothing moved but the leaves and birds and animals, he would stalk out and continue his advance up the pass.

At a turn it narrowed again; the opposing cliff walls were not more than fifty yards apart here, and in several places along the route the defile was blocked by a patch of jungle. It took him many minutes to pass through each grove and the strain of passing through the brush without making noise was great. He reached a section which was comparatively open again and moved forward with a sense of release.

But at another turn he saw before him a tiny valley limited by the cliffs on either side and plugged by a small wood which grew completely across the gap. In the daylight it would have a fine field of view. It was the best position he had seen for an outpost, and he was certain, immediately and instinctively, that the Japanese had retreated to here. He felt it with a start of his limbs, an acceleration of his heart. Martinez examined the grove from the lee of a rock, staring across the moonlight, his face pinched and tense. There was a band of deep shadow at his right where the cliffs filleted into the base of the pass, and smoothly, not allowing himself to think about it, he glided around the rock, and crept along in the darkness on his hands and knees, keeping his face low. With fascination he found himself watching the ragged borderline between the moonlight and shadow, and unaccountably he felt himself moving toward the light once or twice. It seemed alive, with an existence as acute as his; his throat was tight, almost swelling, and he watched the shimmer of the moonlight with a dumb absorption. The grove came nearer, was twenty yards away from him, now ten. He paused at the edge of it, and examined its periphery for a machine-gun emplacement or a foxhole. In the darkness he could see nothing but the dark bulk of the trees.

Once more Martinez entered a grove and stood waiting for sounds. He could not hear anything at first, and he advanced a cautious step, parting the brush with his hands, and then moved forward another and another. His foot trod on a patch of worn earth, explored it with fright. He knelt and patted the earth, fingered the small leaves of a bush at his side. The ground was trampled, and the bush had been beaten to one side.

He was on