as."

"Yes, and you'rre going to take a biggerr one if you go chasing all over
Gerrmany after that girrl. You won't find herr. That was a lot of
rattlebrain talk anyway--we're _so clevaire_!"

"There's no use making fun of him," said Tom; "he helped us."

"We'll get caught, that'll be the end of it," said Archer sullenly. Tom
did not answer.

"You seem to be the boss of everything, anyway."

They scrambled diagonally down the eastern slope of the high ground,
heading always toward the river and after an hour's travelling came out
upon its shore.

"Here's where we'll have to cross if we're going to cross at all," said
Tom. "What do you say?"

"_I_ haven't got anything to say," said Archer; "_you're_ doin' all the
saying."

"If we go any farther south," Tom went on patiently, "we'll be too near
Strassbourg and we're likely to meet boats. Listen."

From across the river came the spent whistle of a locomotive accompanied
by the rattling of a hurrying train, the steady sound, thin and clear in
the still night, mingling with its own echoes. A few lights, widely
separated, were visible across the water and one, high up, reassured Tom
that the mountains, the foothills of which they had followed, continued
at no great distance from the opposite shore.

There were welcoming fastnesses over there, he knew, and a dim, wide
belt of forest extending southward. There, safe from the haunts of men,
or at least with timely warning of any hamlets nestling in those sombre
depths, he and his comrade might press southward toward that promised
land, the Swiss border.

Yet, strangely enough (for one side of a river is pretty much like the
other) Tom felt a certain regret at the thought of leaving Alsace.
Perhaps his memory of the Leteurs had something to do with this. Perhaps
he had just the boyish feeling that it would change their luck. And he
knew that over there he would be truly in the enemy's country, with the
magic of his little talisman vanished in air.

Yet right here he must decide between open roads and stealthy
hospitality and that silent, embracing hospitality which the lonesome
heights would offer. And he decided in favor of the lonesome heights.
Perhaps after all it was not the enemy's country, though the names of
Baden and Schwarzwald certainly had a hostile sound.

But the rugged mountains and dim woods are never enemies of the scout,
and perhaps Tom Slade of Temple Camp felt that even the Schwarzwald,
which i