Tom looked at him as one might look at a leper.
"You low-down traitor!" he said bitterly. "You vile scoundrel! I've caught you at last and caught you dead to rights. You're the most contemptible thing that breathes. You're a disgrace to your uniform. You ought to be wearing a wooden overcoat and you will when Uncle Sam lays his hands on you. I ought to kill you myself this minute."
His hand clenched the pistol which he had taken from Rabig's pocket, and a look of craven fear came into the traitor's eyes.
"Oh, don't be afraid," said Tom scornfully. "I'm not going to do it. Perhaps you'll suffer more if I let you live than if I killed you. You're a marked and branded man. You're a man without a country. The very men you've sold yourself to look upon you as a yellow dog.
"Now, Rabig, listen to me," Tom went on with deadly earnestness. "I'm going to strip you of the uniform you've disgraced. I'll have to untie your hands for a minute to get the coat over your arms, but I've got the drop on you and if you make the slightest move except to do what I tell you to you're a dead man."
Rabig was too cowed to do anything but obey, and in a few minutes Tom had stripped him of coat and trousers and put them on himself. He re-bound Rabig's hands tightly. Then he went through the pockets of the coat.
As he had expected he found the pass that had admitted Rabig to the German lines. Opposite the word "Losung," which Tom knew meant "countersign," was scribbled the word "Potsdam."
"I guess this thing that brought you over will take me back," Tom remarked. "Now, Rabig, I'm going to leave you here with your German friends. They'll pick you up after a while, though I don't care whether they do or not. I'm going back to the boys of the old Thirty-seventh and tell them just what has happened to Nick Rabig, the traitor. So long, Benedict Arnold."
With a parting glance of contempt Tom left the traitor and went down the hill with a confidence that he was very far from feeling.
He had the pass and the countersign, but he was not sure that these would be sufficient. Perhaps an officer would be called by the sentry to make sure that everything was all right. Perhaps the sentry at the point where he should try to pass the line might be the same one who had let Rabig through, and he might notice the difference in personal appearance. Any one of a dozen things might happen to arouse suspicion.