"Herr General—gun."
Then suddenly there flashed into Tom's mind something he had heard about German artillerymen being chained to their guns. So that was it. And some French gunner, or an American maybe, had unconsciously set this poor wretch free by smashing his chain with a shell.
"You're in the French lines," Tom said. "Did you mean to come here? You're a prisoner."
"Ach, diss iss petter," the man said, only half understanding.
"Yes, I guess it is," said Tom. "I'll bind your foot up and then I'll take that chain off if I can and bind your wrist. Then we'll have to find the nearest dressing station. I suppose you got lost in this forest. I been in the German forest myself," he added; "it's fine—better than this. I got to admit they've got fine lakes there."
Whether he said this by way of comforting the stranger—though he knew the man understood but little of it—or just out of the blunt honesty which refused to twist everything German into a thing of evil, it would be hard to say. He had about him that quality of candor which could not be shaken even by righteous enmity.
Tearing two strips from his shirt, he used the narrower one to make a tourniquet, which he tied above the man's ankle.
"If you haven't got poison in it, it won't be so bad," he said. "Now I'll take off that chain."
He raised his machine upon its rest so that the power wheel was free of the ground. Then, to the wounded Boche's puzzled surprise, he removed the tire and fumbling in his little tool kit he took out a piece of emery cloth which he used for cleaning his plugs and platinum contact points, and bent it over the edge of the rim, binding it to the spokes with the length of insulated wire which he always carried. It was a crude and makeshift contrivance at best, but at last he succeeded, by dint of much bending and winding and tying of the pliable copper wire among the spokes of the wheel, in fastening the emery cloth over the fairly sharp rim so that it stayed in place when he started his power and in about two revolutions it cut a piece of wire with which he tested the power of his improvised mechanical file.
"Often I sharpened a jackknife that way on the fly-wheel of a motor boat," he said. The Boche did not understand him, but he was quick to see the possibilities of this whirling hacksaw and he seemed to acknowledge, with as much grace as a German may, the Yankee ingenuity of his liberator.