Part 12 (1/2)

”I guess it only happened tonight,” said Tom, ”or more gas would have leaked out. Let's hunt for the eats and things.”

The wreckage of the car proved a veritable treasure-house. There was a flashlight and a telescopic field gla.s.s, both of which Tom s.n.a.t.c.hed up with an eagerness which could not have been greater if they had been made of solid gold. In the smashed locker were two good-sized tins of biscuit, a bottle of wine and several small tins of meat. Tom emptied out the wine and filled the bottle with water out of the five-gallon tank, from which they also refreshed their parched throats. The food they ”commandeered” to the full capacity of their ragged pockets.

”And look at this,” said Archer, hauling out a blouse such as the hanging German wore; ”what d'ye say if I wearr it, hey? And the cap, too? I'll look like an observation ballooner, or whatever you call 'em.”

”Good idea,” said Tom, ”and look!”

”A souveneerr?” cried Archer.

”The best _you_ ever saw,” Tom answered, rooting in the engine tool chest by the aid of the flashlight and hauling out a pair of rubber gloves.

”What good are those?” said Archer, somewhat scornfully.

”_What good!_ They're a pa.s.sport into Switzerland.”

”Do you have to wear rubber gloves in Switzerland?” Archer asked innocently, as he ravenously munched a biscuit.

”No, but you have to wear 'em when you're handling electrified wire,”

said Tom in his stolid way.

”G-o-o-d _night_! We fell in soft, didn't we!”

Indeed, for a couple of hapless, ragged wanderers, subsisting wholly by their wits, they had ”fallen in soft.” It seemed that the very things needed by two fugitives in a hostile country were the very things needed in an observation balloon. One unpleasant task Tom had to perform, and that was to remove the blouse from the hanging German and don it himself, which he did, not without some shuddering hesitation.

”It's the only thing,” he said, ”that would make anybody think somebody's been here, and that's just what we've got to look out for.

The other things won't be missed, but if anybody should come here and see him hanging there without his coat they'd wonder where it was.”

However, this was a remote danger, since probably no one knew of the disaster.

Tom's chief difficulty was in restricting that indefatigable souvenir hunter, Archer, from loading himself down with every conceivable kind of useless but interesting paraphernalia.

”You're just like a tenderfoot when he starts out camping,” said Tom.

”He takes fancy cus.h.i.+ons and a lot of stuff; he'd take a bra.s.s bed and a rolltop desk and a couple of pianos if you'd let him,” he added, with rather more humor than he usually showed. ”All we're going to take is the biscuits and two cans of meat and the flashlight and the field gla.s.s and the bottle, and, let's see----”

”I don't have to leave this dandy ivory cigar-holderr, do I?” Archer interrupted. ”We could use it for----”

”Yes, you do, and we're going to leave that cartridge belt, too, so chuck it,” ordered Tom. ”If anybody _should_ come up here we don't want 'em to think somebody else was here before 'em. All we're going to take is just what I said--some of the eats, and the flashlight and the field gla.s.s and the bottle and the rubber gloves and the pliers and--that's all.”

”Not even this dial-faced thing?” pleaded Archer.

”That's a gas gauge or something,” said Tom. ”Come on now, let's get away from here.”

Archer pointed the flashlight and cast a lingering farewell gaze upon a large megaphone. For a brief moment he had wild thoughts of trying to persuade Tom that this would prove a blessing as a hat, shedding the pelting Alsatian rains like a church steeple. But he did not quite dare.

CHAPTER XIV

A RISKY DECISION