"One sure thing!" Roscoe laughed inaudibly. "It's the same old Tommy Slade. Well, I was just going to bean this geezer when my officer told me I'd better follow him."
"I was following him, too," said Tom; "stalking is the word you ought to use."
"Captain thought he might be up to something special. So I followed—stalked—how's that?"
"All right."
"So I stalked him and when I saw he was following the stream I made a detour and waited for him right here. You see what he was up to? Way down in Cantigny they could turn a switch and start this blamed poison, half a dozen hogsheads of it, flowing into the stream. They waited till they lost the town before they turned the switch, and they probably thought they could poison us Americans by wholesale. Maybe they had some reason to think the blamed thing hadn't worked, and sent this fellow up. I beaned him just as he was going to turn the stop-cock."
"Maybe you saved a whole lot of lives, hey?" said Tom proudly.
Roscoe shrugged his shoulder in that careless way he had. "I'll be glad to meet any more that come along," he said.
It was well that Tom Slade's first sight of deliberate killing was in connection with so despicable a proceeding as the wholesale poisoning of a stream. He could feel no pity for the man who, fleeing from those who fought cleanly and like men instead of beasts, had sought to pour this potent liquid of anguish and death into the running crystal water. Such acts, it seemed to him, were quite removed from the sphere of honorable, manly fighting.
As a scout he had learned that it was wrong even to bathe in a stream whence drinking water was obtained, and at camp he had always scrupulously observed this good rule. He felt that it was cowardly to defile the waters of a brook. It was not a "mailed fist" at all which could do such things, but a fist dripping with poison.
And Tom Slade felt no qualm, as otherwise he might have felt, at hiding there waiting for new victims. He was proud and thrilled to see his friend, secreted in his perch, keen-eyed and alert, guarding alone the crystal purity of this laughing, life-giving brook, as it hurried along its pebbly bed and tumbled in little gushing falls and wound cheerily around the rocks, bearing its grateful refreshment to the weary, thirsty boys who were holding the neighboring village.