“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?”