"No, but you have to wear 'em when you're handling electrified wire," said Tom in his stolid way.
"G-o-o-d night! We fell in soft, didn't we!"
Indeed, for a couple of hapless, ragged wanderers, subsisting wholly by their wits, they had "fallen in soft." It seemed that the very things needed by two fugitives in a hostile country were the very things needed in an observation balloon. One unpleasant task Tom had to perform, and that was to remove the blouse from the hanging German and don it himself, which he did, not without some shuddering hesitation.
"It's the only thing," he said, "that would make anybody think somebody's been here, and that's just what we've got to look out for. The other things won't be missed, but if anybody should come here and see him hanging there without his coat they'd wonder where it was."
However, this was a remote danger, since probably no one knew of the disaster.
Tom's chief difficulty was in restricting that indefatigable souvenir hunter, Archer, from loading himself down with every conceivable kind of useless but interesting paraphernalia.
"You're just like a tenderfoot when he starts out camping," said Tom. "He takes fancy cushions and a lot of stuff; he'd take a brass bed and a rolltop desk and a couple of pianos if you'd let him," he added, with rather more humor than he usually showed. "All we're going to take is the biscuits and two cans of meat and the flashlight and the field glass and the bottle, and, let's see——"
"I don't have to leave this dandy ivory cigar-holderr, do I?" Archer interrupted. "We could use it for——"
"Yes, you do, and we're going to leave that cartridge belt, too, so chuck it," ordered Tom. "If anybody should come up here we don't want 'em to think somebody else was here before 'em. All we're going to take is just what I said—some of the eats, and the flashlight and the field glass and the bottle and the rubber gloves and the pliers and—that's all."
"Not even this dial-faced thing?" pleaded Archer.