Tom smiled with a kind of sickly resignation. "Let's see," he said; "yes, you're right, they've got uniforms, too. It's all up. We might have had sense enough to know. I bet they traced us all the way through Alsace. There's no use trying to beat that crowd," he added in cynical despair.
Hope dashed when it is just reviving brings the most hopeless of all despair, and with Tom, whose nerves had been so shaken, their imminent capture seemed now like a kind of mockery.
"When I found you were all right," he said to Archer in his dull way, "and we were all alone here, I might have known it was too good to be true. I wouldn't bother now. I just got bad luck.—When I tried for the pathfinders' badge and tracked somebody that stole something," he added with his stolid disregard for detail, "I found it was my own father, and I didn't claim the badge. That's the kind of luck I got. So I wouldn't try any more. 'Cause if you got bad luck you can't help it. I dropped my knife and the blade stuck in the ground—up at Temple Camp—and that's bad luck. Let 'em come——"
"IT'S FIFTY-FIFTY,—TWO AGAINST TWO," SAID ARCHER. Page 153
This side of Tom Slade was new to Archer, and he stared curiously at the lowering face of his companion.
"That's what you call losing your morale," he said; "if you lose that—go-od night! Suppose General Joffre said that when the Huns werre hitting it forr Paris! S'pose I said that when my foot stuck in the mud on the bottom of this plaguey riverr!"
"I didn't know that," said Tom.
"Well, you know it now," retorted Archer, "and I don't give up till they land me back in prison, and I don't give up then, eitherr. And I ain't lettin' any jack-knives get my goat—so you can chalk that up in yerr little old noddle!"