“By George—I had forgotten something. What is ladder in French? Something you climb up, see?”
He made a show of climbing a ladder, and Manon understood.
“Echelle! Of course!”
Brent left her to go on her own voyage of discovery and made his way into the factory. The tiled floor was littered with broken glass that crisped and crackled under Brent’s feet. Here and there a girder had fallen and the place looked as though a Zeppelin had plunged through the roof and was rusting in a tangled mass of complex metal work. Brent saw nothing here but scrap-iron. He walked through a doorway, and found himself in what had been an engineer’s shop.
The opportune and heaven-blessed discoveries of the Swiss Family Robinson were not more singular than Brent’s adventure in that engineer’s shop. The indefatigable Boche appeared to have used the place as a workshop and then left in a hurry, and the British troops who had followed had passed through with equal speed. Luckily no Chinese had been sent to clear up the village, and Brent was the first salvage man on the spot. He collected a couple of hammers, a wrench, a tommy-bar, two cold chisels, a brace and a set of bits, a rusty hack-saw—a whole bag of nails, and an assortment of bolts and nuts. He was like an excited miser grabbing gold. In a box under one of the benches he found a jack-plane, a pair of pincers, some files, and a gimlet. The whole affair was so enormously successful that it seemed absurd.
He filled a box with the precious treasure, and staggered out to meet Manon. She, too, had rushed to meet him, a little flushed with excitement, a blue lacquered tin of corned beef in her hand.
“I have found a ladder. Its top is broken—but you might mend it.”
“Great! Look here!”
He showed her his boxful of tools.
“O, mon Dieu!”