I wakened the next morning much refreshed and in good spirits.  The guard was polite and obliging, and when I said, “Guard, I like your place,” his face broke into a friendly grin which warmed my heart.  Ted had spoken truly when he said the Germans were a “spotty race.”  It is a spotty country, too, and one of the pleasant spots to us was the civil jail at Meppen.

Of course, to men who had been sleeping in beds and eating at tables and going in and out at their own pleasure, it would have been a jail; but to us, dirty, tired, hungry, red-eyed from loss of sleep, and worn with anxiety, it was not a jail—­it was a haven of rest.  And in the twenty-four hours that we spent there we made the most of it, for we well knew there were hard times coming!

CHAPTER XVI

THE INVISIBLE BROTHERHOOD

A special guard was sent from Vehnemoor to bring us back, and we had to leave our comfortable quarters at Meppen and go back with him.

The guard took a stout rope and tied us together, my right wrist to Edwards’s left, and when we were securely roped up, he tried to enlighten us further by dancing around us, shouting and brandishing his gun, occasionally putting it against our heads and pretending he was about to draw the trigger.  This was his way of explaining that he would shoot us if we didn’t behave ourselves.

We tried to look back at him with easy indifference, and when he saw that he had not succeeded in frightening us, he soon ceased to try.  However, from the wicked looks he gave us, we could see that he would be glad to shoot us—­if he had a reasonable excuse.

At the station in Meppen, where he took us fully an hour before train time, as we stood in the waiting-room with the guard beside us, the people came and looked curiously at us.  The groups grew larger and larger, until we were the centre of quite a circle.  We did not enjoy the notoriety very much, but the guard enjoyed it immensely, for was he not the keeper of two hardened and desperate men?

We noticed that the majority of the women were dressed in black.  Some of them were poor, sad, spiritless-looking creatures who would make any person sorry for them; and others I saw whose faces were as hard as the men’s.  The majority of them, however, seemed to be quite indifferent; they showed neither hostility nor friendliness to us.

We changed cars at Leer, where on the platform a drunken German soldier lurched against us, and, seeing us tied together, offered to lend us his knife to cut the cord, but the guard quickly frustrated his kind intention.

At Oldenburg we were herded through the crowded station and taken out on the road for Vehnemoor, the guard marching solemnly behind us.  He knew we had no firearms, and we were tied together, but when Ted put his free hand in his pocket to find some chocolate, as we walked along, the guard screamed at him in fear.  He seemed to be afraid we would in some way outwit him.