“I should say,” commented Henri; “I see that all the bridges are gone, and that pontoon one leading out of the town, I suppose, was set up by the Russians immediately after the surrender.”
“Speaking of the town,” said Billy, “reminds me that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go over and see if the Coffee House is yet standing, and if Fritz is still on his pins.”
“I expect Fritz has many times tightened his belt since the picking grew thin, let alone feeding the public as he used to do.”
“Well, old top, and what of it?” laughed Billy. “Fritz could buckle up a foot or two and then would never be mistaken for a fairy.”
The Steiber Coffee house, the boys soon discovered, was no longer a center of good cheer, bright fires and sanded floors, but an improvised hospital, crowded with the sick and wounded. Fritz, however, was there as large as life, and apparently none the worse for the horse-meat diet during the weeks of want and woe in the town.
Like Stanislaws, he had an extra look at the transformed aviators before he began to thaw into former genial address, a warning process instantly and wholly completed when Billy sounded in his ear the words, “It is for Eitel.”
This friend of many travelers, credited with speaking knowledge of seven different languages, probably used a little of all of them in the greeting inspired by the magic sentence.
“The same flying boys you are that sat at my fireside with the Herr Georges” (Roque) “and the red giant” (Schneider) “on that first dark night when the great guns were roaring across the river and you came in with the wind. Ah, how different now,” sighed the heavyweight host; “the good days are no more. And,” he concluded, “what of Eitel; what word of him?”
Henri told of the trust imposed in them by Stanislaws, and of the charge that they deliver to him (Fritz) the belt and the valuables therein.
“He knows, he knows,” murmured the innkeeper, with eyes moist and a tremor in his voice, “that old Fritz will find a way to reach his loved ones at home.”