Tom Slade, Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer

by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

"That's the idea."

Pause.

"You hear about more doctors coming—no? Soon?"

"Sorry I can't oblige you," said Roscoe.

The officer paused a moment, glaring at him and Tom felt very unimportant and insignificant.

"Vell, anyway, you haf good muscle, huh?" the officer finally observed; then, turning to his subordinates, he held forth in German until it appeared to Tom that he and Roscoe were to carry the machine gun to the enemy line.

To Tom, under whose sullen, lowering manner, was a keenness of observation sometimes almost uncanny, it seemed that these men were not the regular crew which had been stationed here, but had themselves somehow chanced upon the deserted nest in the course of their withdrawal from the village.

For one thing, it seemed to him that this imperious officer was a personage of high rank, who would not ordinarily have been stationed in one of these machine gun pits. And for another thing, there was something (he could not tell exactly what) about the general demeanor of their captors, their way of removing the gun and their apparent unfamiliarity with the spot, which made him think that they had stumbled into it in the course of their wanderings just as he and Roscoe had done. They talked in German and he could not understand them, but he noticed particularly; that the two who went into the pit to gather the more valuable portion of the paraphernalia appeared not to be familiar with the place, and he thought that the officer inquired of them whether there were two or more guns.

When he lifted his share of the burden, Roscoe noticed how he watched the officer with a kind of apprehension, almost terror, in his furtive glance, and kept his eyes upon him as they started away in the darkness.

Roscoe was in a mood to think ill of Tom, whom he considered the bungling, stubborn author of their predicament. It pleased him now to believe that Tom was afraid and losing his nerve. He remembered that he had said they would be crucified as a result of Tom's pin-headed error. And he was rather glad to believe that Tom was thinking of that now.