THE PRIZE SAUSAGE
"Come on out, Archy," said Tom with a recklessness which struck terror
to poor Archer's very soul. "He won't hurt you--he's dead."
"D-e-a-d!" ejaculated Archer.
"Sure--he's hanging there."
"And all the time I wanted to sneeze," said Archer, laughing in his
reaction from fear. "Ebe-nee-zerr, but I had a good scarre!"
Going over to the tree, they saw the ghastly truth. A man wearing a
garment something like a Russian blouse, but of the field-gray military
shade of the Germans (as well as the boys could make out by the aid of a
lighted match) was hanging by his garment which had caught in a low
spreading branch of the tree. His feet were just clear of the ground and
as the breeze blew he swayed this way and that, the gathering strain
upon his garment behind the neck throwing his limp head forward and
giving his shoulders a hunched appearance, quite in the manner of the
clog dancer. The German emblem was blazoned upon his blouse and
superimposed in shining metal upon the front of his fatigue cap. Even as
they paused before him he seemed to bow perfunctorily as if bidding them
a ghastly welcome.
Tom's scout instinct impelled him instantly to fall upon the ground in
search of enlightening footprints, but there were none and this puzzled
him greatly. He felt sure that the man had not been strangled, but had
been killed by impact with some heavier branch higher up in the tree;
but he must have made footprints before he climbed the tree, and----
Suddenly he jumped to his feet, remembering what he had thought to be a
guardhouse. It lay a hundred or more feet beyond the dangling body and
as they neared it it lost its sentinel-station aspect altogether.
"Well--what--do you--know about that?" said Archer.
"It's an observation balloon, I'll bet," said Tom. "A Boche sausage!
Look for another man before you do anything else--there's always two. If
he's around anywhere we might get into trouble yet."
It was a wise thought and characteristic of Tom, but the other man was
quite beyond human aid. He lay, mangled out of all semblance to a human
being, amid the tangled wreckage of the car.
The fat cigar-shaped envelope of the balloon stood almost upright, and
though it looked not the least like a police telephone station now, it
was easy to see how, from a distance in the dim light, it might have
suggested a little round domed building.
"How do you s'pose it happened?" Archer asked.
"I don't know," said Tom. "It's an observation balloon, that's sure.
Maybe it was on its way back from the lines to somewhere or other. Hurry
up, let's see what there is; it'll be daylight in two or three hours and
we don't want to be hanging around here. They might send a rescue party
or something like that, if they know about it."
"Morre likely they don't," said Archer.
"I guess it only happened tonight," said Tom, "or more gas would have
leaked out. Let's hunt for the eats and things."
The wreckage of the car proved a veritable treasure-house. There was a
flashlight and a telescopic field glass, both of which Tom snatched up
with an eagerness which could not have been greater if they had been
made of solid gold. In the smashed locker were two good-sized tins of
biscuit, a bottle of wine and several small tins of meat. Tom emptied
out the wine and filled the bottle with water out of the five-gallon
tank, from which they also refreshed their parched throats. The food
they "commandeered" to the full capacity of their ragged pockets.
"And look at this," said Archer, hauling out a blouse such as the
hanging German wore; "what d'ye say if I wearr it, hey? And the cap,
too? I'll look like an observation ballooner, or whatever you call 'em."
"Good idea," said Tom, "and look!"
"A souveneerr?" cried Archer.
"The best _you_ ever saw," Tom answered, rooting in the engine tool
chest by the aid of the flashlight and hauling out a pair of rubber
gloves.
"What good are those?" said Archer, somewhat scornfully.
"_What good!_ They're a passport into Switzerland."
"Do you have to wear rubber gloves in Switzerland?" Archer asked
innocently, as he ravenously munched a biscuit.
"No, but you have to wear 'em when you're handling electrified wire,"
said Tom in his stolid way.
"G-o-o-d _night_! We fell in soft, didn't we!"
Indeed, for a couple of hapless, ragged wanderers, subsisting wholly by
their wits, they had "fallen in soft." It seemed that the very things
needed by two fugitives in a hostile country were the very things needed
in an observation balloon. One unpleasant task Tom had to perform, and
that was to remove the blouse from the hanging German and don it
himself, which he did, not without some shuddering hesitation.
"It's the only thing," he said, "that would make anybody think
somebody's been here, and that's just what we've got to look out for.
The other things won't be missed, but if anybody should come here and
see him hanging there without his coat they'd wonder where it was."
However, this was a remote danger, since probably no one knew of the
disaster.
Tom's chief difficulty was in restricting that indefatigable souvenir
hunter, Archer, from loading himself down with every conceivable kind of
useless but interesting paraphernalia.
"You're just like a tenderfoot when he starts out camping," said Tom.
"He takes fancy cushions and a lot of stuff; he'd take a brass bed and a
rolltop desk and a couple of pianos if you'd let him," he added, with
rather more humor than he usually showed. "All we're going to take is
the biscuits and two cans of meat and the flashlight and the field
glass and the bottle, and, let's see----"
"I don't have to leave this dandy ivory cigar-holderr, do I?" Archer
interrupted. "We could use it for----"
"Yes, you do, and we're going to leave that cartridge belt, too, so
chuck it," ordered Tom. "If anybody _should_ come up here we don't want
'em to think somebody else was here before 'em. All we're going to take
is just what I said--some of the eats, and the flashlight and the field
glass and the bottle and the rubber gloves and the pliers and--that's
all."
"Not even this dial-faced thing?" pleaded Archer.
"That's a gas gauge or something," said Tom. "Come on now, let's get
away from here."
Archer pointed the flashlight and cast a lingering farewell gaze upon a
large megaphone. For a brief moment he had wild thoughts of trying to
persuade Tom that this would prove a blessing as a hat, shedding the
pelting Alsatian rains like a church steeple. But he did not quite
dare.