Читать книгу Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 7

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Tom took the limping Boche, his first war prisoner, to the Red Cross station at Vivieres where they had knives and scissors and bandages and antiseptics, but nothing with which to remove Prussian manacles, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men and the willing, kindly nurses there could have done little for the poor Boche if Tom Slade, alias Thatchy, had not administered his own particular kind of first aid.

The French doctors sent him forth with unstinted praise which he only half understood, and as he sped along the road for Compiègne he wondered who could have been the allied gunner who at long range had cut Fritzie loose from the piece of artillery to which he had been chained.

“That feller and I did a good job anyway,” he thought.

At Compiègne the whole town was in a ferment as he passed through. Hundreds of refugees with mule carts and wheelbarrows laden with their household goods, were leaving the town in anticipation of the German advance. They made a mournful procession as they passed out of the town along the south road with babies crying and children clamoring about the clumsy, overladen vehicles. He saw many boys in khaki here and there and it cheered and inspired him to know that his country was represented in the fighting. He had to pause in the street to let a company of them pass by on their way northward to the trench line and it did his heart good to hear their cheery laughter and typical American banter.

“Got any cigarettes, kiddo?” one called.

“Where you going—north?” asked another.

“To the billets west of Montdidier,” Tom answered. “I’m for new service. I came from Toul sector.”

“Good-night! That’s Sleepy Hollow over there.”

From Compiègne he followed the road across the Aronde and up through Mery and Tricot into Le Cardonnois. The roads were full of Americans and as he passed a little company of them he called,

“How far is ——?” naming the village of his destination.

“About two miles,” one of them answered; “straight north.”

“Tell ’em to give ’em Hell,” another called.

This laconic utterance was the first intimation which Tom had that anything special was brewing in the neighborhood, and he answered with characteristic literalness, “All right, I will.”

The road northward from Le Cardonnois was through a hilly country, where there were few houses. About half a mile farther on he reached the junction of another road which appeared also to lead northward, verging slightly in an easterly direction. He had made so many turns that he was a little puzzled as to which was the true north road, so he stopped and took out the trusty little compass which he always carried, and held it in the glare of his headlight, thinking to verify his course. Undoubtedly the westward road was the one leading to his destination for as he walked a little way along the other road he found that it bent still more to the eastward and he believed that it must reach the French front after another mile or two.

As he looked again at the cheap, tin-encased compass he smiled a little ruefully, for it reminded him of Archibald Archer, with whom he had escaped from the prison camp in Germany and made his perilous flight through the Black Forest into Switzerland and to the American forces near Toul.

Archibald Archer! Where, in all that war-scourged country, was Archibald Archer now, Tom wondered. No doubt, chatting familiarly with generals and field marshals somewhere, in blithe disregard of dignity and authority; for he was a brazen youngster and an indefatigable souvenir hunter.

So vivid were Tom’s thoughts of Archer that, being off his machine, he sat down by the roadside to eat the rations which his anxiety to reach his destination had deterred him from eating before.

“That’s just like him,” he thought, holding the compass out so that it caught the subdued rays of his dimmed headlight; “always marking things up, or whittling his initials or looking for souvenirs.”

The particular specimen of Archer’s handiwork which opened this train of reminiscence was part and parcel of the mischievous habit which apparently had begun very early in his career, when he renovated the habiliments of the heroes and statesmen in his school geography by pencilling high hats and sunbonnets on their honored heads and giving them flowing moustaches and frock coats.

In the prison camp from which they had escaped he had carved his initials on fence and shack, but his masterpiece was the conversion of the N on this same glassless compass into a very presentable S (though turned sideways) and the S into a very presentable N.

The occasion of his doing this was a singular experience the two boys had had in their flight through Germany when, after being carried across a lake on a floating island while asleep, they had swum back and retraced their steps northward supposing that they were still going south.

“Either we’re wrong or the compass is wrong, Slady,” the bewildered Archer had said, and he had forthwith altered the compass points before they discovered the explanation of their singular experience.

After reaching the American forces Archer had gone forth to more adventures and new glories in the transportation department, the line of his activities being between Paris and the coast, and Tom had seen him no more. He had given the compass to Tom as a “souvenir,” and Tom, whose sober nature had found much entertainment in Archer’s sprightliness, had cherished it as such. It was useful sometimes, too, though he had to be careful always to remember that it was the “wrong way round.”

“He’ll turn up like a bad penny some day,” he thought now, smiling a little. “He said he’d bring me the clock from a Paris cathedral for a souvenir, and he’d change the twelve to twenty-two on it.”

He remembered that he had asked Archer what cathedral in Paris, and Archer had answered, “The Cathedral de la Plaster of Paris.”

“He’s a sketch,” thought Tom.