Tom Slade with the Boys Over There Part 17

"If he was--only here now," he breathed, half aloud, "I'd let him--I'd be willing not to be boss--like he said. That's the--trouble--with me--I'm always wanting to--be----Oh, my head----"

He knew now, what it was a pretty hard thing for one of his indomitable temperament to realize, that things were out of his hands, that he could go no farther. North or south or east or west, he could go no farther.

Capture or firing squad or starvation and death from exhaustion, he could go no farther. His name would not be sent home on the casualty lists, any more than Archer's would, but they had _tried_, and done their bit as well as they could.

There was one faint hope left; perhaps this house was not occupied, or if it was on the Alsatian side of that terrible river (a true Hun river, if there ever was one) it might be occupied by a Frenchman. Scarcely knowing what he was doing, Tom pushed the door open and staggered inside. Dazed and suffering as he was, he was conscious of the rain pelting on the roof above him and sounding more audibly than outside where the boisterous river drowned the sound of the downpour.

Something big and soft which caught in his feet was directly before him and he stumbled and fell upon it. And there he lay, pressing his throbbing forehead, which seemed bursting with fresh pain from the force of his fall.

He had a reckless impulse to end all doubt by calling aloud in utter abandonment. But this impulse pa.s.sed, perhaps because he did not have the strength or spirit to call.

Soon, from mere exhaustion, he fell into a fitful, feverish slumber accompanied by a nightmare in which the lashing of the wind and rain outside were conjured into the clangor and hoof beats of cavalry and he was hopelessly enmeshed in a barbed-wire entanglement.

With the first light of dawn he saw that he was lying upon a ma.s.s of fishnet and that his feet and arms were entangled in its meshes.

He was in a small, circular apartment with walls of masonry and a broken spiral stairway leading up to a landing beside a narrow window. Rain streamed down from this window and trickled in black rivulets all over the walls. A very narrow doorway opened out of this circular room, from which the door was broken away, leaving two ma.s.sive wrought-iron hinges sticking out conspicuously into the open s.p.a.ce. As Tom's eyes fell upon these he thought wistfully of how eagerly Archer would have appropriated one of them as a "souveneerr." Poor, happy-go-lucky Archer!

"I thought he was a good swimmer," Tom thought, "because he lived so near Black Lake.[A] It was all my fault. He probably just didn't like to say he wasn't----"

[Footnote A: The lake on the sh.o.r.e of which Temple Camp was situated.]

He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to ease the pain in his head and collect his scattered senses. Evidently, he was alone in this dank place, for there was no sign of occupancy nor any sound but the light patter of rain without, for the storm had spent its fury and subsided into a steady drizzle.

He dragged himself to his feet, and though his knee was stiff he was glad to discover that he was not incapable of walking. He believed he was not feverish now and that his headache was caused by shock and bruising rather than by illness. Perhaps, he thought, he was not so badly off after all. Except for Archer....

Limping to the doorway he peered cautiously out. The sky was dull and hazy and a steady, drizzling rain fell. There is something about a drear, rainy day which "gets" one, if he has but a makeshift shelter; and this bleak, gray morning carried poor Tom's mind back with a rush to rainy days at his beloved Temple Camp when scouts were wont to gather in tent and cabin for yarns.

He now saw that he was on a little rocky islet in the middle of the river and that the structure which had sheltered him was a small tower, very much like a lighthouse except that it was not surmounted by a light, having instead that rough turret coping familiar in medieval architecture. Far off, through the haze, he could distinguish, close to the sh.o.r.e, a gray castle with turrets, which from his compa.s.s he knew to be on the Baden side. He thought he could make out a road close to the sh.o.r.e, and other houses, and he wished that he had the spy-gla.s.s so that he might study this locality which he hoped to pa.s.s through.

Of course, he no longer cherished any hope of finding Florette Leteur; Archer's chiding words still lingered in his mind, and, moreover, without the gla.s.s he could do nothing for he certainly would never have thought of entering Norne without first "piking" it from a safe vantage point.

There was nothing to do now but nurse his swollen knee and rest, in the hope that by night he would be able to swim to the Baden sh.o.r.e and get into the hills. Never before had he so longed for the forest.

"If it wasn't for--for him being lost," he told himself, as he limped back into the tower, "I wouldn't be so bad off. There's n.o.body lives here, that's sure. Maybe fishermen come here, but n.o.body'll come today, I'll bet."

After all, luck had not been unqualifiedly against him, he thought. Here he was in an isolated spot in the wide river. What was the purpose of this little tower on its pile of rocks he could not imagine, but it was fast going to ruin and save for the rotting fishing seine there was no sign of human occupancy.

If only Archer were there it would not be half bad. But the thought of his companion's loss sickened him and robbed the lonely spot of such aspect of security as it might otherwise have had for him. Still, he must go on, he must reach the boys in France, and fight for Archer too, now--Archer, whom his own blundering had consigned to death in these treacherous waters....

He looked out again through the doorway at the dull sky, and the rain falling steadily upon the sullen water. It was a day to chill one's spirit and sap one's courage. The whole world looked gray and cheerless.

Again, as on the night before, he heard the rattle of a train in the distance. High up through the drenched murky air, a bird sped across the river, and somehow its disappearance among the hills left Tom with a sinking feeling of utter desolation. In Temple Camp, on a day like this, they would be in Roy Blakeley's tent, telling stories....

"Anyway, it's better to be alone than in some German's house," he tried to cheer himself. "We--I--kept away from 'em so far, anyway----"

He stopped, holding his breath, with every muscle tense, and his heart sank within him. For out of that inner doorway came a sound--a sound unmistakably human--tragically human, it seemed now, shattering his returning courage and leaving him hopeless.

It was the sound of some one coughing!

CHAPTER XXI

COMPANY

Ordinarily Tom Slade would have stopped to think and would have kept his nerve and acted cautiously; but he had not sufficiently recovered his poise to meet this emergency wisely. He knew he could not swim away, that capture was now inevitable, and instead of pausing to collect himself he gave way to an impulse which he had never yielded to before, an impulse born of his shaken nerves and stricken hope and the sort of recklessness which comes from despair. What did it matter? Fate was against him....

With a kind of defiant abandonment he limped to the little stone doorway and stood there like an apparition, clutching the sides with trembling hands. But whatever reckless words of surrender he meant to offer froze upon his lips, and he swayed in the opening, staring like a madman.

For reclining upon a rough bunk, with knees drawn up, was Archibald Archer, busily engaged in whittling a stick, his freckled nose wrinkling up in a kind of grotesque accompaniment to each movement of his hand against the hard wood.

"I--I thought----" Tom began.

"Well,--I'll--be----" countered Archer.

For a moment they stared at each other in blank amaze. Then a smile crept over Tom's face, a smile quite as unusual with him as his sudden spirit of surrender had been; a smile of childish happiness. He almost broke out laughing from the reaction.

"Are you carvin' a souvenir?" he said foolishly.

"No, I ain't carrvin' no souveneerr," Archer answered. "Therre's fish among those rocks and I'm goin' to spearr 'em."

"You ain't carvin' a _what_!" said Tom.

"I ain't carrvin' a souveneerr," Archer said with the familiar Catskill Mountain roll to his R's.

"I just wanted to hear you say it," said Tom, limping over to him and for the first time in his life yielding to the weakness of showing sentiment.

"All night long," he said, sitting down on the edge of the bunk, "I was thinkin' how you said it--and it sounds kind of good----"

"How'd you make out in the riverr?" Archer asked.

"You can't even say _river_," said Tom, laughing foolishly in his great relief.

"It was some storrm, all right! But I got the matches safe anyway, and they'll strike, 'cause I tried one."

"You ought to have made a whisk stick[A] to try it," said Tom, then caught himself up suddenly. "But I ain't going to tell you what you ought to do any more. I'm goin' to stop bossin'."

[Footnote A: A stick the end of which is separated into fine shavings which readily catch the smallest flame, a familiar device used by scouts.]

"I got yourr spy-gla.s.s forr you," said Archer. "I had to dive f'rr't.

Didn't you hearr me call to you it was lost and I was goin' down f'rr't?"

"----lost----down----"

The tragic words flitted again through Tom's mind, and he reached out and took Archer's hand hesitatingly as if ashamed of the feeling it implied.

"What'd you do that for? You were a fool," he said.