"Vell, vat you do here, huh?" one asked.
Archer was managing this affair and he managed it in his own sweet way.
"We're herre because we're herre," he said, in a perfect riot of rolling R's.
"You German—no?"
"No, thank goodness! We'rre not," Archer said recklessly. "Are we pinched?"
"How you come here?" the German demanded in that tone of arrogant severity which seems to imply, "I give you and the whole of the rest of the world two seconds to answer."
Tom, whose spirits revived at this rather puzzling turn of affairs, watched the two soldiers keenly and noticed that neither had sword or firearms. And he realized with chagrin that in those few moments of "lost morale," he had been strangely unworthy of himself and of his scout training. And feeling so he let Archer do the talking.
"We're Americans."
"Americans, ach! From prison you escape, huh?" the younger soldier snapped. "You haff a peekneek here, huh?" And turning to his companion he poured a kind of guttural volley at him, which his comrade answered with a brisk return of heavy verbal fire. Archer, listening intently and using his very rudimentary knowledge of German, gathered that whoever and whatever these two were, they were themselves in the perilous business of escaping.
"They'rre in the same box as we are," he said to Tom. "Don't worry."