The guard nodded, adding with a kind of triumph in his voice, "Eleven were brought in this morning."
That was the extent of his information, but Bob pondered it most of the night, while he kept alive the fire and tended his feverish companion, whose greatest comfort it seemed was to know Bob's friendly presence close at hand.
In the morning he went out the moment the door was unlocked, leaving his wretched coffee untasted. A light snow had fallen during the night, and the air was cold and sparkling, with the sun just risen. This was the hour when all the prisoners crossed the yard for breakfast. He searched hundreds of faces, French and Russian, before at last a little knot of downcast United States infantrymen came by, soup basins in hand. Some of them were wounded. Bob's heart beat hard and his eyes filled with hot tears of sympathy and comradeship. He could hardly see their faces, but all at once a hand was thrust through the wire netting beside him, and a voice trembling with excitement cried, "Bob Gordon!"
Bob stared through the netting with misty, unbelieving eyes.
"Lieutenant, I meant to say," stammered Sergeant Cameron, as Bob, too overcome at the sight of him to answer, clasped his outstretched hand.
"We won, though," the sergeant said in his ear, in the instant before his hand was withdrawn to resume the march across the yard, and those words echoed in Bob's ears above the noisy orders of the German guards ordering on the men, who, one and all, had paused to watch the meeting between the two Americans with friendly, understanding eyes.
The prisoners were from his father's regiment. This was the thought uppermost in Bob's mind. But they had won the fight!