"We are Americans," said Tom. "We escaped from the prison camp across the Alsace border, and we're on our way to the frontier. I knew you were French on account of the fleur-de-lis on the end of your flagpole——"
"And ze button—yess?" the old man urged, interrupting him.
Tom told him the whole story of Frenchy and the Leteurs, and of how he had come by his little talisman.
"I have fought in zat regiment," the old man said, "many years before you are born. I have seen Alsace lost—yess. If you were Germans I would die before I would give you food. But I make you true welcome. I have been many years in America. Ah, I have surprise you."
"What is this place?" Archer ventured to ask.
"Ziss is Mernon—out of fifty-two men they take forty-one to ze trenches. My two sons, who are weavers too, they must go. Now they take the women and the young girls."
Further conversation developed the fact that the old man had worked in a silk mill in America for many years and had returned to Alsace and this humble place of his birth only after both of his sons, who like himself were weavers, had been forced into the German service. "If I do not come back and claim my home, it is gone," he said. So he had returned and was working the old hand loom with his aged fingers, here in the place of his birth.
He was greatly interested in the boys' story and gave them freely of his poor store of food which they ate with a relish. Apparently he was not under the cloud of suspicion or perhaps his age and humble condition and the obscurity and remoteness of his dwelling gave him a certain immunity. In any event, he carried his loathing of the Germans with a fine independence.
"In America," he said, "ze people do not know about ziss—ziss beast. Here we know. Here in little Mernon our women must work to make ze road down to ze river. Why is zere needed a road to ze river? Why is zere needed ze new road above Basel? To bring back so many prisoners—wounded? Bah! Ziss is what zey say. Lies! I have been a soldier. Eighty-two years I am old. And much I have travelled. So can I see. What you say in Amerique—make two and two together—yess? Zere will be tramping of soldiers over zese roads to invade little Switzerland. Am I right? If it is necessaire—yess! Necessaire! Faugh!"
This was the first open statement the boys had heard as to the new roads, all of which converged suspiciously in the direction of the Swiss frontier. They were for bringing home German wounded; they were to facilitate internal communication; they were for this, that and the other useful and innocent purpose, but they all ran toward the Swiss border or to some highway which ran thither.