gitives themselves.

"Vell, vat you do here, huh?" one asked.

Archer was managing this affair and he managed it in his own sweet way.

"We're herre because we're herre," he said, in a perfect riot of rolling
R's.

"You German--no?"

"No, thank goodness! We'rre not," Archer said recklessly. "Are we
pinched?"

"How you come here?" the German demanded in that tone of arrogant
severity which seems to imply, "I give you and the whole of the rest of
the world two seconds to answer."

Tom, whose spirits revived at this rather puzzling turn of affairs,
watched the two soldiers keenly and noticed that neither had sword or
firearms. And he realized with chagrin that in those few moments of
"lost morale," he had been strangely unworthy of himself and of his
scout training. And feeling so he let Archer do the talking.

"We're Americans."

"Americans, ach! From prison you escape, huh?" the younger soldier
snapped. "You haff a peekneek here, huh?" And turning to his companion
he poured a kind of guttural volley at him, which his comrade answered
with a brisk return of heavy verbal fire. Archer, listening intently and
using his very rudimentary knowledge of German, gathered that whoever
and whatever these two were, they were themselves in the perilous
business of escaping.

"They'rre in the same box as we are," he said to Tom. "Don't worry."

It did not occur to the boys then, though they often thought of it
afterward, when their acquaintance with the strange race of Huns had
been improved, that these two soldiers manifested not the slightest
interest in the experiences which the boys had gone through. Almost
immediately and without condescending to any discourse with them, the
two men fell to discussing how they might _use_ them, just as their
masters had used Belgium and would use Switzerland and Holland if it
fell in with their purpose.

After the generous interest that Frenchy and his people had shown and
the lively curiosity about his adventures which British Tommies in the
prison camp had displayed, Tom was unable to understand this arrogant
disregard. Even a greasy, shifty-eyed Serbian in the prison had asked
him about America and "how it felt" to be torpedoed.

It was not just that the two soldiers regarded the boys as enemies,
either. They simply were not German and therefore nothing that they did
or said counted or was worth talking about.

At last the one who seemed to be the spokesman said, "Ve make a tr