Tom Slade on a Transport

by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

Then he realized that he himself was a prisoner and was in a worse plight than they.

He spent the morning wondering what they would do with him and his brother. Of course they believed him to be the accomplice of his brother. They probably thought he had weakened and told in terror and in hope of clemency. He wondered if they had gone through his brother’s luggage yet and whether they had found any papers.

He realized that it seemed almost too much of a coincidence that he and his brother should have happened on the same ship—and in the same stateroom, all by accident. And he knew that his coming down from the deck just after the signal from the destroyer, looked bad. He knew that back home in America Germans had gone to Ellis Island upon less suspicious circumstances than that. But what would they do with an American? In the case of an American it was just plain treason and the punishment for treason is——

A feeling almost of nausea overcame him and he tried to put the dreadful thought away from him.

“Anyway, the whole business is a kind of a mix-up,” he told himself; “it don’t make any difference what you do—you get in trouble. But I don’t blame them so much, ’cause they judge by looks, and that’s the only way you can do. Anyway, you got to die some time. I’m glad I found it out and told ’em, ’cause anyway it don’t make any difference if they think I confessed or just found it out—as long as they know it. That’s the main thing.”

With this consoling thought he withdrew into his old stolid self, and was ready to stand up and be shot if that was what they intended to do with him. He did not blame anybody “because it was all a mix-up.” If he had chosen to save his brother he might have saved himself. The great ship, with all her brave boys, would have gone down, perhaps, and his brother would have seen to it that they two were saved.

Well, the ship had not gone down, the brave boys who had jollied the life out of him were on their way across country now to die if need be, and who was he, Tom Slade, that he should be concerning himself as to just how or when he should die, or whether he got any credit or not, so long as he had decided right and done what he ought to do?

He would rather have died honorably in the trenches, but if doing Uncle Sam a good turn meant that he must die in disgrace, why then he would die in disgrace, that was all.

The point was the good turn. Once a scout, always a scout.

No one spoke to him all through the day—not even his brother. He heard the hurried comings and goings on the deck, the creaking of the big winches as bag after bag of wheat, bale after bale of cotton, was swung over and lowered upon the brick quay. The little French children who made the neighborhood a bedlam with their gibberish and the outlandish clatter of their wooden shoes; the women who sat in their windows watching these good things being unloaded, as Santa Claus might unload his pack in the bosom of some poor family; the United States officers who were in authority at the port, and all the clamoring rabble which made the ship’s vicinity a picnic ground, did not know, of course, that it was because the captain’s mess boy had made a discovery and “decided right” that these precious stores were not at the bottom of the ocean.