“No,” Phil replied eagerly, but not without some apprehension.
“I’m going to put you through a ‘sweating’ process that will make the worst ‘sweating’ given a suspected criminal in the Tower of London look like a royal reception to the crown prince,” announced “Count Topoff” with some more of his villainous sharpness of voice. “You’re going to have an experience that will make you remember your uninvited visit to Europe away beyond the River Jordan or the River Styx, wherever you go after you give up the ghost.”
“But we were invited here,” Phil answered, with a chill of apprehension that his vanity plot was doomed to failure.
“You invited yourselves here,” piped the big fellow, with an angry swelling of his form decidedly uncomfortable to the boy beside him. “Any other statement from you is a lie.”
Phil ached to give the blustering boche a sharp answer about submarines and the torture of women and children, but he wisely restrained the impulse.
“I think I can answer right now any questions you may put to me to settle your suspicion about my being a spy,” he said resolutely. “You’d better put the question to me now before I have time to think up a story. If I hesitate, you’ll know you’ve caught me; if I tell a clear, well-connected and rapid story, you ought to give me credit of telling the truth.”
“No,” insisted “the count,” whose constitutional brutality seemed to be showing itself more and more on the surface; “you had an opportunity to go on with your story without waiting for any more questions. You’ve been hesitating and talking about other things for several minutes in order to take time to think up an answer to the last question I put to you. When I told you you’d have to explain how you managed to hide a company of soldiers right inside our lines and near the battle front ready to spring out and throw our forces into confusion, why didn’t you answer right away?”
“Because you stopped me by putting another question,” Phil replied without hesitation. “You asked me if I could guess what you were going to do with me.”
“And you took that as an excuse to delay answering the other question. You think you’re very sharp, don’t you?”
“I can answer that question in a very reasonable way,” Phil insisted. “It’s the only explanation any living man could give. You can’t, with all your experience, conceive of another intelligent explanation. The so-called company that I was with consisted of only the soldiers who escaped from the guard under your command a few weeks ago. We hid in the daytime and traveled at night, creeping nearer and nearer to the front. At last we got as near as we thought safe and hid ourselves in dark buildings and basements and waited for the American drive at Chateau Thierry. When it came and your soldiers were pushed back to the point where we were hidden, we jumped out and made our attack.”