had never taken particular notice of this disused pump or of
the little engine which, in happy days of yore, had brought the water up
from the brook and made it available for the pump in a well below.

"Trying to dope it out?" he asked, by way of being sociable.

The "chief engineer," who had half turned before Tom spoke, jumped to
his feet as if frightened and stared blankly at Tom, who stood stark
still gaping at him.

"Well--I'll--be----" began the "chief engineer."

Tom was grinning all over his face.

"Hello, Archer!"

"Chrr-is-to-pherr _Crrinkums_!" said Archer, with that familiar up-state
roll to his R's. "Where in all _get-out_ did _you_ blow in from? I
thought you was dead!"

"You didn't think I was any deader than I thought you was," said Tom,
with something of his old dull manner.

"Cr-a-ab apples and custarrd pies!" Archer exclaimed, still hardly able
to believe his eyes. "I sure did think you was at the bottom of the
ocean!"

"I didn't ever think I'd see _you_ again, either," said Tom.

So the "chief engineer" proved to be none other than Archibald
Archer--whose far-off home in the good old Catskills was almost within a
stone's throw of Temple Camp--Archibald Archer, steward's boy on the
poor old liner on which he had gotten Tom a job the year before.

"I might of known nothing would kill _you_," Tom said. "Mr. Conne
always said you'd land right side up. Do you eat apples as much as you
used to?"

"More," said Archer, "when I can get 'em."

The poor old gas engine had to wait now while the two boys who had been
such close friends sat down beside the disused pump in this German
prison camp, and told each other of their escape from that torpedoed
liner and of all that had befallen them since. And Tom felt that the war
was not so bad, nor the squalid prison community either, since it had
brought himself and Archibald Archer together again.

But Archer's tale alone would have filled a book. He was just finishing
an apple, so he said, and was about to shy the core at the second purser
when the torpedo hit the ship. He was sorry he hadn't thrown the core a
little quicker.

He jumped for a life boat, missed it, swam to another, drifted with its
famished occupants to the coast of Ireland, made his way to London, got
a job on a channel steamer carrying troops, guyed the troops and became
a torment and a nuisance generally, collected souvenirs with his old
tenacity, and wound up in France, where,