Then he snapped off the light.

He had been reliably informed that in ambush at every fifty yards along the road to Blakeney, sentries were waiting to fire on him.

And he proposed to run the gauntlet.

He saw that it was for this moment that, first as a volunteer and later as a Territorial, he had drilled in the town hall, practiced on the rifle range, and in mixed manoeuvres slept in six inches of mud.
As he threw his leg across his bicycle, Herbert, from the motor-car farther up the hill, fired two shots over his head.

These, he explained to Ford, were intended to give "verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative." And the sighing of the bullets gave young Bradshaw exactly what he wanted--the assurance that he was not the victim of a practical joke.