NEWS AT LAST
“Well, well, Nick! To think of meeting you here!” exclaimed Bob.
“Don’t speak to the Hun!” some one called, and then, for the first time, Ned and Bob seemed to realize that the little man, with whom they had been on friendly terms at college, was an enemy.
But such was the case. It was only one of many queer incidents of the war, and more than one fighting American found among the prisoners sent back, after he and his comrades had cleaned up a Boche nest, some man he had known back home—a former waiter at a club, perhaps, or a man who delivered his groceries.
“How came you here?” asked Nick Schmouder, with scarcely a trace of German accent, as he and the other prisoners stood with upraised hands, though one of the survivors had to drop his as he fell in a heap because of weakness from his wounds.
“We came here to teach the Kaiser how to walk 154 Spanish,” said Bob. “I didn’t think you’d fight against us, Nick, after what you learned at Boxwood Hall.”
“Ach! I was forced to,” was the answer. “I am glad it is over—that I am a prisoner. I did not like this war. I shall be glad when it is over and you have won. It is terrible! Listen, I will a secret tell,” and he did not seem afraid of the effect it might have on his apathetic comrades. “Every time I shoot the machine gun I point it at the ground so it will kill no Americans. I do not want to kill them.”
“Hum, that’s a good story to tell now!” said the incredulous officer. “Take ’em to the rear with the other prisoners. Wait, though, this one can’t walk. He’ll have to have a stretcher. I’ll have his wounds patched up. But take the others back. Corporal Hopkins!” he called.
“Corporal Hopkins is wounded, Sir,” reported Ned, with a catch in his voice. “He may be dead. He fell just as we stormed this place, Sir!”
“Oh, I did not know that. See to him at once. Here!” he called to some stretcher-bearers who were coming up, “we may need you!”
They hurried forward, and, leaving Nick Schmouder and the other German prisoners under guard, the officer, with Ned, Bob, and some other Americans, went back to where Jerry had been seen to fall. It was just outside of a little defile 155 leading to the dugout where the machine gun had wrought such havoc.
“There—there he is!” faltered Ned, as he pointed to the crumpled-up body of his chum, and Bob turned his face away, for it seemed to be the end of Jerry Hopkins.
There was blood on Jerry’s head, and blood had seeped out from his right leg, near the knee. Poor Jerry lay very still, and about him were heaped others, who were unmistakably dead.
The lieutenant bent over the corporal and made a hasty examination. There was relief on his face—relief which was reflected on the countenances of Ned and Bob as he said:
“He’s still alive, but badly hurt, I’m afraid. Take him back as gently as you can.”
Ned and Bob helped lift him on to the stretcher. Jerry did not move, and so faint was his breathing that there were times when it seemed to stop altogether.
Desperately as Ned and Bob wanted to go back to the dressing station to learn how it fared with their chum, they must stay on duty in the advanced position they had helped to win. It must be consolidated as much as possible before night, or the Germans might launch a counter offensive.
And so, when the Hun machine gun had been turned about, ready to rake any advancing lines of its recent owners, other measures were taken 156 to insure the holding of the position won at such cost.
“I’d like to have a talk with that Nick,” said Bob, as he and Ned paused for a moment in their work of digging trenches.
“Yes, isn’t it strange to meet him here like this? If he fired any of the shots that did up Jerry Hopkins, why––”
Ned did not finish, but Bob knew what his chum meant.
Feverishly the Americans worked, and to good purpose, for when darkness began to fall they were in strong front trenches with supporting lines back of them, and the artillery was partly in place. If the Germans wanted to take that particular hill again they would have to work for every inch of it.
And now the commissary department got busy, and hot soup and coffee was rushed up to the well-nigh exhausted men. Never was a meal more welcome.
“But it doesn’t taste any better than those doughnuts did,” declared Bob, as he sat on a pile of dirt, sipping coffee from a tin cup, his face and hands plastered with mud and other dirt.
“You took an awful chance, though, Chunky,” said his chum.
“No more than that Salvation Army man did. He was braver than I, because it was my business 157 to be where I was, and he didn’t have to if he didn’t want to.”
“Well, that’s so,” agreed Ned. “But say, I’m going to see if we can’t find out how Jerry is. If he—if he’s––”
But he did not have the heart to finish.
As much had been done as was possible that day, after the terrific battle, and with the arrival of fresh reserves those who had borne the brunt of the fighting were sent to the rear to rest. Ned and Bob were among these, and, obtaining permission, they went to the dressing station to learn Jerry’s fate.
Their hearts leaped with joy when they were told that, aside from a bad scalp wound and a bullet through the fleshy part of his leg, their chum was all right.
The high-powered bullets do infinitely less damage than the old-fashioned slower-moving sort, and the wound in Jerry’s leg was a clean one.
Not so, however, the cut on his head, which was from a piece of burning shell, making a jagged wound that, however, did not touch the bone.
“He’ll be back in line again in three weeks,” declared the surgeon to Ned and Bob, and those were the happiest words they ever had heard.
The next morning, after a feverish night in which they slept but little, they were allowed to 158 see Jerry, and they found him in better condition, relatively, than themselves. For he had been given a bath and cleaned after his wounds were dressed, whereas Ned and Bob were still caked with the mud, dirt, and grime of battle. But it was honorable dirt, as a Japanese might say. Most honorable and cherished.
“Well, how about you, old man?” asked Ned, as the Red Cross nurse said they might talk a little to their injured chum.
“Oh, I’m all right. Feel fine! Just knocked out a little. Save a few Huns for me for the next rush.”
“Oh, we’ll do that all right,” agreed Bob. “Too bad you had to get yours just as we won the game.”
“We won it, so I hear,” observed Jerry.
“Yes, cleaned ’em up,” went on Ned. “And whom do you guess we caught in the last batch of prisoners?”
“Not Professor Snodgrass!”
“No. But some one who knows him. Nick Schmouder!” exploded Bob.
“What? Not the janitor at Boxwood Hall? The fellow who helped us get the goat upstairs into the physics class?”
“The same!” laughed Ned; and Jerry chuckled so at the recollection of one of the jokes of their college days that the nurse was forced to say she 159 would order his chums away unless he remained more quiet.
“I’ll be good!” promised the tall lad. “But that is rich! How did it happen?”
“Don’t know,” admitted Ned. “I’m going to have a talk with him if I can.”
“Let me know what he says,” begged Jerry. “I don’t suppose you have heard anything about the professor or his quest for the two girls?”
“No,” answered Bob. “I guess he’ll never find them. It’s worse than looking for a cent down a crack in the boardwalk at Atlantic City. But I don’t suppose you could convince the professor of that.”
“No,” agreed Jerry. “I’m mighty sorry, too. You remember what he said about losing the money he had lent to a friend of his and needing this bequest from Professor Petersen. Well, if you see or hear from him let me know. I won’t be able to get about for a week—maybe more.”
Bob and Ned stayed until the nurse sent them away, but they promised to call again as soon as allowed. Then, as they were relieved from duty, they went to an officer and received permission to talk to the prisoner, Nick Schmouder, after explaining about him.
The man had been a janitor at Boxwood Hall when Ned, Bob, and Jerry attended there. He had been a good friend to the three chums, and, 160 as mentioned, had assisted them in performing what they were pleased to term a “joke.”
The boys had forgotten all about him, and 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 161 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!”