nd it was with the utmost
wonder they met him again under such strange and strenuous
circumstances.

"How did you come to get into the war?" asked Bob, as he and Ned
talked to the prisoner, who was in a wire cage with hundreds of
others.

"Oh, it was an accident, yet. I came back to Germany to see my old
father, and I was caught here when the war broke out. I had not served
my full time in the army, and so I had to go in again. Ach! how I hate
it. But tell me--why are you here?"

"The same reason that brought every other good American over," replied
Ned sharply. "We want to wipe Prussian militarism off the face of the
earth."

"And a good job, I say!" declared Nick Schmouder. "It is like a bad
disease germ. One of those bugs Professor Snodgrass used to show me in
the microscope. Ah, I wish I was back at Boxwood Hall with him. He was
a nice little man."

"Yes, he was," agreed Ned. "And you may see him, if you stay around
here."

"See him? Is the professor in the war, too?"

"Not exactly," Bob answered. "He is here on a scientific mission.
Something about war noises and insects. But he is after something
else, too. A friend of his, Professor Petersen----"

"Professor Emil Petersen?" cried Nick Schmouder in such a strange
voice that Ned and Bob stared at him. "Did you say Professor Emil
Petersen?"

"I don't know that I mentioned his first name, but it is Emil,"
answered the stout lad. "Why, do you know him?"

"Know him? Why, he once lived in the same German town where my father
and mother lived," declared the former janitor. "They were
friends,--my father worked for him and my mother had looked after him
when he was sick--and when the professor, who was studying or
something, had to go away, he left his two nieces----"

"Two nieces!" burst out Ned and Bob together. "Do you mean Miss Gladys
Petersen and Miss Dorothy Gibbs?"

"Yes! Those were the names," announced Schmouder easily. "He left the
two nieces with my father and mother. They were nice girls!"

"Listen to that!" cried Ned, thumping Bob on the back. "News at last!
We must tell Jerry this!"

CHAPTER XX

A QUEER QUESTION

So unexpected was the news given by the captured Boxwood Hall janitor
that for a moment or two Ned and Bob could scarcely believe it. That
the information, so much desired and so ardently sought after, should
come to them by accident, while, doubtless, Professor Snodgrass was
using every energy to that end, seemed sca