Tom Slade with the Boys Over ThereFitzhugh, Percy Keese
General
Tom Slade with the Boys Over There
Fitzhugh, Percy Keese
World War, 1914-1918 -- Juvenile fiction
The wreckage of the car proved a veritable treasure-house. There was a
flashlight and a telescopic field glass, both of which Tom snatched up
with an eagerness which could not have been greater if they had been
made of solid gold. In the smashed locker were two good-sized tins of
biscuit, a bottle of wine and several small tins of meat. Tom emptied
out the wine and filled the bottle with water out of the five-gallon
tank, from which they also refreshed their parched throats. The food
they "commandeered" to the full capacity of their ragged pockets.
"And look at this," said Archer, hauling out a blouse such as the
hanging German wore; "what d'ye say if I wearr it, hey? And the cap,
too? I'll look like an observation ballooner, or whatever you call 'em."
"Good idea," said Tom, "and look!"
"A souveneerr?" cried Archer.
"The best _you_ ever saw," Tom answered, rooting in the engine tool
chest by the aid of the flashlight and hauling out a pair of rubber
gloves.
"What good are those?" said Archer, somewhat scornfully.
"_What good!_ They're a passport into Switzerland."
"Do you have to wear rubber gloves in Switzerland?" Archer asked
innocently, as he ravenously munched a biscuit.
"No, but you have to wear 'em when you're handling electrified wire,"
said Tom in his stolid way.
"G-o-o-d _night_! We fell in soft, didn't we!"
Indeed, for a couple of hapless, ragged wanderers, subsisting wholly by
their wits, they had "fallen in soft." It seemed that the very things
needed by two fugitives in a hostile country were the very things needed
in an observation balloon. One unpleasant task Tom had to perform, and
that was to remove the blouse from the hanging German and don it
himself, which he did, not without some shuddering hesitation.
"It's the only thing," he said, "that would make anybody think
somebody's been here, and that's just what we've got to look out for.
The other things won't be missed, but if anybody should come here and
see him hanging there without his coat they'd wonder where it was."
However, this was a remote danger, since probably no one knew of the
disaster.
Tom's chief difficulty was in restricting that indefatigable souvenir
hunter, Archer, from loading himself down with every conceivable kind of
useless but interesting paraphernalia.
"You're just like a tenderfoot when he starts out camping," said Tom.
"He takes fancy cushions and a lot of stuff; he'd take a brass bed and a
rolltop desk and a couple of pianos if you'd let him," he added, with
rather more humor than he usually showed. "All we're going to take is
the biscuits and two cans of meat and the flashlight and the field
glass and the bottle, and, let's see----"
"I don't have to leave this dandy ivory cigar-holderr, do I?" Archer
interrupted. "We could use it for----"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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