“I intended to tell you fellows.” Schnitzel’s melancholy dark eyes wandered over the group. Ever since that eventful evening in the rain he had been the observed of all observers. As a result he had promptly retired into his shell, declining to be lionized. Even to the four Khaki Boys he had granted only the barest details of his exploit.
“Somehow I couldn’t bear to talk about it. It was all so sickening. But I don’t mind telling you fellows now. There isn’t much to tell. I never suspected Freidrich until after I got out of the guard-house. One day he came to me and started saying how sorry he’d been for me. He began asking me about myself and my people. What they thought about the war and if they had any relatives in it in Germany. He said many of the Germans were fine people who’d been misunderstood. He gave me a kind of a queer look and, I don’t know why, but it somehow made me distrust him. So I said I didn’t know how my folks felt about it because I hadn’t seen them for several years. That wasn’t true, but anyway it wasn’t any of his business. I told him I didn’t know if any of our relatives in Germany were in the war. That was true enough. I didn’t say what I thought about the Germans themselves.
“That was all he said that time. He kept coming around after me and sympathizing with me. I thought at first he was trying to get me to queer myself. Thought maybe headquarters had put him on my trail to see if I was really all O. K. So I was pretty careful. I found out he could speak German, too. I thought that was rather queer and said so. He explained that he’d learned it from a German overseer on his father’s plantation in Cuba. I didn’t believe it. He spoke it like a German. He had more of the way of a German than a Cuban.
“All of a sudden I made up my mind not to go on in the dark. I went to the K. O. and asked him flat if Fernando had been set to watch me. He nearly had a fit until I told him a few things that I suspected. Then he gave me leave to spring a bluff on the fellow that I was down on the Army, just to see what he’d do.
“So next day I went to him and gave him a great line of talk about how sick I was of Camp Sterling and what a mistake the U. S. had made in declaring war on the Fatherland. That made him prick up his ears. But he was no fool. I had to string him along good and hard before he bit at the hook. One day he asked me why I’d enlisted. I just smiled and threw him a funny look. He stared hard at me and muttered: ‘Hoch der Kaiser,’ and I said: ‘You bet.’
“Then I had him going. After that it was easy. He soon got so he’d talk for hours about how bad the Germans had been treated. He’d almost always end by saying, ‘It is for you and me to avenge the great wrongs done the Fatherland.’ But he’d never said what we ought to do until about a week before the bomb business. Then he asked me to go for a walk. We went away out past the trenches. After a while he stopped me and asked if I was willing to do my bit for the Kaiser. I said I was and he put me through an oath of allegiance to Kaiser Bill and then told me what the ‘great work’ was to be. He was careful not to let me know how he got the bombs. He had two or three of them, you know.
“I put it up strong to him then about the poison. Gave him a lot of guff about our being Brothers in the cause, and all that. He didn’t say in so many words that he did it, but he let me understand it just the same. You know the rest. Thank God, I got that bomb away from him. I’m glad I could do something to help the United States and I’m glad, too, on my own account. I’d never have rested easy as long as that poison affair wasn’t cleared up. I feel now as though I couldn’t go over quick enough to help even the score for Simpson and Brady.”
“That’s the way we all feel,” declared Jimmy.
“I would to-morrow go,” declared Ignace.
“Well, I’m ready to hike along the little old Glory Road,” smiled Roger.