“Too thin, too thin, my boy,” declared Topoff with a sneer. “I thought you’d cook up some such story.”
“Keep up your ‘sweating’ process,” Phil insisted. “Don’t give me any time to think up anything more. Fire your questions at me like a machine-gun. Surely with your keenness of mind you can catch me if I’ve been lying.”
“No, no, nothing more now,” returned Topoff with a doggedness of manner and a glitter of hate in his eyes. “I haven’t begun to ‘sweat’ you yet. You see, I didn’t bring any ‘sweating’ machinery along.”
His eyes fairly bulged with bestial cruelty as he made this announcement with an implied promise of torture that caused a succession of shudders to shake the boy’s frame in spite of his efforts to resist and control the panic attack that he felt coming.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
WHAT THE LIGHTNING REVEALED
“Sweating machinery! What is it?”
This question rang in Phil’s brain during all the rest of the drive. Under the play of his stimulated imagination it became a nightmare transferred into an atmosphere of reality. There was no point in the progress of the continuous tragic dread where he could say to himself, even as one might say in his sleep: “Oh, this is only a dream.”
Who was this more-than-ever mysterious man? What was the explanation of his anomalous position and his tyrannical manner?
That he was a man of power and authority could no longer be doubted. Phil had at first been inclined to regard this blustering trip-voiced misfit of a soldier as an unaccountable joke, but he was fully convinced now that his judgment was decidedly in error in this respect.
On, on they went in a general north-easterly direction. They passed over a crudely repaired bridge that spanned the River Aisne, though Phil did not know at the time what stream it was. They dashed along deep rutted thoroughfares, which engineering crews were trying vainly to keep in smooth-surfaced repair; they passed miles of truck caravans and marching soldiers, also numerous supply stations, around which were usually camped large bodies of soldiers held in reserve to be placed here and there on the battle front as needed. Before long, however, the long lines of moving camions ceased to appear, and the boy concluded that this was an indication that the captured French railroads had been put back into operation up to this point.