"If we go any farther south," Tom went on patiently, "we'll be too near Strassbourg and we're likely to meet boats. Listen."
From across the river came the spent whistle of a locomotive accompanied by the rattling of a hurrying train, the steady sound, thin and clear in the still night, mingling with its own echoes. A few lights, widely separated, were visible across the water and one, high up, reassured Tom that the mountains, the foothills of which they had followed, continued at no great distance from the opposite shore.
There were welcoming fastnesses over there, he knew, and a dim, wide belt of forest extending southward. There, safe from the haunts of men, or at least with timely warning of any hamlets nestling in those sombre depths, he and his comrade might press southward toward that promised land, the Swiss border.
Yet, strangely enough (for one side of a river is pretty much like the other) Tom felt a certain regret at the thought of leaving Alsace. Perhaps his memory of the Leteurs had something to do with this. Perhaps he had just the boyish feeling that it would change their luck. And he knew that over there he would be truly in the enemy's country, with the magic of his little talisman vanished in air.
Yet right here he must decide between open roads and stealthy hospitality and that silent, embracing hospitality which the lonesome heights would offer. And he decided in favor of the lonesome heights. Perhaps after all it was not the enemy's country, though the names of Baden and Schwarzwald certainly had a hostile sound.
But the rugged mountains and dim woods are never enemies of the scout, and perhaps Tom Slade of Temple Camp felt that even the Schwarzwald, which is the Black Forest, would forget its allegiance to whisper its secrets in his ear.