Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line Part 22

Ned did not finish, but Bob knew what his chum meant.

Feverishly the Americans worked, and to good purpose, for when darkness began to fall they were in strong front trenches with supporting lines back of them, and the artillery was partly in place.

If the Germans wanted to take that particular hill again they would have to work for every inch of it.

And now the commissary department got busy, and hot soup and coffee was rushed up to the well-nigh exhausted men. Never was a meal more welcome.

"But it doesn't taste any better than those doughnuts did," declared Bob, as he sat on a pile of dirt, sipping coffee from a tin cup, his face and hands plastered with mud and other dirt.

"You took an awful chance, though, Chunky," said his chum.

"No more than that Salvation Army man did. He was braver than I, because it was my business to be where I was, and he didn't have to if he didn't want to."

"Well, that's so," agreed Ned. "But say, I'm going to see if we can't find out how Jerry is. If he--if he's----"

But he did not have the heart to finish.

As much had been done as was possible that day, after the terrific battle, and with the arrival of fresh reserves those who had borne the brunt of the fighting were sent to the rear to rest. Ned and Bob were among these, and, obtaining permission, they went to the dressing station to learn Jerry's fate.

Their hearts leaped with joy when they were told that, aside from a bad scalp wound and a bullet through the fleshy part of his leg, their chum was all right.

The high-powered bullets do infinitely less damage than the old-fashioned slower-moving sort, and the wound in Jerry's leg was a clean one.

Not so, however, the cut on his head, which was from a piece of burning sh.e.l.l, making a jagged wound that, however, did not touch the bone.

"He'll be back in line again in three weeks," declared the surgeon to Ned and Bob, and those were the happiest words they ever had heard.

The next morning, after a feverish night in which they slept but little, they were allowed to see Jerry, and they found him in better condition, relatively, than themselves. For he had been given a bath and cleaned after his wounds were dressed, whereas Ned and Bob were still caked with the mud, dirt, and grime of battle. But it was honorable dirt, as a j.a.panese might say. Most honorable and cherished.

"Well, how about you, old man?" asked Ned, as the Red Cross nurse said they might talk a little to their injured chum.

"Oh, I'm all right. Feel fine! Just knocked out a little. Save a few Huns for me for the next rush."

"Oh, we'll do that all right," agreed Bob. "Too bad you had to get yours just as we won the game."

"We won it, so I hear," observed Jerry.

"Yes, cleaned 'em up," went on Ned. "And whom do you guess we caught in the last batch of prisoners?"

"Not Professor Snodgra.s.s!"

"No. But some one who knows him. Nick Schmouder!" exploded Bob.

"What? Not the janitor at Boxwood Hall? The fellow who helped us get the goat upstairs into the physics cla.s.s?"

"The same!" laughed Ned; and Jerry chuckled so at the recollection of one of the jokes of their college days that the nurse was forced to say she would order his chums away unless he remained more quiet.

"I'll be good!" promised the tall lad. "But that is rich! How did it happen?"

"Don't know," admitted Ned. "I'm going to have a talk with him if I can."

"Let me know what he says," begged Jerry. "I don't suppose you have heard anything about the professor or his quest for the two girls?"

"No," answered Bob. "I guess he'll never find them. It's worse than looking for a cent down a crack in the boardwalk at Atlantic City. But I don't suppose you could convince the professor of that."

"No," agreed Jerry. "I'm mighty sorry, too. You remember what he said about losing the money he had lent to a friend of his and needing this bequest from Professor Petersen. Well, if you see or hear from him let me know. I won't be able to get about for a week--maybe more."

Bob and Ned stayed until the nurse sent them away, but they promised to call again as soon as allowed. Then, as they were relieved from duty, they went to an officer and received permission to talk to the prisoner, Nick Schmouder, after explaining about him.

The man had been a janitor at Boxwood Hall when Ned, Bob, and Jerry attended there. He had been a good friend to the three chums, and, as mentioned, had a.s.sisted them in performing what they were pleased to term a "joke."

The boys had forgotten all about him, and it was with the utmost wonder they met him again under such strange and strenuous circ.u.mstances.

"How did you come to get into the war?" asked Bob, as he and Ned talked to the prisoner, who was in a wire cage with hundreds of others.

"Oh, it was an accident, yet. I came back to Germany to see my old father, and I was caught here when the war broke out. I had not served my full time in the army, and so I had to go in again. Ach! how I hate it. But tell me--why are you here?"

"The same reason that brought every other good American over," replied Ned sharply. "We want to wipe Prussian militarism off the face of the earth."

"And a good job, I say!" declared Nick Schmouder. "It is like a bad disease germ. One of those bugs Professor Snodgra.s.s used to show me in the microscope. Ah, I wish I was back at Boxwood Hall with him. He was a nice little man."

"Yes, he was," agreed Ned. "And you may see him, if you stay around here."

"See him? Is the professor in the war, too?"

"Not exactly," Bob answered. "He is here on a scientific mission.

Something about war noises and insects. But he is after something else, too. A friend of his, Professor Petersen----"

"Professor Emil Petersen?" cried Nick Schmouder in such a strange voice that Ned and Bob stared at him. "Did you say Professor Emil Petersen?"

"I don't know that I mentioned his first name, but it is Emil,"

answered the stout lad. "Why, do you know him?"

"Know him? Why, he once lived in the same German town where my father and mother lived," declared the former janitor. "They were friends,--my father worked for him and my mother had looked after him when he was sick--and when the professor, who was studying or something, had to go away, he left his two nieces----"

"Two nieces!" burst out Ned and Bob together. "Do you mean Miss Gladys Petersen and Miss Dorothy Gibbs?"

"Yes! Those were the names," announced Schmouder easily. "He left the two nieces with my father and mother. They were nice girls!"

"Listen to that!" cried Ned, thumping Bob on the back. "News at last!

We must tell Jerry this!"

CHAPTER XX

A QUEER QUESTION