"I don't know," confessed Bob. "It looks as bad for them as it has looked for some time for Schnitz. But we must keep on hoping. If they're dead we'll know that soon enough--worse luck. But if they are listed as missing--well, what's the use?" Iggy slowly shook his head. "We of first was five Brothers," he said. "Then Franz go, and we was four. Now two more iss go and we iss two. Two left, only. Py jolly, maybe soon we iss only one!" CHAPTER XVII BLOWN UP Bob, who was cleaning some of the mud off his leggings, looked up and over at his Polish chum. "Hey, you, come off that!" he exclaimed. "Come off what?" asked Iggy in surprise. "I iss only sit on de ground, and unless I iss come off him--py jolly! where else could I go?" he asked. "Oh, I didn't mean come off the earth!" exclaimed Bob, with a laugh. "I meant stop making such gloomy predictions." "Who is he?" asked Iggy. "Who's who?" countered Bob. "Dat Mr. Dixton," responded Iggy. "Does you mean Captain Frank Dickerson?" "Oh, no! No!" laughed Bob. "I mean you are not to be so gloomy-Gus like." "Gus? Gus? Iss he a pasteboy--I mean a doughboy, too?" "Say, if I've got to go back and explain everything I'll never get this mud off!" laughed Bob. "All I meant was don't look on the dark side of things. Be a little happier, and you'll make me happier. Don't think, just because Roger and Jimmy haven't showed up, that they are dead or prisoners. They may be all right." "I have a hope so," said Iggy, but the gloomy way in which he shook his head did not indicate that he was very sincere. However, there was nothing that could be done about it, and Bob and Iggy just had to wait. Time, however, did not hang heavily on their hands, for there was never a moment of the day and very few moments of the night when there was not something to do. If it was not standing guard, doing sentry duty, digging trenches, or helping fit up dugouts, there were barbed-wire parties to become active in, listening-post duty to go out on, and the thousand and one things that a fighting army can always find to do. Iggy and Bob performed their full share of all these tasks, and it was perhaps well that they could be kept so occupied. For, in spite of Bob's seeming cheerfulness, dark forebodings as to the fate of Jimmy and Roger would come to him. "And there's Franz, too," he told himself. "But he's been missing so long now that it's hardly possible he'll ever come back--at least, until after the war is over and prisoners are exchanged." But Bob was to meet Franz Schnitzel sooner than he expected, and under strange circumstances. "Well, I wonder what the next move will be," remarked Bob to a fellow soldier one day about a week after the big advance in which Roger and Jimmy had been lost sight of. Since that time there had been only slight engagements between patrols of the Americans and the Huns.