Just as we started on our way the big guns began booming somewhere ahead
of us toward the southwest; so we turned in that direction.
We had heard the guns distinctly in the early forenoon, and again, less
distinctly, about noontime. Thereafter, for a while, there had been a
lull in the firing; but now it was constant--a steady, sustained boom-
boom-boom, so far away that it fell on the eardrums as a gentle
concussion; as a throb of air, rather than as a real sound. For three
days now we had been following that distant voice of the cannon, trying
to catch up with it as it advanced, always southward, toward the French
frontier. Therefore we flogged the belly of our tired horse with the
lash of a long whip, and hurried along. There were five of us, all
Americans. The two who rode on bicycles pedaled ahead as outriders, and
the remaining three followed on behind with the horse and the dogcart.
We had bought the outfit that morning and we were to lose it that night.
The horse was an aged mare, with high withers, and galls on her
shoulders and fetlocks unshorn, after the fashion of Belgian horses; and
the dogcart was a venerable ruin, which creaked a great protest at every
turn of the warped wheels on the axle.
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