Chapter 22

A JOYOUS REUNION

Shouting like so many maniacs, they rushed toward him. At the same instant Tom, too, began to run, and in a moment they had their arms around him, and were hugging him, pounding him, mauling him, exclaiming, questioning, laughing, rejoicing, all in one breath.

Tom was back with them again, good old Tom, their chum, their comrade, Tom, over whose fate they had spent so many sleepless hours, Tom, for whom any one of them would have risked his life, Tom who they knew was captured, and who they feared might be dead.

There he was, the same old Tom, with face and body thin, with hair unkempt and matted, with traces showing everywhere of the anxiety and suffering he had undergone, and yet with the same indomitable spirit that neither captivity nor threatened death had broken, and the same smile upon his lips and twinkle in his eyes.

"Easy, easy there, fellows," he protested laughing. "Let me come up for air. And before anything else, lead me to some grub. I haven't eaten for so long that there's only a vacuum where my stomach ought to be."

"You bet we'll lead you to it," cried Bart.

"An anaconda will have nothing on you when we get through filling you up," promised Billy.

"What did I tell you, fellows," cried Frank delightedly. "Didn't I say the old boy'd be coming in some morning and asking us if breakfast was ready?"

Tom was giving Frank the long-lost letter he had been carrying when Corporal Wilson came up with the relief and their greeting was almost as boisterous and hilarious as that of his own particular chums had been, for Tom was a universal favorite in the regiment, and they had all mourned his loss.

They would have overwhelmed him with questions, but Frank interposed.

"Nothing doing, fellows," he said. "This boy isn't going to say another word until we've taken him to mess and filled him up till he can't move. After that there'll be plenty of time for a talk and we'll keep him talking till the cows come home."

It was a rejoicing crowd that took Tom back to the main body of the regiment, where he almost had his hands wrung from him. They piled his plate and filled his coffee cup again and again and watched him while he ate like a famished wolf.

"Tom's running true to form," joked Frank, as they saw the food vanish before his onslaught.

"Whatever else the Huns took away from him, they left him his appetite," chuckled Billy.

"Left it?" grinned Tom, as he attacked another helping. "They added to it. I never knew what hunger was before. Bring on anything you've got, and I'll tackle it. All except fish. I'm ashamed now to look a fish in the face."

It was a long time before he had had enough. Then with a look of seraphic contentment on his face he sat back, loosened his belt a notch, and sighed with perfect happiness.

"Now fellows, fire away," he grinned, "and I'll tell you the sad story of my life."

They needed no second invitation, for they had been fairly bursting with eagerness and curiosity. Questions rained on him thick and fast. Their fists clenched when he told them of the cruelties to which he had been subjected. They were loud in admiration of the way in which he had met and overcome his difficulties. They roared with laughter when he told them of the alarm clock, and Tom himself, to whom it had been no joke at the time, laughed now as heartily as the rest.

"So that's the way you got those ropes gnawed through when you were at the farmhouse," exclaimed Frank, when Tom told them of the aid that had come to him from the rats. "We figured out everything else but that. We thought that you must have frayed them against a piece of glass."

"I used to hate rats," said Tom, "but I don't now. I'll never have a trap set in any house of mine as long as I live."

"If you'd only known how safe it would have been to walk downstairs that day!" mourned Frank.

"Wouldn't it have been bully?" agreed Tom. "Think of the satisfaction it would have been to have had the bulge on that lieutenant who was going to hang me. I wouldn't have done a thing to him!"

"Well, we got him anyway and that's one comfort," remarked Bart.

"To think that you were legging it away from the house just as we were coming toward it," said Billy.

"It was the toughest kind of luck," admitted Tom. "Yet perhaps it was all for the best, for then I might not have had the chance to get the best of Rabig."

"Rabig?" exclaimed Frank, for the traitor had not yet been mentioned in Tom's narrative.

"What about him?" questioned Billy eagerly.

"Hold your horses," grinned Tom. "I'll get to him in good time. If it hadn't been for Rabig I wouldn't be here. I owe that much to the skunk, anyway."

It was hard for them to wait, but they were fully rewarded when Tom described the way in which he had trapped and stripped the renegade, and left him lying in the woods.

"Bully boy!" exclaimed Frank. "That was the very best day's work you ever did."

"Got the goods on him at last," exulted Bart.

"The only man in the old Thirty-seventh that has played the yellow dog," commented Billy. "The regiment's well rid of him. He'll never dare to show his face again."

"He can fight for Germany now," said Frank, "and if he does, I only hope that some day I'll run across him in the fighting."

"You won't if he sees you first," grinned Billy. "He doesn't want any of your game."

Tom had left one thing till the last.

"By the way, Frank," he remarked casually, "I ran across a fellow in the German prison camp who came from Auvergne, the same province where you've told me your mother lived when she was a girl. He said he knew her family well."

"Is that so?" asked Frank with quick interest. "What was his name?"

"Martel," replied Tom.

"Why that's the name of the butler who used to be in my mother's family!" cried Frank. "Colonel Pavet was telling me that he had been captured, and had died in prison. I was hoping that he was mistaken in that, for the colonel said he had information that might help my mother to get her property."

"The colonel is right about the man's dying," replied Tom, "for I was with him when he died."

"It's too bad," said Frank dejectedly.

"I shouldn't wonder if he did not know something," said Tom, "for he seemed to have something on his mind. He told me one time that his imprisonment and sickness happened as a judgment on him."

"If we could only have had his testimony before he died," mourned Frank.

"I got it," declared Tom triumphantly.