Page:Air Service Boys Flying for France.djvu/81

76 been starting to search me when your coming scared the bunch away.

"You were lucky, I tell you, Jack. And I hope after this you'll be satisfied to take your constitutionals in the daytime. This dark deck isn't a very safe place these times, when they douse the glim mostly, and try to keep every light from showing, so no lurking sub can locate us."

"Oh, I've had my lesson, all right! Believe me, I don't mean to try it a second time. Honest now, do you think they would have tossed me over the side after going through all my pockets and finding nothing worth while?"

Jack's voice had a perceptible tremble to it, as though the idea were appalling to him, for which no one surely could blame the boy.

"I don't know what to say to that," Tom told him. "It seems monstrous; but then these German spies hold life cheap enough. See what some of them have been doing in America—putting bombs in the holds of passenger and freight steamers that carry munitions or food for the Allies, and which are timed to explode days later, perhaps sending the whole crew down to watery graves."

"That's so," muttered Jack. Then following up the subject with feverish eagerness, as