“Chrr-is-to-pherr Crrinkums!” said Archer, with that familiar up-state roll to his R’s. “Where in all get-out did you blow in from? I thought you was dead!”
“You didn’t think I was any deader than I thought you was,” said Tom, with something of his old dull manner.
“Cr-a-ab apples and custarrd pies!” Archer exclaimed, still hardly able to believe his eyes. “I sure did think you was at the bottom of the ocean!”
“I didn’t ever think I’d see you again, either,” said Tom.
So the “chief engineer” proved to be none other than Archibald Archer—whose far-off home in the good old Catskills was almost within a stone’s throw of Temple Camp—Archibald Archer, steward’s boy on the poor old liner on which he had gotten Tom a job the year before.
“I might of known nothing would kill you,” Tom said. “Mr. Conne always said you’d land right side up. Do you eat apples as much as you used to?”
“More,” said Archer, “when I can get ’em.”
The poor old gas engine had to wait now while the two boys who had been such close friends sat down beside the disused pump in this German prison camp, and told each other of their escape from that torpedoed liner and of all that had befallen them since. And Tom felt that the war was not so bad, nor the squalid prison community either, since it had brought himself and Archibald Archer together again.
But Archer’s tale alone would have filled a book. He was just finishing an apple, so he said, and was about to shy the core at the second purser when the torpedo hit the ship. He was sorry he hadn’t thrown the core a little quicker.
He jumped for a life boat, missed it, swam to another, drifted with its famished occupants to the coast of Ireland, made his way to London, got a job on a channel steamer carrying troops, guyed the troops and became a torment and a nuisance generally, collected souvenirs with his old tenacity, and wound up in France, where, on the strength of being able to shrug his shoulders and say, Oui, oui, he got along famously.