“The word, I think, will explain itself to a man of your learning,” replied the boy, recalling his flattery weapon. “It’s a machine that bores a hole seven or eight feet in diameter right through the earth at the rate of about a mile a day. It was through the first tunnel of the first machine delivered at the battle front that I led a company of soldiers into the basement of one of those buildings behind your lines near Chateau Thierry.”
“And who invented that machine?” inquired the now excited and somewhat bewildered Topoff.
“Thomas A. Edison,” Phil answered, uttering that magic name with a swelling of hero worship and national pride.
The count meditated a few moments. It was evident that he was deeply impressed with his prisoner’s story.
“How many of those machines has the American army?” he asked.
“Of course, I can’t say as to that,” Phil replied slowly. “But there’s only one at the part of the front with which I’m familiar. However, I understand they’re being made as rapidly as possible to be rushed all along the American, English, and French fronts.”
Again Topoff lapsed into meditation. This time he was silent longer than before. Then suddenly he looked up sharply at his “fabulizing informant” and said:
“Here is an important question that needs more than any other to be answered: What becomes of the excavated earth as the tunnel advances?”
This was surely a “stunner of a question” and tested Phil’s ingenuity to the limit. When it first “hit” him it made the boy’s head swim, but he clenched his fists and gritted his teeth with desperation and thought as he had never thought before. An answer came, such as it was, and Phil communicated it with all the aplomb that he could command.
“I’m not very familiar with the mechanical working of the contrivance,” he said, “although I’ve seen it operate. The question you ask, of course, involves the problem of the great principle of the invention. The way I get it is this: It seems that Mr. Edison, in working out his scheme, applied a new scientific discovery of his, electro-chemical, they call it. By means of this new process they seem to be able to convert the excavated earth into gas and a small amount of powdered refuse. The gas is piped back through flexible tubes, and the refuse is carted out in a low, narrow auto-truck.”