All day long they ran a zigzag course, taking a long cut to France, as Pete Connigan would have said, the general tension relieved by the emergency drills, manning the boats and so forth.
In the afternoon hours of respite from his duties he met Frenchy, whose patience had been a little tried by some of Uncle Sam"s crack jolliers, and they sat down on the top step of a companionway and talked.
"Zis I cannot bear!" he said, shrugging his shoulders. "To be called ze Hun! Ugh!"
"They"re only kidding you," said Tom; "fooling with you."
"I do not like it--no!"
"But if you hadn"t become an American before the war," said Tom, "you couldn"t have enlisted on our side because you really were a German--a German citizen--weren"t you?"
"Subject, yess! Citizen, no! All will be changed. Alsace will be France again! We go to win her back! Yess?"
"Yes," said Tom. "I only meant you belonged to Germany because you couldn"t help it."
"You are a lucky boy," Frenchy said earnestly. "Zare is no--what you say?--Mix-up; Zhermany, France, America--no. You are all _American_!"
"I got to remember that," said Tom simply. "I know some rich fellers home where I live. They let me join their scout troop, so I got to know "em. One feller"s name is Van Arlen. His father was born in Holland.
They got two automobiles and a lot of servants and things. But anyway my father was born in the United States--that"s one thing."
"Ah," said Frenchy, enthusiastically, "zat is ever"ting! You are fine boy."
His expression was so generous, so pleasant, that Tom could not help saying, "I like France, too."
"Listen, I will tell you," said Frenchy, laughing. "It is ze old saying, "Ever" man ha.s.s two countries; hees own and France!" You see?"
In the warmth of Frenchy"s generous admiration Tom opened up and said more than he had meant to say--more than he ever had said to anyone.
"So I got to be proud of it, anyway," he said, in his honest, blunt fashion. "Maybe you won"t understand, but one thing makes me like to go away from Bridgeboro, kind of, is the way people say things about my folks. They don"t do it on purpose--mostly. But anyway, all the fathers of the fellows I know, they call them Mr. Blakeley and Mr. Harris, and like that. But they always called my father Bill Slade. I didn"t ever hear anybody call him Mister. But anyway, he was born in the United States--that"s one sure thing. And so was my grandfather and my grandmother, too. Once my father licked me because I forgot to hang out the flag on Decoration Day. That shows he was patriotic, doesn"t it? The other day I was going to tell you about my uncle but I forgot to. He was in the Civil War--he got his arm shot off. So I got a lot to be proud about, anyway. Just because my father didn"t get a job most--most of the time----"
"Ah!" vociferated Frenchy, clapping him on the shoulder. "You are ze--how you say--_one_ fine boy!"
Tom remained stolid, under this enthusiastic approval. He was thinking how glad and proud he was that his father had licked him for forgetting to hang out the flag. It had not been a licking exactly, but a beating and kicking, but this part of it he did not remember. He was very proud of his father for it. It was something to boast about. It showed that the Slades----
"Yess, you are a fine boy!" said Frenchy again, clapping him on the shoulder with such vehemence as to interrupt his train of thought. "Zey must be fine people--all ze way back--to haf" such a boy. You see?"
FOOTNOTE: [1] Submarines.
CHAPTER IX
HE SEES A STRANGE LIGHT AND GOES ON TIPTOE
Of course, it would have been expecting too much to suppose that the boys in khaki would overlook Tom Slade any more than Frenchy would escape them, and "Whitey" was the bull"s-eye for a good deal of target practice in the way of jollying. It got circulated about that Whitey had a bug--a patriotic bug, particularly in regard to his family, and it was whispered in his hearing as he came and went that his grandfather was none other than the original Yankee Doodle.
Of course, Tom"s soberness increased this good-natured propensity of the soldiers.
"Hey, Whitey," they would call as he pa.s.sed with the captain"s tray, "I hear you were born on the Fourth of July. How about that?"
Or
"Hey, Whitey, I hear your great grandfather was the fellow that put the bunk in Bunker Hill!"
But Tom did not mind; joking or no joking, they knew where he stood with Uncle Sam and that was enough for him.
Sometimes they would vary their tune and pleasantly chide him with being a secret agent of the Kaiser, "Baron von Slade," and so on and so on. He only smiled in that stolid way of his and went about his duties.
In his heart he was proud. Sometimes they would a.s.sume to be serious and ply him with questions, and he would fall into their trap and proudly tell about poor old Uncle Job and of how his father had licked him, by way of proving the stanch Americanism of the Slades.
In their hearts they all liked him; he seemed so "easy" and bluntly honest, and his patriotism was so obvious and so sincere.
"You"re all right, Whitey," they would say.
Then, suddenly, that thing happened which shocked and startled them with all the force of a torpedo from a U-boat, and left them gasping.
It happened that same night, and little did Tom Slade dream, as he went along the deck in the darkening twilight, carrying the captain"s empty supper dishes down to the galley, of the dreadful thing which he would face before that last night in the danger zone was over.
He washed his hands, combed his hair, put on his dark coat, and went up on deck for an hour or two which he could call his own. In the companionway he pa.s.sed his friend, the deck steward, talking with a couple of soldiers, and as he squeezed past them he paused a moment to listen.
It was evidently another slice of the same gossip with which he had regaled Tom earlier in the day and he was imparting it with a great air of confidence to the interested soldiers.
"Don"t say I told you, but they had two of them in the quartermaster"s room, buzzing them. It"s more"n rule breaking, _I_ think."
"German agents, you mean?"
The deck steward shrugged his shoulders in that mysterious way, as if he could not take the responsibility of answering that question.
"But they haven"t got anything on "em," he added. "The gla.s.s ports were locked--they couldn"t have thrown anything out. So there you are. The captain thinks it was phosphorus and maybe he"s right. It"s a kind of a light you sometimes see in the ocean."
"Huh," said one of the soldiers.
"It"s fooled others before. So I guess there won"t be any more about it.
Keep your mouths shut."
Tom pa.s.sed them and went out upon the deck. He did not venture near the forbidden spot astern, but leaned against the rail amidships. He knew he had the right to spend his time off on deck and he liked to be alone.
Now and then he glimpsed a little streak of gray as some apprehensive person in a life belt disappeared in a companionway, driven in by the cold and the rough sea.
Presently, he was quite alone and he fell to thinking about home, as he usually did when he was alone at night. He thought of his friend Roy Blakeley and of the happy summers spent at Temple Camp; of the stalking and tracking, and campfire yarns, and how they used to jolly him, just as these soldiers jollied him, and call him "Sherlock n.o.body Holmes"
just because he was interested in deduction and had "doped out" one or two little things.
One thing will suggest another, and from Temple Camp, with its long messboard and its clamoring, hungry scouts, and the tin dishes heaped with savory hunters" stew, his thoughts wandered back across the ocean to a certain particular mess plate, right here on this very ship--a mess plate with a little black stain on it, where someone might have laid a burning match-end.
He caught himself up and thought of Mr. Conne. But this was his time off and he had the right to _think_ about anything he pleased. He could not be reprimanded for just thinking. Nothing would tempt him to run the risk of another encounter with one of those stern, brisk-speaking officers, but he could _think_.
And he wondered whether that black spot _had_ been made by a match-end.
The spot would show plainly, of course, for he knew how shiny and clean mess plates were kept. Had he not done his part in scouring and rubbing them down there in the galley?