Tom Slade with the Boys Over There | Page 9

hearrd a kind of rustling once," Archer said fearfully.
"There's a couple of cows 'way over in a field," said Tom; "they might have made some sound."
After what seemed to them an age, the leaves over the opening seemed bathed in a strange new light and glistened here and there.
"That crack faces the west," said Tom. "The sun's beginning to go down."
"How do you know?" asked Archer.
"I always knew that up at Temple Camp. I don't know how I know. The morning sun is different from the afternoon sun, that's all. I think it'll set now in about two hours."
"I wonder when she'll come," Archer said.
"Not till it's good and dark, that's sure. She's got to be careful. Maybe this place can be seen from the road, for all we know. Remember, we didn't see it in the daylight."
"Sh-h-h," said Archer. "Listen."
From far, far away there was borne upon the still air a dull, spent, booming sound at intervals.
"It's the fighting," whispered Tom.
"Wherre do you suppose it is?" Archer asked, sobered by this audible reminder of their nearness to the seat of war.
"I don't know," Tom said. "I'm kind of mixed up. That feller in the prison had a map. Let's see. I think Nancy's the nearest place to here. Toul is near that. That's where our fellers are--around there. Listen!"
Again the rumbling, faint but distinctly audible, almost as if it came from another world.
"The trenches run right through there--near Nancy," said Tom.
"Maybe it's ourr boys, hey?" Archer asked excitedly.
Tom did not answer immediately. He was thrilled at this thought of his own country speaking so that he, poor fugitive that he was, could hear it in this dark, lonesome dungeon in a hostile land, across all those miles.
"Maybe," he said, his voice catching the least bit. "They're in the Toul sector. A feller in prison told me. You don't feel so lonesome, kind of, when you hear that----"
"Gee, I hope we can get to them," said Archer.
"What you got to do, you can do," Tom answered. "I wonder----"
"Sh-h. D'you hearr that?" Archer whispered, clutching Tom's shoulder. "It was much nearerr--right close----"
They held their breaths as the reverberation of a sharp report died away.
"What was it?" Archer asked tensely.
"I don't know," Tom whispered, instinctively removing the short stick and closing the trap door tight. "Don't move--hush!"
CHAPTER VI
PRISONERS AGAIN
"Do you hear footsteps?" Archer breathed.
Tom listened, keen and alert. "No," he said at last. "There's no one coming."
"What do you s'pose it was?"
"I don't know. Sit down and don't get excited."
But Tom was trembling himself, and it was not until five or ten minutes had passed without sound or happening that he was able to get a grip on himself.
"Push up the door a little and listen," suggested Archer.
Tom cautiously pressed upward, but the door did not budge. "It's stuck," he whispered.
Archer rose and together they pressed, but save for a little looseness the door did not move.
"It's caught outside, I guess," said Tom. "Maybe the iron hasp fell into the padlock when I put it down, huh?"
That, indeed, seemed to be the case, for upon pressure the door gave a little at the corners, but not midway along the side where the fastening was. Archer turned cold at the thought of their predicament, and for a moment even Tom's rather dull imagination pictured the ghastly fate made possible by imprisonment in this black hole.
"There's no use getting excited," he said. "We get some air through the cracks and after dark she'll be here, like she said. It's beginning to get dark now, I guess."
But he could not sit quietly and wait through the awful suspense, and he pressed up against the boards at intervals all the way along the four sides of the door. On the side where the hinges were it yielded not at all. On the opposite side it held fast in the center, showing that by a perverse freak of chance it had locked itself. Elsewhere it strained a little on pressure, but not enough to afford any hope of breaking it.
"If it was only lowerr," Archer said, "so we could brace our shoulderrs against it, we might forrce it."
"And make a lot of noise," said Tom. "There's no use getting rattled; we'll just have to wait till she comes."
"Yes, but it gives you the willies thinkin' about what would happen----"
"Well, don't let's think of it, then," Tom interrupted. "We should worry." And suiting his action to the word, he seated himself, drew up his knees, and clasped his hands over them. "We'll just have to wait, that's all."
"What do you suppose that sound was?" Archer asked.
"I don't know; some kind of a gun. It ain't the first gun that's been shot off in Europe lately."
For half an hour or so they sat, trying to make talk, and each