Part 27 (1/2)

They needed no second invitation, for they had been fairly bursting with eagerness and curiosity. Questions rained on him thick and fast.

Their fists clenched when he told them of the cruelties to which he had been subjected. They were loud in admiration of the way in which he had met and overcome his difficulties. They roared with laughter when he told them of the alarm clock, and Tom himself, to whom it had been no joke at the time, laughed now as heartily as the rest.

”So that's the way you got those ropes gnawed through when you were at the farmhouse,” exclaimed Frank, when Tom told them of the aid that had come to him from the rats. ”We figured out everything else but that.

We thought that you must have frayed them against a piece of gla.s.s.”

”I used to hate rats,” said Tom, ”but I don't now. I'll never have a trap set in any house of mine as long as I live.”

”If you'd only known how safe it would have been to walk downstairs that day!” mourned Frank.

”Wouldn't it have been bully?” agreed Tom. ”Think of the satisfaction it would have been to have had the bulge on that lieutenant who was going to hang me. I wouldn't have done a thing to him!”

”Well, we got him anyway and that's one comfort,” remarked Bart.

”To think that you were legging it away from the house just as we were coming toward it,” said Billy.

”It was the toughest kind of luck,” admitted Tom. ”Yet perhaps it was all for the best, for then I might not have had the chance to get the best of Rabig.”

”Rabig?” exclaimed Frank, for the traitor had not yet been mentioned in Tom's narrative.

”What about him?” questioned Billy eagerly.

”Hold your horses,” grinned Tom. ”I'll get to him in good time. If it hadn't been for Rabig I wouldn't be here. I owe that much to the skunk, anyway.”

It was hard for them to wait, but they were fully rewarded when Tom described the way in which he had trapped and stripped the renegade, and left him lying in the woods.

”Bully boy!” exclaimed Frank. ”That was the very best day's work you ever did.”

”Got the goods on him at last,” exulted Bart.

”The only man in the old Thirty-seventh that has played the yellow dog,” commented Billy. ”The regiment's well rid of him. He'll never dare to show his face again.”

”He can fight for Germany now,” said Frank, ”and if he does, I only hope that some day I'll run across him in the fighting.”

”You won't if he sees you first,” grinned Billy. ”He doesn't want any of your game.”

Tom had left one thing till the last.

”By the way, Frank,” he remarked casually, ”I ran across a fellow in the German prison camp who came from Auvergne, the same province where you've told me your mother lived when she was a girl. He said he knew her family well.”

”Is that so?” asked Frank with quick interest. ”What was his name?”

”Martel,” replied Tom.

”Why that's the name of the butler who used to be in my mother's family!” cried Frank. ”Colonel Pavet was telling me that he had been captured, and had died in prison. I was hoping that he was mistaken in that, for the colonel said he had information that might help my mother to get her property.”

”The colonel is right about the man's dying,” replied Tom, ”for I was with him when he died.”

”It's too bad,” said Frank dejectedly.