ring her. See--listen! You know what our great Napoleon say? 'Across ze
Alps lies Italee.' So shall you arrest Mam'selle!" She put her arm on
Tom's shoulder and looked into his eyes with a kind of inspiring frenzy.
"Close, so very close," she whispered significantly, "_across ze Rhine
lies Switzerland_!"

CHAPTER XXXI

THE END OF THE TRAIL

Not in all the far-flung battleline was there a more pitiable sight than
the bright sun beheld as he poured his stifling rays down upon the
winding line of upturned earth which lay in fresh piles across the
country of southern Alsace.

Almost to the Swiss border it ran, but no one could get across the Swiss
border here without running into Prussian bayonets. To the east, where
the Rhine flowed and where the mountains were, some reckless soul might
manage it in a night's journeying, if he would brave the lonesome
fastnesses; though even there the meshes of forbidding wire, charged
with a death-giving voltage, stretched across the path. It was not an
inviting route.

[Illustration: "DON'T LOOK SURPRISED," TOM SAID IN AN UNDERTONE. Page
198]

You may believe it or not, as you please, but along this new road score
upon score of young women and mere girls toiled and slaved with pickaxe
and shovel. And some fell and were lifted up again, with threats and
imprecations, and toiled on. There were some who came from Belgium,
whose hands had been cut off, and these were harnessed and drew stones.
They lived, if you call it living, in tents and wooden barracks along
the line of work, and in these they spent their few hours of respite in
fearful, restless slumber.

Over them, like a black and threatening cloud, was the clenched,
blood-wet iron fist. Now and then one broke down in hysterics and was
"arrested" and taken before the commander who sprawled and drank wine in
a peasant cottage nearby. For the road must be made and German
militarism tolerates no nonsense....

Across the fields toward this road passed a young fellow in the uniform
of a petty officer. He carried in his hand a paper and a pair of
handcuffs. He was repeating to himself a phrase in the German language
in which he had just been carefully drilled. "Wo ist sie?"

It was all the German that he knew.

Approaching the road, he passed along among the workers, who glanced up
at him covertly and plied their implements a little harder for his
presence. Coming upon a soldier who was marching back and forth on
guard