The Man on Horseback
CHAPTER I
THE YANKEE DOODLE GLORY
Like a great, shimmering silver horn the morning mist swung out of the valley and Tom Graves swung along with it, sitting his tough, sinewy, thirteen-hand pony as easily as a lifetime of it can teach a man, and lifting the mare gently with knee and soft word and knowing hand when ruts or slippery timber falls cleft the road or when it dipped too suddenly into rock- strewn levels.
Fourteen miles beyond, an hour and a half's ride if the pony was as keen as the man, was Woodfell, a one-horse, one-man homestead of drab, slat-built house, splintering, zig-zag fence, rickety corral, and a brown, hopeless blotch of illy tilled fields. There he would stable his horse with "Swede" Johnson, the squatter, pay more or less gracefully that flaxen-haired individual's habitual overcharge for a meal consisting of bread mixed in the flour bag and baked in the frying-pan, inky, boiled coffee, stringy bacon that tasted of fish, and rice pudding remarkable for its shortcomings as to raisins, and resume his journey on foot into the Hoodoo mining district.
Tom Graves was easily moved to laughter. He would laugh, at other people and at himself, with his mouth that was wide and generous, his flashing, even, white teeth, his square lighter's chin, his nose that, starting in a haughty Wellingtonian curve, finished disconcertingly with a humorous tilt to starboard. He would laugh with every inch of his muscular, well-knit body, with his very hair that was uncompromisingly bristly and as uncompromisingly red; and he laughed now as he said to himself that the district was rightly named.
The Hoodoo! The evil, lumpish spirit of man's aspirations, man's hopes and faith!
Once that part of Idaho had been famed for its rich placer claims that had washed every day into the thou sands; then a misleading and glittering outcropping of gold-studded quartz, and a mad wave of adventurers, Americans, Canadians, Englishmen, Scots, and Scandinavians, surging in and making the gaunt hillsides ring with the staccato thud of pickaxe and the dull, minatory rumble of powder and dynamite. Finally disappointment, misgivings, an indiscriminate swallowing of both capital and labor in one tremendous avalanche of failure … And the merry band of Argonauts, shaking off their dismay as a spaniel shakes off water and cocking their beavers at the face of misfortune, had followed the gold lure into farther fields, the Kootenais this time.
To-day the Hoodoo district was empty of life except for a couple of ancient Chinamen from California, satisfied with washing their daily dole of five dollars of gold in a forgotten claim; a few optimistic Spokane prospectors who dreamt glimmering mirages of mica; and John Truex, called "Old Man" Truex throughout the Inland Empire.
He was a relic of former days, a man who had once hobnobbed with such notorious characters of local Northwestern history as Soapy Smith and Swiftwater Bill and who, well past three score and ten, white-haired, patriarchal, yet erect and lithe, had built himself a two-story cabin of logs neatly dovetailed, in the heart of the bleak, frowning Hoodoos. It was surrounded by a flower garden, odorous with old-fashioned blossoms, and flanked by a nostalgic strawberry patch, shooting thin roots in fifteen inches of well-fertilized soil that he had carried in bags from the rolling Palouse and spread with loving hands on the narrow rock ledge that framed his cabin.
He still called himself a prospector, still was sure that some day he would strike it rich, and he was the partner of Tom Graves, half owner in the latter's prospect hole that was called grandiloquently the Yankee Doodle Glory and was the joke of every mining man from Seattle to the Idaho Panhandle.
Not that Tom Graves was a miner by profession.
He had been born thirty years earlier in the Palouse, had never been west of Spokane nor east of Butte, and had followed the range all his life. As a boy he had helped his father in a decade's hopeless fight against the sprouting of grain, the fencing of free land, and the nibbling of sharp-toothed sheep, afterwards riding herd to various cattle men, and finally becoming horse wrangler to Charles Nairn, the owner and manager of the Killicott ranch.
He was a typical Man on Horseback, an atavistic throwback to an earlier age when men rode free and large, and before steam and electricity and machinery came to cumber, some say to lighten, the world's burden. But he was not displeased when his friends referred to him as "the miner," or introduced him to traveling salesmen or visiting ranchers as the "King of the Hoodoos." For he had a healthy American appetite after money and the decent things that money can buy.
He remembered how the Yankee Doodle Glory had come into his possession at the end of a memorable day and night two-handed, stud-poker session with Dixon Harris, the horse wrangler of a neighboring ranch.
Tom had won steadily, hand after hand, pot after pot, until finally Dixon Harris had risen to his feet, had taken a greasy, yellowish, thumb-stained paper from his pocket, and thrown it across the table.
"I am flat, Tom," he had announced. "Thirty seeds to the bow-wows an' next pay day a hell o' a long ways off. Take this here Yankee Doodle Glory an' call it even. Somebody stuck me with it when I wasn't lookin' an' now I'm goin' to stick you, you old son-of-a-gun. Turn about's fair play!"
And Tom Graves had laughed and had taken the title certificate—the mine was patented—in payment of Dixon Harris gambling debt.
The Yankee Doodle Glory was a standing joke in the community. It had had a variegated, picturesque, and not altogether honest career. It had been sold and re-sold to capitalists from Boston, London, Minneapolis, and New York, abandoned and picked up again, disposed of at auction in Spokane amidst the roaring laughter of those present for thirty-five cents cash ("an' you're paying damned high for what you're getting!" the auctioneer had added facetiously); money had been spent on it lavishly for blasting and timbering, tunneling and assaying, and never a speck of color, neither gold nor silver, neither copper nor galena, had ever been discovered in its frowning, hopeless depths.
Men out there in the Northwest spoke of "passing the Yankee Doodle Glory" as men in other places speak of "passing the buck"; and now laughing Tom Graves was the owner.
But though he had had half-a-dozen chances of palming it off on newcomers fresh from the East he had always stoutly refused to do so.
"It isn't because I don't want to stick 'em," he had said, blushing like a girl, "but I'm going to develop this here property of mine, see?" And so he had formed a partnership with "Old Man" Truex by the terms of which the latter contributed the labor, the tools, and the dynamite, while Tom ceded to him a half interest in the mine and gave an occasional sum of money whenever he could save it out of his munificent wage of sixty dollars a month.
And then, two days ago, he had received a succinct and ungrammatical telegram that read:
"Git here in a helluva hurry struck it apowerful and aplenty.
"(Signed) Truex
CHAPTER II
GOLD
"Look a-here, Tom," said "Old Man" Truex late that evening as he was busying himself amongst his pots and pans that shone and twinkled and glittered like so many kindly, ruby-eyed hobgoblins, "what are you goin't do with your half of all them opprobrious riches down yonder in the Yankee Doodle Glory?" He waved a hand through the window towards the Hoodoos that coiled back to the star-lit firmament in a great wave of carved, black stone.
Tom was toasting his legs in front of the glowing hearth. He was tired and sleepy and happy. All morning he had ridden; then the long up-hill pull on foot from "Swede" Johnson's homestead to the cabin; and finally three hours climbing and slipping in and about the prospect hole of the Yankee Doodle Glory under his partner's guidance. It had not meant much to him: just a flat facet of shimmering quartz where the old miner's pickaxe had uncovered it, something like a trail of haggard, indifferent light that disappeared in the frowning maw of a rudely blasted, rudely timbered tunnel, and a small heap of what to him had appeared to be rubbish, but which his partner had handled as a fond mother handles her first born and had designated as: "Gold, my lad! Virgin gold, or I'm a Dutchman!"
"Sure it isn't fool's gold?" Tom asked now with a laugh.
"Fool yourself!" In his excitement Truex missed the flapjack that he was tossing browned side up into the skillet, so that it dropped on the ground with a flopping, sizzling smack. "I tell you it's the real thing. Look a-here, Tom. I guess them years on the range have stunted yer perceptions. Of course you don't know the hills as I do. You can't know—oh—the struggle, the fight, the treachery, the damned cheating deceit that's in them rocks. But," wagging his patriarchal beard, "nor can you know the promise of them hills. Wealth that comes to you suddenly after you've given up hope and are mighty near to blowing off yer head with a stick o' powder! Why, by the Immortal and Solemnly Attested Heck!"—this was his pet swear word—"I tell you I have ranged these here hills since I was knee-high to a wood louse and I've never seen such a vein of—"
"Say! What is a vein?"
"Gosh A'mighty! Go to bed, Tom, before I brain you with my skillet. Only take this bit o' information along and hug it in yer dreams: You've got enough gold down there in the Yankee Doodle Glory to buy yourself what you want!"
"Oh!" Tom Graves yawned and kicked off his high-heeled boots. "I always did have a hankering after the coin. There's that new saddle Dixon Harris got up from Gallup's. Cost him seventy seeds and he's willing to part with it for fifty, spot cash. Guess there's enough gold in my half for that?"
Truex shook his head hopelessly.
"Tom," he said very solemnly, "I tell you there's enough gold in there so's you can do what you darned please. You can go to Spokane and join the Club and be a man o' leisure. You can walk up Seventh Avenue and have the pick of all them swell dumps there. You can surround yer bow-legged self with Chink cooks and autermobiles and baskets of champagne and … Say, what'd you call them things full o' small bones that tastes like punk chicken and sticks in yer throat?"
"Fishes?" suggested Tom sleepily.
"No! Not fishes! I had it once when I sold that there Sally Miller prospect hole to that Eastern guy. Wait! I have it! Terrapin—that's the name! Why, man," he continued seriously, sitting down on the edge of his narrow bunk and scratching his shins, "there's so much gold down there in that hole it makes me afraid at times. Afraid!" he repeated in a strangely sibilant whisper.
"Say, you're locoed!" Tom laughed. "What's the matter with you, old-timer? Afraid of gold?"
"I ain't afraid of the gold. Gold is all right." Truex shook his head. "But, Tom …" he crossed the room and put his hand on the younger man's shoulder, "when you were down there, in that tunnel of the Yankee Doodle Glory, didn't you—oh—hear something?"
Tom looked up sharply.
"I did. But it wasn't exactly hearing. It was more like …" he hunted for the right word. "Well, something like … I don't know what!"
"All right. You did notice it then!" Truex broke in triumphantly. "And so did I!"
"Isn't it always so in a mine? In a tunnel? Like an echo?"
"No. It isn't. And it wasn't like an echo. Nor did I notice it until my pickaxe knocked off that bit o' sure-enough quartz, the morning I sent you that wire! Say, Tom," he went on, very earnestly, "it's maybe because I am an old fellow and sorta superstitious. I've followed the gold trail these fifty years or more, an' I know! I have seen mighty strange things in the hills. I could tell—things. And, Tom, down there in the Yankee Doodle Glory, when I found that bit o' quartz with the true color sticking in it like raisins in a pudding, I had a funny feeling. I .… I was scared, scared stiff. Well, never mind," he wound up, returning to his bunk and taking off his clothes. "To-morrow you got to get up right early and take a sample of that there ore to Newson Garrett in Spokane. He'll make us an assay. Good night."
"Good night," mumbled Tom, who was already half asleep.
CHAPTER III
THE UNKNOWN METAL
A long career as chemist and assayer had made a pessimist and misanthrope of Newson Garrett.
Miners had come to his laboratory and had offered him large, certified checks, asking nothing of him in return except that he should rectify his reports by taking off a couple of figures from the rubric entitled Silica and add them to that labeled Gold. Other miners had proposed to kill him on the spot when he told them that what they had taken for virgin gold were only shimmering, deceptive bits of iron crystal. Still others, told by him that they had struck it rich, went straightway on a lengthy spree in the old Cœur d'Alene Theater to wake up a week later with a splitting headache and a brown taste, and to discover on returning to their mines that somebody had jumped their claims in the meantime.
So he was morose and silent.
"It'll take another Treadwell, another Leroy, to make me excited," he used to say at the Club over his glass of Vichy and milk, "and those days are over. Why, to-day a fellow thinks he's all the Guggenheims rolled into one and multiplied by the sum total of all the Vanderbilts when his stuff runs two ounces to the ton!"
But, five days later, when Tom Graves ambled into his office, still dressed as if he had just come fresh from the range, in blue jeans tucked into high-heeled boots, a gray flannel shirt, and sombrero, but all neat and clean, even slightly dandyish in the careful knotting of the blue cotton necktie, the rakish angle of his hat, and the elaborate pattern stitched on his boot legs, Newson Garrett smiled. He smiled all over his large, puttyish, hairless face, and held out a flabby hand.
"Mr. Graves," he said in his exact, well-modulated diction that still smacked of Harvard after a lifetime in the Northwest, "permit me to shake you by the hand."
"Sure, I'll permit it if you ask like a nice little girl. But, what's the festive occasion? Why this exuberance of comehitherness, Garrett?"
"Your mine!" replied the other. "Your Yankee Doodle Glory! The jest of the decade has turned into the marvel, the envy of the decade, my dear sir. It is wonderful. I might say extraordinary. It will make history in the mining annals of the Inland Empire. See for yourself," handing Tom the typewritten assay report of the quartz samples which Truex had given him.
Tom read:
There is also present an element, probably some metal that could not be determined, as it did not respond to ordinary tests."
Tom looked up with a laugh.
"Say, put it in plain American. All this is Siwash to me. What does it mean?"
"It means that you are rich beyond the dreams of avarice. It means that you are a budding Rockefeller. It means that the Yankee Doodle Glory, if the vein runs true …"
"Truex says it does …"
"He ought to know. He is an expert at blocking out ore bodies in his own crude way."
"I guess so." Tom pointed at the paragraph at the bottom of the assay report. "Say, Garrett, what's this?"
"Just what it says there. You see, when I assayed the ore samples, though I used all the known tests, there was one little ingredient, a metal most likely—I am trying not to be too technical—that I was unable to separate."
Tom leaned across the counter. He thought of his partner's curious words, and of his own curious sensation, something like an echo, yet less decided, more far away, he had experienced when he had entered the tunnel of the Yankee Doodle Glory and had come face to face with the ore ledge which his partner's pickaxe had uncovered.
"This unknown metal or whatever you call it," he asked, "did it—well—affect you any? Your ears, I mean …?"
"Yes!" Garrett gave his words the emphasis of a suddenly lowered voice. "It did affect my ears in a very strange," he thumped the table in an access of quite unhabitual excitement, "a perfectly unscientific manner." He was going to say more, but checked himself. "Never mind," he went on, "you are rich. You've got the gold. As to this unknown ingredient, this unknown metal, I have made sure that it will not interfere with any smelting process you may decide on. And I shall send it East to a friend of mine who has a great scientific laboratory to see what he makes of it. Don't you worry about it."
But Tom Graves did worry a day later when Truex suddenly came to town and went straight to his room in the Hotel Spokane.
"Tom," said the old miner, "I'm through with the Yankee Doodle Glory. I'd swap my half of it for a chaw of Macdonald's plug." And being pressed for a reason he repeated his former statement that he was afraid. He said that, in continuing blasting the tunnel and running it smack up against the vein, he had uncovered an even richer ore body, but that the strange sensations, as of a far-off echo, had increased a hundredfold.
"Garrett says something about a new metal,"'rejoined Tom Graves.
"Forget it. Metals don't affect your ears. I don't want nothing to do with that there mine."
"But," said Tom philosophically, "half of it is yours."
"I don't want nothing to do with it, just the same. I'm scared. I don't want to ever enter that tunnel again!"
"You won't have to. We'll develop the mine in style. It won't cost much, will it?"
"No. We got enough ore in sight to pay for all the machinery we need, an I've a little money saved up. But," he repeated, irritably, "I tell you, Tom, I'm goin' to sidestep that there mine. I don't want nothing to do with it—not a damned thing. I'd rather …"
"All right, all right, old-timer. Keep your hair on. I'll take a run over to the Club and have a talk with Martin Wedekind."
The latter was a German-American of the best type. He came of an excellent Berlin family, but his father, dead these many years, had been of such a grimly Calvinistic turn of mind that he had not been able to understand why his own children should have been born with a grain of original sin. To the father, the whole of life had meant nothing but a continuous and emphatic moral action. He had brought up his two sons accordingly, and had strained their souls to such a horrible pitch of self-righteousness and hard ideal ism that they threatened to snap and recoil.
And finally, in the case of Martin, his younger son, it had recoiled. He had been guilty of a small sin and had been shipped off to America thirty years earlier.
He had come straight West, had done well there, and had become an American heart, soul, and politics, including even the saving prejudices. He hated the very sound of the word hyphen.
"There are two classes of hyphenates," he used to say when he warmed to the subject. "There's the sort who get here via the steerage with the clothes they stand in, make their stake, thanks to the splendid hospitality, the fairness of equal chance, and the unlimited possibilities of America, and return to Germany as first-class passengers with money jingling in the jeans. Over yonder they pose as Simon-pure Yankees and read the New York Herald, while here in America they swear by Bill the Kaiser and read the New Yorker Herald. They are the breed who hate America and dislike Germany, who try to straddle the fence, who would kick at the climate of both Hell and Paradise, who are neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. Then there's the other variety, the intellectual hyphenates—and often they have good American names and not a drop of German blood in their veins—who spout statistics about German efficiency, meaning by that damnable word a comparison between what's best in Germany with what's worst in America. I hate both breeds. I'm an American. No. I am not sorry that I wasn't born over here. If I had been, I wouldn't have been able to appreciate so thoroughly what America is, and means, and does."
To-day Martin Wedekind was retired from active business affairs and spent his time between his home in Lincoln Addition and the Club, where he played his afternoon game of cards or dominoes and took his whiskey straight, like a native born. His wife was a New England woman and he had an only child, a daughter. He was a little on the autumn side of fifty, tall, heavy, slightly stooped, with peering, twinkling, kindly eyes, a mass of close-curled hair, a thick, graying mustache, and great hairy hands that he used freely to gesticulate with.
He did so this afternoon when the Club steward announced Tom Graves, whom he had met the year before on a visit to the owner of the Killicott ranch. At that time an impromptu friendship had sprung up between the two men in spite of their difference in age and fortune and, at least on Tom's side, not altogether hindered by the fact that Bertha, Martin Wedekind's daughter, was blond and violet-eyed and straight of limb.
"Hullo, Tom! Hullo, capitalist!" was his hearty greeting as the young Westerner ambled into the room with that peculiar, straddling, side-wheeling walk which smacked of stock saddle and rolling prairie.
Tom grinned sheepishly as he sat down. "I guess the news of the rich strike in the Yankee Doodle Glory is all over town by this time?" he asked.
"Sure. Garrett spilled the beans."
"Damned good beans," commented Tom, "fine and rich and nutritious and juicy."
"Yes. But look out, young fellow. Every con agent in the Inland Empire is going to lay for you with a flannel-wrapped brick and a cold deck."
Tom waved a careless hand.
"A fat lot of good it'll do them," he laughed. "My mother was Scotch and as careful as a setting hen, and I've followed the range all my life. Bulliest little training-school to kick some horse sense into you. Well, Wedekind," he leaned across the table and his eyes lit up with a frank, boyish appeal, "you're a good friend of mine, aren't you?"
"None better!" came the kindly reply.
"Fine and dandy. You see, I want to talk to you about that mine."
Wedekind smiled.
"Need a stake to start your developing work?" he asked, slapping his check book on the table. "Name your figure, my boy."
Tom shook his head. "Thanks. It isn't that. It's just some advice I want about my partner. The old son-of-a-gun has gone loco …"
"Gold gone to his head?"
"Not a bit. Gold's gone to his feet. They're cold, Wedekind, as cold as clay." And he told the other about the curious sensation, as of a far-off echo, he and his partner had experienced in the tunnel, adding that Truex resolutely refused to have anything more to do with the Yankee Doodle Glory, and showing Garrett's assay report with the paragraph about the unknown substance on the bottom.
"Garrett says it's all right?" asked Wedekind.
"Sure. As right as rain. Says that foreign metal or whatever it may turn out to be won't interfere with the smelting."
"Well, there's nothing to worry over then. I guess platinum was an unknown metal once, and even gold and silver were unknown during the iron age."
"But Truex won't play."
"You don't need him, Tom. You work the mine yourself. I'll give you a line to Fred Gamble, the engineer. He has done some work for me. And you make a contract with Truex … Never mind. I'll take the matter up with him myself." He looked at his watch. "What are you doing to-night?"
"Oh, nothing special."
"Fine. Come on up to the house and take pot luck. Mrs. Wedekind will be glad to see you. And Bertha, too."
"I haven't seen your daughter since last year," said Tom, as he walked down the broad staircase of the Club side by side with Wedekind.
The latter laughed.
"She's changed some," he replied. "You know she has been visiting my brother Heinrich in Berlin for over five months. Just returned. Oh, yes," he repeated rather musingly, "she's changed some."
CHAPTER IV
BERTHA WEDEKIND
"Well, Tom, I am glad to see you!" Mrs. Wedekind, small, delicate, white-haired, with something about her reminiscent of old lace and lavender, beamed upon him through her gold-rimmed spectacles. "And rich, aren't you?"
Tom Graves felt slightly embarrassed. References to the lucky strike in the Yankee Doodle Glory and his suddenly acquired wealth often made him curiously ill at ease as if it were a reflection, quite undeserved, on his character and his manliness.
So he smiled vaguely and apologetically and shook her hand without knowing what to reply, while Martin Wedekind, guessing what was going on in the young Westerner's mind, came to the rescue.
"Yes, Fanny," he said to his wife. "Who would have believed last year that the Killicott ranch harbored a prospective capitalist?" He turned to Tom and led him to the sideboard with its hospitable array of bottles and glasses and syphons. "Shall I mix you one in honor of the occasion?"
But Tom Graves was not listening, for Bertha Wedekind had come into the dining-room, an exquisite little figure with her wheat-colored hair that rippled over the broad, smooth, low forehead in a curly, untamable mass, her violet-blue eyes, her pure oval of a face, pink and white and flower-soft. Her youthful incompleteness seemed a lovely sketch for some thing larger, finer, more splendid; just a sketch of happy, seductive hints with the high-lights of woman hood yet missing.
Tom took her narrow, white hand, looking upon her admiringly and approvingly. She was dressed in foamy silver lace over shimmering rose-pink satin, with contrasting moire ribbons in deep purple and a cluster of purple satin orchids at her high waist line.
Tom laughed. He remembered how he had seen her the year before, on the Killicott ranch where she had been spending the summer together with her parents, in riding breeches, a khaki coat, a blue silk tie loosely knotted around her slim throat, and her hair pinned up carelessly beneath a flopping, mannish stetson, riding the range alongside of him and glorying in the speed and tang and zest of it.
"By Ginger, Bertha," he said, "you've sure changed some. Now that gown of yours," he was studying it naïvely, "I lay you my rock bottom dollar it's from Paris."
Bertha smiled rather languidly.
"I am afraid you would lose your bet, Tom," she replied. "This gown is not from Paris. I bought it in Berlin. Had it made there …" And, as if returning to a subject that was uppermost in her mind: "You don't have to go to Paris any more for gowns or, oh, 'most anything. You can get everything you want in Berlin. Not only frocks and frills, but beauty, and culture, and big things, worthwhile things! Why, compared to Germany, America is …"
"Daughter," cut in her mother dryly, "aren't you forgetting that you are an American?"
"Dad is a German. Aren't you, Dad?"
Martin Wedekind flushed an angry red. "I was born in Berlin. But I am an American—every inch of me—all the time!"
"Uncle Heinrich told me in Berlin that …"
"Leave your Uncle Heinrich out of the question. He and I have gone different ways. I tell you that I am an American, while he is a Prussian officer. And—" turning to Tom and smiling bitterly, as if remembering something that had happened very long ago and that he had never been able to eradicate completely from his mind, "you know what Prussian officers are, don't you?"
Tom shook his head. His range of actual experience was limited by Spokane to the west, by Butte to the east, and the British Columbia border to the north. Of course he had known foreigners, but they were mostly Britons, Canadians, and Scandinavians, men very much like himself, men blending easily into the great, rolling West.
"I'll tell you what they are," continued Wedekind heatedly, "for I know them. They are brass-buttoned, brass-gallooned, brass-helmeted, brass-souled, saber-rattling vulgarians. They are …"
"Father! Please!" came Bertha's hurt, indignant cry, and at the same time, simultaneous with the Chinese servant's felt-slippered appearance, Mrs. Wedekind interrupted with a conciliatory:
"The soup's on the table!"
Martin Wedekind laughed.
"Never mind, little fellow," he said to his daughter, calling her by his favorite nickname, "you and I aren't going to quarrel over …"
"Over anything or anybody, Dad dear." Bertha finished the sentence for him, and gave his arm an affectionate little squeeze.
But even so there was a sort of embarrassed hush during dinner now and again when the conversation turned to Berlin; and, somehow, it seemed impossible to keep away from the subject. Bertha was young and impressionable. She had just returned from Germany after her first visit abroad; and all she had seen there, and felt and heard, was very vivid in her memory, and very important.
Tom Graves looked at her rather ruefully. He was deeply in love with her, and he said to himself that she was different from the girl he used to know, different from the clear-eyed Western girl who had ridden by his side across the rolling range of the Killicott. Harder she seemed, more sure of herself, less considerate of other people's feelings, more stubborn and unreasonable in the swing of her own prejudices, more critical and skeptical; and after dinner, when Mrs. Wedekind had left the house to call on a neighbor while her husband was stealing a surreptitious forty winks behind the shelter of the evening paper, the change struck him more forcibly than ever.
Bertha was at the piano, her fingers softly sweeping the keys while she hummed a German song:
"Klingling, tschingtsching und Paukenkrach,
Noch aus der Feme tönt es schwach,
Ganz leise bumbumbumbum tsching,
Zog da ein bunter Schmetterling,
Tschingtsching, bum, um die Ecke?" …
Tom looked at her: at the tiny points of light that danced in her fair hair, the soft curve of her neck, the slim, straight young shoulders, and he took a deep breath, like a man about to jump. He was what his life had made him, the range, the free roaming, the open, vaulted sky. Simple he was and just a little stubborn; at times easily embarrassed, but of a lean veracity, with himself and other people, that forced him to speak out sudden and unafraid where other, more sophisticated men, would have hesitated.
Thus it was now.
He had always loved her, and he had never considered the fact that he was a simple horse wrangler, while she was the daughter of a well-to-do, well-educated man. What had kept him from speaking to her of love had been the fact that he had been poor. Now he was on the road to fortune, and so he spoke straight out, without preamble:
"Bertha, I must tell you something. I …"
She turned very quickly and cut through his sentence with a gesture of her slim, white fingers.
"Don't, Tom," she said.
"But you don't know what I …"
"I do. You are going to tell me that you love me, aren't you?" And, when he did not reply, just inclined his head, she went on: "I shall never marry an American!"
"You … What?" Tom was utterly taken aback.
"I shall never marry an American," she repeated calmly.
"But—why?"
She did not reply for several seconds. She had always liked Tom, had always felt safe in his presence. There had even been moments, last year on the Killicott ranch, when her liking had edged close to the danger line of something greater. But she had changed since then. In Berlin a new world, new people, a new view-point, new prejudices, had spread before her; and, honest in so far that she saw things without spectacles, dishonest in so far that these things were only those she wanted to see, she told Tom just what she thought.
"Love to me is a romantic thing, and you—I mean, American men—are so terribly, terribly prosy, so commonplace!"
Tom Graves was hurt. Not personally hurt, but hurt in his Americanism, his patriotism. It was a narrow patriotism, geographically limited, but it was clean and good and very decent.
"Bertha," he said, "pardon me but you don't know what you're talking about!"
"Oh, don't I?"
"You don t. Romance? Is that what you are after?"
"Yes," she said stubbornly.
"All right. And aren't we Americans romantic enough for anybody who cares for that sort of thing? Why, girl, is there anything more romantic in the wide world than a typical American whose great-grandfather, rifle in arm and knife in boot, came out of Virginia into Kentucky in the days when Kentucky was the farthest frontier? Not for gain, but just to see what was going on behind the ranges? Whose grandfather drifted into Kansas when it was 'Bloody' Kansas and thence via Panama to California in the first great gold rush? Whose father mined and ranched and played poker and drank his red liquor from Alaska to the Sierras?"
"Meaning yourself?"
"You bet your life! I guess I've read some, back on the old homestead, in the long winter evenings in my father's tattered old books! I read a lot about your Brian Boru, and Richard the Lion-Hearted, and Tamerlane, and Frederick Barbarossa, and Roland, and all the other guys with their long, foreign, stem-winding names! But, say, for real, live, kicking romance, you give me a plain American, out of the Northwest, via Kentucky, Kansas, and California! Give me …"
"Teleglam, Missie!" came a soft, sing-song voice from the door, and Yat, the old Chinese servant, waddled in, giving a yellow envelope to Bertha.
She tore it open rapidly, read, and rushed over to her father.
"Dad! Dad!"
He sat up, rubbing his eyes. "Hello, little fellow! What's all the excitement?"
"Oh, Dad! Baron von Gotz-Wrede is coming to America! He's going to come West, to Spokane!"
Martin Wedekind did not reply. Rather pityingly he looked at Tom Graves, who was moodily studying the pattern in the claret-colored Saruk rug.
But the German baron's cable was not the only one which was flashed over the Western wires that night. For when Tom returned to his room at the Hotel Spokane he found there a telegram, dated Berlin, offering him half a million dollars spot cash for control of the Yankee Doodle Glory.
It was signed: "Johannes Hirschfeld & Co., G.M.B.H."
CHAPTER V
THE OFFER
"What do these hieroglyphics mean?" asked Tom of Martin Wedekind the next afternoon, pointing at the signature of the cablegram.
"G.M.B.H.?"
"Yes."
"It's an abbreviation for ‘Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung.’"
"Sounds like a he-clam singing through his nose," came Tom's observation. "What's the answer?"
"The English for it? Company with limited responsibility.' 'Johannes Hirschfeld & Co., Ltd.,' as the English would have it. By the way, some little offer that, Tom! Half a million cold cash … Whew!"
"I guess it's some sort of a con game."
"No!" Wedekind laughed. "In Germany the name of Johannes Hirschfeld stands for nickel-plated, harveyized-steel, all-wool respectability. The Hirschfelds are hand in glove with the Deutsche Bank, and the Deutsche Bank people are as thick as thieves with the German Government."
"In other words, that offer is O. K.?"
"Sure, Tom. If you want to sell."
Tom Graves shook his bristly, red head. "What knocks me is how that Berlin gang knows about the Yankee Doodle Glory. Why, man, everybody used to poke fun at that particular prospect hole in the Hoodoos. There wasn't a day in the last twenty years when you couldn't have picked up the Yankee Doodle for a grin and a handful of peanuts, and now … Wait!"
They were sitting in the little red-and-gold poker room of the Club and just then Newson Garrett was passing by on his way to the library. Tom hailed him through the open door:
"Say, Garrett! Step in here a moment." He showed him the cable. "What'd you make of it? Half a million chilly ducats for the Yankee Doodle Glory!"
"For a controlling interest in it," rectified the exact assayist. Then he shook his head. "Steep price. Too steep. Those Dutchmen are loco. Brand them before they escape."
"Yes, yes," put in Martin Wedekind. "But the Hirschfeld people are not exactly fools. They have mining interests all over the world, and agents, and correspondents. There must be a reason …"
"And they seem to be in a devil of a hurry," said Tom. "Old Man Truex struck the vein on the first, and to-day is the fifteenth. Let me figure back."
"You got to the Hoodoos on the third."
"Yes. Back in Spokane on the fifth, and gave you the ore sample the same day."
"Yes," Garrett inclined his head. "I made my assay tests on the sixth, while you went back to the Killicott ranch and asked me to hold my report until your return …"
"Which was on the eighth. Of course the news of the strike spread," added Tom.
Wedekind looked up suddenly.
"Garrett," he asked, "Tom told me you sent some of the Yankee Doodle Glory ore samples to New York, to a friend of yours who has a great chemical laboratory?"
"I did. There was that unknown metal which I was unable to separate."
"When did you send it?"
"On the seventh."
"And it reached New York on the eleventh …"
"Or the twelfth, Wedekind."
"Let's call it the twelfth." Wedekind cupped his chin in his hands. He was thinking deeply. "To-day is the fifteenth," he went on. "Three days difference. What's the name of your New York friend?"
"The chemist? Oh, Sturtzel. Conrad Sturtzel."
"A German?"
"Yes. We studied together in Freiburg where I took a post-graduate course. First-rate fellow. Very clever. The right sort to find out all about that unknown ingredient." He rose. "Sorry I have to leave you, gentlemen. And—Tom! Take that half-million offer! By all means!"
"Don't you do anything of the sort!" Wedekind said when Garrett had disappeared.
"Why not?" Tom was frankly astonished.
"Because … I'll be frank with you. Because Sturtzel is a German, and because that very respectable and very honest firm of Johannes Hirschfeld & Co… ."
"You think they'd welsh?"
"No. They'd pay you spot cash in good, minted gold coin of the realm. It's because"—instinctively he lowered his voice—"they are hand in glove with the Deutsche Bank, with the German Government …"
"You don't trust the Germans any too much, do you, Wedekind?"
"I don't!" There was veiled bitterness in the older man's voice. "I know them. My brother Heinrich, he writes to me—he asks me to … Never mind never mind! But I tell you I know them. I know their virtues. But I also know—the other side. Tom," he went on very insistingly, "don't you sell that mine. If it's worth half a million to them, as a gamble, a gamble, mind you …"
"It's worth that same to me. I'm on. Sure. And I'll have all the joy of developing the property, of working it, of seeing my fortune grow. Why, Wedekind," he went on enthusiastically, "it's bully, perfectly bully! It makes me feel strong, and powerful, and …"
Wedekind made a hurried, anxious gesture. "You don't own control, do you?"
"No. It's an even fifty-fifty split with Old Man Truex."
"And he told you he wanted nothing more to do with the mine." He rose. "All right. I'll talk to him. Where does he stay?"
"Up at Eslick's."
"Wait for me here. I'll fix it up for you."
And when Wedekind, ten minutes later, reached the old prospector's dusty, bare room in the Eslick, he found him in the act of lighting his pipe with something that looked suspiciously like a twisted-up cablegram.
He looked up when Wedekind entered.
"Hullo," he said hospitably; "sit down and reach on the shelf yonder. You'll find some liquor there that ain't so bad." He laughed. "Say, Wedekind, some damn fool's tryin' to play a joke on me. Sends me a telegram from one of them furrin' places an asks me to sell him control of the Yankee Doodle Glory for half a million …"
"Who?"
"Don't know. Didn't look at the signature." Truex rammed the paper spill deeper into his blackened pipe bowl. "An' I don't give two whoops in hell. I'm through with the Yankee Doodle. I'm scared of it."
"That's just what I came here to talk to you about," said Wedekind, leaning across the table. "Listen …"
CHAPTER VI
GETTING ON
"Old Man" Truex's conditions were the acme of guileless simplicity.
All he wanted was to be left alone; for as he repeated over and over again with senile persistency, he was scared of the Yankee Doodle Glory and "he didn't want nothing more to do with it."
At first he was all for accepting a small cash remuneration for his past services, and he wanted to give to Tom the entire stock of the company, which in the meantime had been incorporated, free of charge.
"Take it," he said; "there ain't any strings attached."
But finally he was persuaded to accept one-half of the net profits every month as his share, leaving control of the property in Tom Graves hands.
"Now are you satisfied?" he asked.
"Not yet," said Martin Wedekind, "for what's going to become of your half of the profits in case of your death?"
Truex glared at him through his bushy eyebrows.
"I ain't goin' to kick the bucket for a long while yet!" he growled.
"Sure. Let's hope so. But suppose you …"
"Well, if I die, let Tom keep the whole lot."
"Haven't you got any relatives, any family, old-timer?" suggested the latter.
"No." Then, suddenly, as if remembering something forgotten these many years: "Wait. By the Immortal and Solemnly Attested Heck! I had a sister once, back in York State where I was raised. Silly little goose! Ran away with some measly, fiddle-scratchin', long-haired foreigner, and I ain't ever heard of her nor seen her since. Maybe she had a kid."
"What's her name?" inquired Tom.
"Sally. Sally Truex."
"I mean her married name?"
"Can't think of it, pardner. Makes no difference, though. I tell you what. If I die you just keep what's due me and hand it over to Sally or Sally's kids if they show up, see? Here!" He scrawled a few rude words on a piece of paper and handed it to Wedekind. "I guess that's good enough, ain't it?"
Wedekind read.
"It's going to be bomb-proof in a jiff," he said, and he sent the Club steward for Alec Wynn, the lawyer, who was in the next room playing life pool.
Wynn came in a few seconds later, and Truex's will, for it was no less, was duly and legally attested, witnessed, and sealed.
"Shall I put it in my safe for you?" asked the lawyer.
"I guess so," replied Truex, and Wynn left to finish his interrupted game.
Truex sighed like a man who had successfully accomplished a herculean task. "Well, there we are all cocked and primed! An as to my share of the boodle you just pay it in every month at the Old National Bank. I've a bit of an account there, an' they'll send me whatever I need when I write to em."
"Aren't you going to settle down, now you are wealthy?" asked Tom.
"Me? God, no! I'm going to British Columbia up the Elk River a-ways. A fellow told me last night there's a splotch of sure-enough quartz land up yonder an' I want to have a dig at it."
And so the old prospector packed his telescope grip and was off to the border on the next Spokane & Northern train, leaving Tom Graves entirely in control of the Yankee Doodle Glory.
Given Newson Garrett's report and Wedekind's loyal help, he had little trouble in raising money for the initial development work, and Gamble, the young Pennsylvania engineer whom Wedekind had recommended, went into the task with such speed, zest and efficiency that within a few weeks even the most doubting Thomas on the local mining stock exchange, which met every forenoon in a room of the Hotel Spokane appropriately and conveniently next to the bar room, became convinced that the ore strike in the Yankee Doodle Glory was not an elaborate hoax, with a bait for suckers attached. Consequently there was many a man who groaned at the remembrance that once he had been the possessor of the prospect and that he had been in a hurry to pass it on to the next greenhorn.
Contrary to the accepted and time-honored traditions of Northwestern mining men who have made their fortunes unexpectedly and over night, who come to town on a roaring, tearing celebration, who strike the more unchecked components of local society with the strength and enthusiasm of a flying blast and gather around them a festive crowd of both sexes primed with exuberance and thirst and expectation, Tom Graves leaned instinctively towards the more sober, the more conservative set of which Martin Wedekind was the accepted leader.
Not that he was a prig. He was what is known as a "regular fellow" in want of a better, or worse, word. Good-humored, good-natured, easy-going, generous, he had the gift of spreading about him a wave of happiness and joy.
So it was not altogether because of his rapidly growing bank account in the Old National that he was elected a member of the Club and invited to the best houses, both of proud Seventh Avenue and the more humble North side—the eternal North side of every Western town.
Of course mothers, mothers with daughters of marriageable age, that is, are the same the world over, and since Tom Graves was clean and straight and decent besides being well-to-do, the coming Spokane season was destined to witness a tug of war with Tom as the matrimonial prize; Mrs. Ryan clucking triumphantly when Tom danced the first one-step with Virginia Ryan, Mrs. Plournoy marking down a trick in her favor when the young Westerner led her daughter Cecily to the supper table.
But Tom was blind to all this byplay.
His heart was entirely taken up with Bertha Wedekind.
Dearer she was to him than the dwelling of kings, and, although even in his range days he had always been slightly dandyish, it was for her rather than for himself that gradually he abandoned the more pronounced horse-wrangling mode of dress and appeared in the streets, the restaurants, and the salons of Spokane in the garb of effete civilization—with a few notable exceptions. For he still remained faithful to his floppy, leather-encircled, alkali-stained stetson. He still refused resolutely to wear either vest or gloves. He still found it impossible to get rid of his straddling, side-wheeling walk, the memory of saddle and bit and dancing cayuse bred to the range game.
Meanwhile, the unknown ingredient of the Yankee Doodle Glory had become the scientific sensation of the hour.
Many a learned body, many a mining school, from Columbia to Denver, either asked for ore samples or sent trained men to make a personal examination of the mine in the Hoodoos.
But nobody was able to discover the nature of the foreign ingredient, not even Conrad Sturtzel, the German chemist in New York, to whom Garrett had appealed and who had an international reputation.
Newson Garrett, though, had been right when he had told Tom that the presence of the unknown metal would not interfere with the mine itself. The under ground work progressed speedily and well. The ore smelted without the slightest trouble, and though the miners at first complained of the same sensations, like an echo far-off that had scared "Old Man" Truex away from the Hoodoos and into the uncharted wilds of the Elk River district, they had no lasting ill consequences, no consequences of any sort for that matter.
"It's simply as if you were sand-hogging in a tunnel below a river bed," said Gamble, the engineer, and even that Conrad Sturtzel explained by a lengthy article in the American Ore Age in which he proved, very scientifically and long-windedly, that tunnels laid at a certain pitch acted as reservoirs for tone waves and that the foreign ingredient had of course nothing whatever to do with the curious sensation; an opinion which, since it was signed with Sturtzel's name, was accepted by the scientific and mining world.
Thus the double marvel, the financial one of Tom's sudden rise to fortune and the scientific one of the unknown metal, passed into the limbo of familiar things when—it was late in May of the year Nineteen Hundred and Thirteen, over fourteen months before the outbreak of the gigantic Prussian Crime—a new sensation electrified Spokane society.
For Bertha Wedekind remarked, quite casually, at the occasion of a supper dance given by her chum, Virginia Ryan, that a friend of hers from Berlin was coming to Spokane in a few days.
Virginia smiled superciliously. She had met a number of Germans and made no secret of the fact that she considered them very worthy, very respectable, and frightfully bad form.
"Oh—we'll try and be nice to him," she said.
Bertha smiled triumphantly.
"You won't have to try so very hard," she retorted. "You see, my friend is an officer in a crack regiment, my Uncle Heinrich's regiment. His name is Baron Horst von Gotz-Wrede, and you should see him in his uniform—blue and silver! Perfectly gorgeous, my dear!"
Virginia collapsed while Tom, who sat next to Bertha, felt something tug at his heart-strings.
It was later in the evening, as he helped Mrs. Wedekind on with her coat, that the kindly old New England woman put her thin, wrinkled hands on his shoulders and said, with that sudden abruptness of hers, that he needn't worry. "Young girls will be young girls. But—they get over it!"
Tom was taken aback.
"Then you … You know …?" He stammered.
"Of course. I am a mother, and I have eyes in my head," she smiled, "though I do wear spectacles."
"But …"
"Tom dear," said Mrs. Wedekind, "you are a nice boy. I'd love dearly to have you for a son. …"
"Or a son-in-law?" laughed Tom, with a return of his old, happy humor.
"Yes, Boy dear. But you must go in and win her by yourself. Bertha is stubborn."
"I'm stubborn myself," rejoined Tom Graves; and he bent abruptly and kissed the old lady on the cheek.
CHAPTER VII
BARON HORST VON GÖTZ-WREDE
Baron Horst von Götz-Wrede was the exact opposite of the German accepted and perpetrated as typical by the comic sheets, the music halls, and the weeklies with guaranteed over two and a half million circulation.
He was neither short nor plump. His hair was not honey-blond and brushed straight back from a square and stubborn forehead; there was no supercilious upsweep of pointed, curled mustache, and his eyes were neither watery blue nor glassed in by immense, professorial spectacles. He smoked no ell-long, cherry-wood stem, china-bowl pipe, nor did he dine exclusively on such Teuton delicacies as sauerkraut, pickled herrings, liver sausage, veal kidney roast with sour gravy, and nut cake topped by whipped cream.
On the contrary, he was tall and lean and clean-shaven, of a certain angular, feline grace; dark enough to be an Italian with a dash of Moor; polite enough to be a Frenchman of fiction, and dressed in a pronouncedly and aggressively British style. His clothes spoke of a Haymarket tailor, his neckties and socks and blazers and hats of the Burlington Arcades.
He was good-looking, even striking-looking, with his clean, trained down length of limb, his wide, supple shoulders, his narrow hips, and his long, predatory face that sloped wedge-shaped to a cleft chin.
Baron Horst von Götz-Wrede was a cosmopolite, and he had a disconcerting habit of telling people so.
"Now, please don't take me for one of those fabulous Prussian officers who have swallowed the ramrod with which they were beaten in school," he said in his precise, beautiful English to Miss Virginia Ryan at the first dinner party given in his honor by the Wedekinds. "I assure you that I don't begin my morning prayer with shouting three times ‘Hoch der Kaiser!’ nor do I wind up the evening by getting dismally drunk on blond beer and singing some sentimental ditty about ‘Die Lore am Thore.’ I am—" he looked into her heavy-fringed, blue, Irish eyes, "well. … Don't you think that I could easily pass for an American?"
"For an Englishman rather—I should say," replied Virginia Ryan.
"What's the difference?" laughed the Baron. "English or American? It's one and the same, and I …" He raised his voice slightly so that it carried the length of the dinner table, "We Germans have a deep respect, a lasting admiration, even affection for the Anglo-Saxon peoples." He rose, glass in hand, as if carried away by the surging feelings in his heart. "Ladies and gentlemen! Pardon me—I know it's—oh not the right thing to do, at such an informal little party. But will you permit me to drink to—ah—" looking at the men behind the table, successful men of the Northwest, hearty, well-fleshed, keen Americans with a sprinkling of Britons and Canadians—"to you! The Anglo-Saxons! First in freedom and achievement!"
The toast was taken up. Glasses clinked. Only Tom Graves and Martin Wedekind sat silent and moody.
There was no doubt that the Baron was a great social success. Too, a social lion. Seventh Avenue and the North side, the Spokane Club and the Country Club, native-born and Canadian-born, vied with each other in entertaining the visitor, who was plentifully supplied with money and had taken a suite at the new Davenport. He spoke freely and ingenuously to the reporters of the local and other Northwestern papers who quizzed him for copy.
"My reasons for coming to America? Oh, curiosity to see with my own eyes if the American women run true to the charming specimens which we see in Berlin, during the season; and anxiety—possibly tinged by a little envy, but you must not print this, gentlemen, if you please—to find out the secret for America's colossal advance in international affairs. For, gentlemen, I own up to it. We of my country are envious of you, and just a little afraid. I hope to Heaven that we shall always be friends—we Germans—and you—and"—he turned with a smile to Bob Defries, correspondent of the Victoria, B. C., Daily Colonist—"you—Canadians—British!" and it was natural that the Baron's words were freely printed, quoted, and circulated.
He had brought letters along to Martin Wedekind from the latter's brother in Berlin. Too, Bertha told her father that the Baron and the younger comrades in his regiment had been most attentive to her during her stay in the German capital; and so Martin Wedekind was of necessity forced to play host-in-chief to the Prussian officer.
It was only to Tom Graves that he spoke his real mind.
"I don't like him," he said.
"Nor do I," growled Tom. "I like him about as well as a cold in the head."
And then both would be silent and look guilty. For they were fair and just, and deep down in their hearts they knew that there was no cogent reason for their dislike. On the other hand, Tom was too honest to hide the antipathy he felt, and when he met the Baron he treated him in an abrupt, rasping manner which, putting the odium as it were on him and not on the other, only served to increase his dislike.
"Say, I feel like kicking him," he said one day to Newson Garrett.
"Whom?"
"That foreigner with the unpronounceable, double-barreled name! That German Baron with the hook nose and the British accent and the atmosphere of noble ancestors and the general culpability that goes with it!"
"The ladies like him!" signed Garrett, who had a tender spot in his heart for blue-eyed Virginia Ryan.
"Sure—and …" Tom checked himself. "I was going to say that he does the regular Young Lochinvar dope, hands 'em out sob stuff copped from the Ladies' Own Gazette, signed Jessica Pinkney and written by a red-haired Mick with a pipe, three inches of stubble, and an overdue board bill. But it isn't fair. He isn't one of those sighing, ogling, hand-kissing society corsairs. He and—I hate like the deuce to own up to it—he's a sportsman, all right. And it isn't only the ladies that like him. The men, too, have fallen for him like weak-kneed nine pins …"
"What are you going to do about it?" inquired the logical assayist.
"Me? Nothing! I am going to shake the dust of Spokane off my feet. Temporarily, that is. I'm going up to the Yankee Doodle Glory and have a squint at things there. My bank account is running up so fast that I'm afraid at times it's all a dream …"
And so, the next morning, Tom Graves left town, and two days later found him facing Gamble in the latter's cabin, a long, low building of dovetailed logs, dirt-roofed and chinked with mud, most of its four-paned windows built in to "keep the air out," its tall stove pipe wired and braced, trying to lead an upright life in spite of the furious wind that sometimes boomed from the higher Hoodoo peaks and roared through the draw at the rate of forty and fifty miles an hour.
But Tom was quite happy. This wasn't the range, the Killicott. Yet at least it was the free, the open. It was the untrammeled West; his own!
CHAPTER VIII
THE SECOND OFFER
It was a few days later and Tom Graves was sitting side by side with Gamble in front of the latter's cabin, contentedly rolling a brown paper cigarette, looking out at the dipping, peaking mountains and listening to the sounds of pickaxe and blast that drifted across from the tunnel of the Yankee Doodle Glory, where the miners had begun their early morning shift.
Directly below his feet lay the old stage route, long disused, last memory of the gold seekers who had once followed the glittering metal lure to the Hoodoos. It was still in fairly good condition, ruts and grooves apart, bottled up between rock ridges five hundred feet high, their crevices giving foothold to stunted pines, gnarled fir trees, and an occasional "bearberry" bush, their bases sheltering thick, lacy growths of young spruce. The rocks stood out sharply and threateningly, like gloomy sentinels silhouetted against the tight-stretched sky, while the road beneath lay bathed in purple and umber light.
It was quite early in the morning. The shivering sun rays blinked through the pines and gilded the opposite crags; they trickled down leisurely to a ribbon-shaped granite ledge and a sparkling little brook fringed by bush and willow.
"Lonely country," suggested Gamble, who was a recent arrival from some old, teeming Pennsylvania mining town.
"Aha! Lonely. And safe," replied Tom, lighting his cigarette and sending a thick plume of smoke straight up into the still air. "No trouble here in the hills. I used to swear by the range. Still do. But I guess old Truex is right. The hills are all right, too. There is no meanness here, no cheating, no swindling, no …" And then, looking intently through puckered eyes, "say, if there isn't somebody coming! Down yonder! Along the old road!" and, following Tom's outstretched finger, Gamble saw a tiny, brown spot moving along rapidly between the rock ridges.
"Can't see his face," went on Tom, who had fetched a pair of field-glasses from the cabin, "but traveling in considerable style, whoever he is."
Gamble took the glasses.
"You bet," he replied; "some style!"
For the tiny, brown spot was a low buckboard driven by one man, side by side with another, and was filled to overflowing with pieces of luggage—two Gladstone bags, a plaid roll, a canvas roll, a linen-covered trunk, three guns in pigskin cases, a large creel and fishing rod and a camera.
"Where do you think they are going?" asked Tom.
"Must be coming here. The road leads to Goat Peak. That's the end of it, and there's a pretty smooth ascent from there up to this cabin."
"I guess so. Wonder who it is, though," replied Tom and, half an hour later, while Gamble had walked over to the Yankee Doodle Glory, his wonder grew into surprise and his surprise into dull, unreasoning anger.
For, around an out jutting, frayed rock that marked the end of the Goat Peak Trail, followed by a lanky, perspiring Palouse farmer youth, laden with most of the pieces of luggage that had crowded the buckboard, came Baron Horst von Götz-Wrede, smiling, debonair, superbly sure of himself, with hand outstretched.
"I have heard so much about your free and open Western hospitality that I decided to have a try at it," he laughed. "Here I am! My word!" he continued in his curiously British accents, "you don't seem a bit glad to see me. Have I broken in on the hermit's meditations about peace and the pure life?"
Tom stiffened. Then, very quickly, he stepped forward and shook the offered hand. For, after all, the man of the Far West is very much akin to the desert Arab in his peculiarly rigid code of honor, his peculiarly sweeping code of hospitality; hospitality even to the blood enemy who touches his tent ropes.
"Glad to see you." He tried to give to the words a ring of that welcome which, deep in his heart, he knew to be missing. Then, pointing at the guns and the fishing rod, "Come here for sport? Not much game here, I am afraid, and the trout are as shy as butterflies."
The Prussian officer had paid off the young farmer and sent him on his way. He turned to Tom with a smile of utter, winning sincerity.
"Mr. Graves," he said, "I have been told by men who know that you Westerners are jolly good poker players, pretty hard to bluff, and so I shall put my cards on the table, face up. Of course I am awfully fond of sport and I'd be glad to pot one of your big horns. But my real reason in coming here was to have a look at that famous mine of yours, the Yankee Doodle Glory. I have heard a lot about it, and I am frightfully curious by nature."
Tom was frankly astonished. He knew that the sensation of the ore strike in his mine was no longer a matter of absorbing interest to any one, and so he said: "Why, that's ancient history."
"Perhaps to you, the Americans. But not to …" The Baron checked himself quickly. He bit his lips as if trying to cut off the word he had been about to pronounce. He seemed strangely flustered for a moment, and his English, usually so carefully modulated, so ultra-British in every delicate shade of inflection, suddenly took on a thick, rasping, guttural tang.
"You see," he stammered, "the papers say a good deal about it, and …"
Tom Graves took pity on the other's evident embarrassment. He had no idea why the man should be ill at ease, and he dismissed the fact of it as some mad, inexplicable, foreign idiosyncrasy.
"Sure," he said, "that unknown metal. I get you," and he did not notice that the German, at the words, had turned slightly pale and was studying him intently from beneath his lowered eyelids.
"Well," Tom went on, "have a bit of breakfast, and then I'll take you round to the diggings and you can gopher about there to your heart's content."
He said it laughingly. For all at once it had struck him that he had every reason in the world to be glad of the other's presence here in the Hoodoos. As long as he was here, he was away from Bertha Wedekind, and that was a point gained. And so, his native hospitality fired by his love, his jealousy, his self-interest, Tom set about preparing breakfast. He heated up the coffee, threw half-a-dozen slices of fat pork sizzling into the skillet, and mixed the proper ingredients for that Western culinary marvel prosaically called flapjacks.
"Here you are," he said, when everything was finished and, passing to his guest the frying-pan filled with pork, "have some mountain veal! And say—" laughing, jovial, now thoroughly at his ease, "don't dirty any more plates than you have to. Gamble and I are taking turn and turn about, and this is my day to cook and wash up and get messy generally. Fall too, stranger!"
Breakfast finished, he took Baron von Götz-Wrede to the mine tunnel and into the hands of Gamble while he returned to the cabin, sat himself upon a stone, and smoked, doing nothing successfully and blissfully.
Late that night, after dinner, with their guest in the back room hunting in his Gladstone bag for cigars, Gamble turned to Tom Graves with a sudden, hurried whisper.
"Did you say that fellow's an officer in the German cavalry?"
"Sure. Why?"
"Well, he knows as much and more about mining engineering than I do and, believe me, I am no slouch at the game. He …"
"Shut up!" whispered Tom.
But it was too late. The Baron had come into the front room. He must have overheard the last sentence, at least caught the sense and drift of it, for he laughed, very much like a schoolboy surprised in a naughty prank.
"I do know mines, don't I, Mr. Gamble?" he asked. "Well, I am not ashamed of it. You see, we Prussian army chaps, while we like our career, of course get tired of drill, drill, drill all the time. We get bored to death with saber and lance and martingale. We have to have relaxation of some sort, you know, and I have always taken a great deal of interest in what's going on in the bowels of the earth."
"You're certainly some little expert," commented Gamble admiringly, and the Baron inclined his head.
"German efficiency," he replied, and it was difficult to tell if he was poking fun at himself or at the others.
Gamble went to bed early leaving Tom and his guest in front of the blazing, crackling log fire. Tom was sleepy and happy. He was about to doze off when the German's words startled him into immediate and full wakefulness:
"How much will you take for the Yankee Doodle Glory?"
The American looked up sharply. "You want to buy?"
"Yes. Outright. For cash. Name your figure, Mr. Graves."
The latter did not like the other's abrupt, dragooning manner, and—he was a good poker player. He folded his hands behind his head, kicked out his feet towards the full warmth of the fire, and yawned elaborately.
"I don't know as I want to sell," he said finally, with utter carelessness. "I guess I'm sort of stuck on these old Hoodoos. No. I don't know as I want to sell powerfully bad."
"Five hundred thousand?" asked the Baron, taking out check book and fountain pen.
Tom grinned mischievously. "Oh, you carry your munition along, do you? Well, it's no go. I don't want to sell. At least I don't know that I do … yet!"
"When will you know?"
"Perhaps next week. Perhaps never."
The Baron gave a short, impatient laugh. "I thought you Americans were such quick, sharp businessmen."
"I'm not a businessman. I'm an ex-cowpuncher, and I've all the time in the world. Let's turn in."
"Verdammt noch 'mal!" The Baron lapsed into hectic, vituperative German. But he controlled him self. "I make that offer six hundred thousand," he continued.
Tom Graves rose.
"Quit tilting the jackpot," he advised. "I'm not playing;" and that was all the answer the other could get out of him though that night. All the following week he returned to the attack, periodically raising his bid until he had reached an even million, and even Tom kicked himself for a stubborn fool. "But," as he explained it afterwards, "I never sell when the other fellow is too damned anxious to buy. It may be punk business, but it's me!"
At the end of the week Tom decided to return to Spokane.
"You can stay here. Gamble'll take good care of you," he told the Baron.
But the German said he would come along to town, and all the way to Spokane he repeated his offer for the Yankee Doodle Glory, raising his bid time and again, and finally driving Tom into an access of American abruptness.
"Stow that nagging. You aren't my wife, nor my mother-in-law, and you aren't even my side-kick. I don't want to sell, and hell, brimstone, and damnation can't budge me when I've made up my mind, see?"
Von Götz-Wrede choked down an angry word. Then he was again his old, suave self.
"Well, never mind. I shall ask you just once more …"
"Look here! I told you I …"
"Just once more … before I leave Spokane. You see, I shall leave here to-morrow night."
"Oh, you're off?"
"Yes, my leave is over. Back to the regiment, and the drill."
Tom smiled. He thought of Bertha. Here was one rival at least eliminated for good. So he essayed a mild, white lie. "I'm mighty sorry to see you go."
"And I am sorry to leave. I've had a ripping time. Thanks for your hospitality, and if ever you come to Germany …"
"Me—to Germany?" Tom Graves laughed out loud at the idea. "Say—I don't …"
"You never know what may happen. Anyway, if ever you happen to be in Berlin, look me up." He was again the soul of sincerity. "We like men like you over there. Strong men, big, powerful, daring, upstanding; and there's one or two things you could teach us …"
"Nothing except riding a little pony," smiled Tom.
"Exactly. And that's a lot. You see, I am in the cavalry, call myself a good horseman, have ridden for my regiment at Olympia, in London. But compared to you … My word!"
And the young Westerner, touched in his weak spot, decided that the man was not so bad after all and thought to himself that perhaps he would let him have the Yankee Doodle Glory. There was really no sense in not selling.
But, since he considered Martin Wedekind his mentor in all things financial, he ran out to the house in Lincoln Addition that evening and put the case before his friend, in all its details, including the Baron's extraordinary knowledge of mines and mining.
"Shall I sell?" he asked.
Wedekind shook his head. "No. Don't sell to …"
"To the Baron?"
"To any German! To anybody unless you know exactly who and what he is. No, no! Don't you ask me to give you any reasons. Just do what I tell you, will you?"
"Sure!"
And so, the next day, when Herr von Götz-Wrede called on him for his final decision he was met by such a staunch, hard "No! I won't sell, and that's flat!" that the German gave up.
"All right, Mr. Graves," he said, waving a careless hand. "All right. Only, please keep it to yourself. Don't speak about that offer I made you. People would think me slightly—oh—touched."
"But why do you …?"
"I am a rich man, I have hobbies, and I like to gratify them. That's all. By the way," shaking hands again, "do come over to Germany and look me up."
"No. I don't want to travel."
"Don't be so provincial. Come on. You're a rich man, a man of leisure. Do come. Promise me that you'll come!"
"No!"
"I shan't take no for an answer." He lifted a threatening finger. "Honestly, unless you promise me, I am going to stay right here in Spokane, and nag you every day about selling the Yankee Doodle Glory!"
"All right, all right!" laughed Tom. "I promise!"
"You'll come this year?"
"Yes, yes, I promise anything you wish as long's you shut up about that mine!"
"Thanks. That's corking. Here's my address. 'No. 67, Xantener Strasse, Berlin, W.' I'll be mighty glad to see you over there!"
And there was such a charming, sincere smile on his lips and in his eyes that Tom decided all his former antipathy had been nothing but rank envy and jealousy; and so he grasped the German's hand and cried enthusiastically:
"You bet I'll come!"
CHAPTER IX
EASTWARD HO!
Tom Graves went abroad rather sooner than he had imagined he would at the time he had given his rash promise to Baron Horst von Götz-Wrede.
And it was Bertha Wedekind's fault.
About a week after the German's departure, thinking there was now a clear field and no favors, he decided to ask her once more to be his wife. She had been nice to him the last few days and, being in love and therefore self-centered, there was but one construction he could put on her shifting mood—she was beginning to like him better; rather, she was drifting back into that chummy, simple sympathy, not unmixed by tenderness, that had been between them the year before on the Killicott ranch, before she had had her head turned by the Prussian officers whom she had met at her uncle's house in Berlin.
It was on a Saturday night, and the Country Club was giving its weekly hop. More than one couple, tired of dancing, had sought the seclusion of the great, sweeping veranda that framed the Club building on all sides to catch the breeze that boomed down from far Hay den Lake, laden with the sweetness of wood flowers and the tang of wet pine.
"Let's go out. I want to talk to you," said Tom, and he was so masterful that Bertha took his arm and went without a word.
She sat down on a rocker, and he remained standing in front of her, looming up square and heavy and manly in the drifting moonlight.
"Bertha," he said in a low voice, "a few weeks ago when I was going to tell you that I love you, you did not let me finish. You told me that you …"
"I told you that I would not marry you, nor any other American." She was not looking at him, but studied her tiny, narrow foot, arching the instep.
"You will listen to me now," he went on. "You see, I love you. I am mad about you, just plumb mad. I—why, girl, there isn't a thing in the world I wouldn't do for you. Perhaps I am just a fool, just a silly, superstitious fool. But last year, back on the Killicott, when I looked at you, pretty and dainty and well-educated and the daughter of a rich man, when I looked at myself, just a poor horse wrangler with not a cent in my jeans, nothing but my sixty bucks or so to live on, I used to pray. Yes! I prayed to God to give me money!"
"Tom!"
"Wrong to pray for money, you think? Not a bit of it! For when I prayed for money, I prayed for what's best, what's most strong, most decent in me! My love for you! You see, I'm not altogether a sentimental jackass. I know that even the truest love in the world can't make a go of it on sixty bucks a month, that even the truest love in the world has got to eat and drink and—" smiling and leveling a shameless thumb at her dainty little dance frock of lavender tulle, girdled with a shimmering length of blue and silver brocade, "buy one of those things once in a while. Wait," as she started to rise, "I haven't finished yet. My words are—oh—sort of inadequate. If I had you out on the range now, with the wind in my face and a little pony between my knees, I guess I could speak to you. But here, with these duds on—" ruefully indicating his sober black and white dress suit, "well, I feel cramped and clumsy and very much like a darn fool. But, don't you see …" and, suddenly, the inner worth, the inner passion of the man, shone in his eyes. His words caught the glamor that shone from youth, from love, from courage, from revival of old hopes, raising of new banners, and soared up to something closely resembling a lyric pitch: "I worship you, dear! I adore you like—like a queen! I love you soul and heart and body! Why, girl, I hear your voice at night, and it haunts me in my dreams. I've smelt the open range in springtime when all the little unknown flowers peep up overnight and make the air sweet and soft—and you, your presence, leaves just such a fragrance behind!" He gave a short laugh. "Talk like a poet, don't I? But—you see, dear—I'm just mad about you, just plumb mad!"
"You must fight against it," said Bertha, with all the priggishness of youth.
"Why should I? Haven't I got a right to love you? Can I help that I love you?" and he went on, reckless of speech, until his passion had spent itself.
Bertha gave a little sigh.
"Tom," she said, "I am fond of you. I like you like a …"
"If you say that you like me like a brother I am going to do something reckless! I love you—nor do I love you like a sister. I love you with a real, honest flesh-and-blood love and …"
"Tom!" She looked up and saw the expression in his eyes. Instinctively she lowered her voice. "I am sorry, Tom, very, very sorry. But …" she made a little gesture.
He clenched his fists that the knuckles stretched white.
"It's no go, eh?" he asked. "It's because of that … that German Baron damn him …"
"You must not swear! I won't have it. You—you are rude and ill-bred and …"
"All right, all right!" Tom's temper was fast getting the better of him. "I understand all right. Your head has been turned by those what does your father call them?—those brass-souled, saber-rattling coyotes …"
"Father doesn't know!"
"You bet your life he does! He knew them in his youth. He hasn't got a bit of use for those bragging, swaggering, square-head Dutch officers …"
She rose, fire in her eyes.
"You are insulting me," she cried. "I am a German myself!"
"Don't you believe it! You're a plain, every-day, field-and-garden American just like me, just like your Dad—and that's one of the many reasons why I'm so crazy about you."
"You—you are …" The girl was near to crying. "I hate you, hate you!"
"All right. I guess you've made up your mind to marry one of those jackanapes with their pink-and-green monkey jackets, the lightning conductor spikes on their helmets, their haw-haw manners and the bits of window glass stuck in their eyes. You …" quite suddenly he recollected himself. He bent his head, like a man submitting to the judgment of Fate. "I beg your pardon, Bertha. I lost my temper. God … I love you so …"
"I don't want to see you again … Never!"
"You won't!"
And he was off at a half run. He grabbed coat and hat, jumped into a taxicab, and drove home.
There he took down the telephone receiver, called for Pacific 6589, and startled Johnny Wall, the jolly, plump little Canadian who directed the local fortunes of the Atlantic steamship lines, out of a sound and dreamless sleep.
"Get me a passage, Johnny! Immediately!
"What are you talking about? Are you drunk?"
"I am not. I am mad!"
"You sound like it …" Wall was about to slam down the receiver, when Tom begged him frantically to wait.
"I'm not mad the way you mean. I am quite sober and quite sane."
"Well—what do you want?"
"I want to go to Europe!"
"When?"
"Immediately. Get me a ticket or whatever you call the fool things. And, Johnny, not a word to anybody. I am making a sneak!"
"All right, Tom. I'll fix you up. Come to my office in the morning."
And so, the next afternoon, after a visit to the Old National Bank where he arranged with Donald McLeod, the black-haired Scotch cashier, for transmission of funds, he took train for New York. He did not even say good-by to Martin Wedekind for fear of running into Bertha.
But Wedekind found out about Tom's departure just the same, for Johnny Wall blabbed, and when Tom Graves, who had four days in New York before his steamer sailed, called at the steamship office for his berth, he found there a special delivery letter from Wedekind, wishing him luck on the journey, and enclosing some lines of introduction to his brother, Heinrich, in Berlin.
"I haven't seen Heinrich for years, in fact not since I was a young lad," added Martin Wedekind. "I did not like him then; he was the regular Prussian incarnation of beef and brawn and damn your neighbors' feelings and your neighbors' pet corns. I don't think that thirty-odd years in the army have improved him any. But he is a colonel of cavalry, and since you are going to Europe, you might as well see all the phases of life there. God bless you, my boy!"
Tom boarded the North German Lloyd liner Augsburg at noon, on Saturday.
An hour or two later, the steward handed him a telegram from Spokane.
It read:
"Don't sell the Yankee Doodle Glory.
"(Signed) Wedekind."
CHAPTER X
THE MEETING
"Mister Graves!"
The voice was a woman's, low, musical, and irate; and Tom turned quickly.
It was the afternoon of the first day out. For the first time in his life Tom was away from his native, Northwestern heath and confronted by a scene that was not framed by lanky pine and frayed, ribbed rock, by rolling sage land and green-thundering waterfall, studded with little towns set flat, like jewels, into the surrounding plains and straddling in an arrogant, devil-may-care manner in all the cardinal points of the compass, as if to advertise to newcomers fresh from the East that, if they would but wait a year or two, the town would fill up and grow to the next range, and even beyond.
For the first time in his life Tom felt the lap and surge of salt water beneath his feet and so he had been leaning over the top deck rail looking over the great Atlantic that chopped towards the crooked, peaked sky line with an immense roll; and, the ship giving a ruffianly lurch at the same moment, he nearly lost his balance and fell on the plank deck when he recognized the speaker's face.
"Well! Bertha! I'll be eternally razzle-dazzled!"
He held out a big, honest hand to Miss Wedekind, who stood there, dressed in short plaid skirt, low-heeled brown shoes, tweed hat, and a silk blazer of gold and black stripes.
She waved the proffered hand aside. Her violet eyes eddied up with a slow flame of anger.
"I don't want to shake hands with you!" she said.
"Eh?" Tom Graves did not believe his ears. "Aren't you glad to see a face from home? Why, say, I am plumb tickled to see you. I …"
The girl stamped her foot.
"I am—oh—angry!" she cried. "Frightfully angry! What do you mean by persecuting me, by following me when you know you are not wanted?"
"Me—persecute—you?" stammered Tom. "Me—follow—you?"
"Exactly! Don't play the stupid! I took the first train for New York, the first steamship out of New York, as soon as Uncle Heinrich cabled that his mother, my grandmother, was sick, near death, and wanted to see me once more. And here you … Have you no shame, no decency?"
"Say, Bertha," stammered Tom. "Honest to God, I don't know anything of what you're saying. I guess I left Spokane a few days before you did. Why, I spent half a week in New York, just fretting and fuming to get away. Didn't your father tell you?"
"He did not! And I don't believe you! No, I do not! You are insufferable. Can't you take no for an answer? Do you think, do you imagine for a moment, that you can win me by such silly, ill-bred, rude persecution? Do you think you can bully me into marrying you? Haven't you got any more manhood than that?"
"Look here, Bertha …"
"You heard what I said, Tom Graves. And if you dare say a word to me on board this ship, if you as much as smile at me, I am going to complain to the captain. There!" and she swept off while he looked after her, cap in hand, scratching his red hair, amazement and grief and hurt pride in his honest features, finally relieving his injured feelings by a tremendous:
"Well, I'll be …"
"I say! Don't speak out your thoughts so freely, my dear sir!" Another voice came to his ear, a man's voice this time and frankly, aggressively British. "Never say you'll be damned or anything as rash as that before you've tried some of that ripping medicine against it they sell down across the saloon bar, what?"
Tom looked up.
The speaker was a young man about his own age, his own height, though a little broader. His hair (he wore his cap in his hand) was honey-colored and neatly parted down the center; his sack suit was tightly tailored and of an extravagant, hairy, green Harris tweed; his heavy brogues were topped by brown cloth spats; and his face, round, rosy, blue-eyed, open, was ornamented by a tiny mustache and an immense, gold-rimmed monocle.
The final seal to this typical specimen of traveling Briton was given by a short briar pipe clamped be tween his teeth; and when Tom Graves looked at him, dazed, rather overcome, the Englishman continued:
"My name's Vyvyan, if you want to stand upon ceremonies," giving him his card.
Tom took it and read thereon:
"Lord Herbert Vyvyan
Bury St-Edmonds."
"Mr.—Bury St-Edmonds?" stammered Tom.
"Gad, no! That's my address, home in England. Vyvyan—that's my name!"
"Oh—mine's Graves—Tom Graves!"
Now, for the excuse of the young Westerner, be it said that all his life, though he had met plenty of Englishmen, in the Inland Empire, he had been familiar only with the two types who abound there: the English worker, and the English wastrel.
The former are the men, men of all classes, who come either direct to the Northwest or via Canada and who, in spite of the fact that they are less ready to take out their citizenship papers than the Continental Europeans, mix with the native life, business and social, as oil mixes with oil, thus accounting for the fact, never yet sufficiently dwelt upon, that though in the United States there are German-Americans, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and what-not, there is no organized, or unorganized, English-American party, or vote, or even consciousness. The English man, he of the worker type, blends with the civic and national life, and his son is altogether an American.
Tom had also met and drunk with and ridden with his share of the second type of English, the wastrels, mostly remittance men who had left their country for their country's good and who received a quarterly stipend from home as long as they remained abroad. There was a vague rumor that some of them were the sons of noblemen, earls and viscounts and so forth, all called "dooks" for short by the gentry of the range, and they were not bad fellows. At least they were plucky.
But this man, Vyvyan, was decidedly not an English worker, and just as decidedly not an English wastrel—and: he was a lord; and Tom, out of the ingenuousness of his heart, blurted out a great, loud, tactless:
"Say, for the love of Mike, are you really a lord—honest to God?"
"Right-oh!" came the cheerful reply.
"One of those guys who wear silly little crowns and a whole lot of purple velvet and white fur?" pursued Tom, remembering what he had learned in the movie theaters of Spokane.
"Right-oh again!" Then, seeing that Tom was studying him intensely: "I say, what's the matter?"
"Oh, nothing!" Tom scratched his head. "But I always thought—have always been given to understand that all lords are … Oh …"
"Silly, damned jackasses? Right-oh, the third time! I am one. You have no idea what a silly ass I am—and wait till you meet my first brother, the Duke! Gad! And now, s'pose we go down and see what the maritime Ganymede has to offer in the line of mixed drinks."
Half an hour later, sampling the third of a series of cocktails, "there are three things I admired most tremendously in America," Vyvyan confided: "Your way of preparing oysters, your way of mixing drinks, and the way your women clothe their jolly little tootsies." Tom Graves had already formed a sincere liking for the young Englishman, and it was evident that the latter returned the feeling.
For, with frank and talkative naïvete, he had told the American all about himself.
"I'm in disgrace," he said; "that's why I am tryin' to perk up a bit alcoholically."
"In disgrace?"
"Right. You see, I am a diplomatist."
"You—a diplomatist?" Tom laughed at the thought.
"Can't blame you for laughing," sighed Vyvyan. "I am rather rotten at the game. Was 'steenth secretary at the Washington Embassy and just got the jolly old boot for most frightful incompetency."
"What are you going to do next?"
"Go home and devil my brother's soul. He's the Duke, y'know, and has lots of what you Americans call pull. I s'pose he'll get me some secretaryship in one of those interesting and unwashed Balkan principalities, but he'll have to wait a while until this Washington mess blows over. He won't like it a bit. You see, I'm not over-flush with the ready; rather stony, in fact, and my brother is as stingy as anything. Never mind, old dear, have one more of the liquid?"
"No, thanks. I've had a nose full."
"Right. Let's go down and eat. Ship's filled with Germans and Austrians and all that sort, eatin' peas with steel knives and inhalin' soup through their jolly old ears, so we two might as well sit together and show 'em a solid Anglo-Saxon front, what? Let's go feed!"
That day and the following saw Tom Graves and Lord Vyvyan continuously together. Occasionally the former saw Bertha Wedekind, usually accompanied by a couple of tall, lean Germans who, the Englishman said, belonged to the German Embassy in Washington. Tom was jealous, but he had to grin and bear it. He knew how stubborn the girl was and that she would doubtless live up to her threat and complain to the captain if he tried to address her.
He spoke to but few of the other passengers. He was garrulous and sociable by nature. Too, he had always liked the Germans whom he had known in the Northwest, chiefly Martin Wedekind, though, when thinking of the latter, he never thought of him as anything but a straight American. But he found it impossible to get on with those aboard the Augsburg.
They were mostly German-Americans from New York, Missouri, and the Middle West, bound on a visit to the Fatherland, and while the majority of them wore tiny American flags in their buttonholes and several had broken into hectic dithyrambs as the ship passed the Statue of Liberty, they became less American and more German with every league the steamer throbbed across the Atlantic.
The first day out, a short, gray-haired, dyspeptic butcher from Cincinnati said with a sigh of satisfaction:
"Na, Gott sei Dank, noch 'ne Woche und dann sind wir, wo es nicht jeder Lausekerl für seine Pflicht und Schuldigkeit hält seinen Nachbarn ordentlich zu bemogeln!"—a nasty reflection on American business morals, which was passed over with a smile as an exuberance of homesickness, an exuberance, too, of Teutonic humor.
Gradually, one by one, the American flags disappeared from buttonholes to be replaced in isolated cases by the black-and-white of Prussia and the black-white-red of the German Empire.
Three days out, a stodgy, immense, keen-eyed St. Louis brewer, with diamonds in his cuff links, his shirt, and his necktie (diamonds, as Tom said to himself, earned and paid for in America) complained to the third officer that the library in the reading-room contained "noddings but Yankee drash. Vy don't you haf some goot Cherman liderachoor instead of all dat Yankee blödsinn? Somedings like de Gartenlaube, or de Jugend, or Simplicissimus? You oughta haf been ashamed mit yourself calling dis one Cherman shib, nicht wahr?"
Thus it grew. Thus they showed with what solemnity they regarded the oath they had sworn at the time when they had taken out final citizenship papers; and on the fourth day out matters came to a head—"a jolly bloody head"—as Lord Vyvyan commented.
For Tom Graves got into an argument with a pale, pimply-faced New York bank clerk by the name of Franz Neumann.
The latter addressed Tom in German. Tom grinned, and said that he had only bought himself a German grammar two days before the Augsburg had left port, that he was working hard, but had not as yet mastered more than about fifteen words. Whereupon the clerk replied, talking raspingly through his nose, that "Bei Gott! it was an infernal arrogance! What did he mean by sailing on a German ship and expecting the Germans to talk English to him? He was a damned so-and-so, also thus-and-thus American this-and-that…"
An argument wound up by Tom's fist descending in a cruel and thumping curve on Herr Neumann's nose; by a running together of stewards and passengers; a raising of voices and avenging Teutonic fists; a blowzy Milwaukee ex-cook crying: "Ach! Dieser brutale Amerikaner! Schmeisst den Kerl ins Wasser!" and, finally, Lord Vyvyan coming to the rescue, leveling a few telling blows at the St. Louis brewer who had made a rear-guard attack against the Westerner, and leading the latter away with soothing words and gestures:
"I say, have a drink, old top. Now … No, you won't," as Tom, hearing the jeers of clerk and ex-cook and brewer, turned, eyes puckered, jaw set, fists going like flails, "don't get excited. Odds are against you. Can't lick 'em all together. Lick 'em one by one, presently. Meanwhile, have a drink. Have two drinks. Wow … Steady she goes!"
Tom fell, panting, into a chair in the smoking saloon.
"Hell!" he said. "I'm sorry that I ever gave that fool promise to that German Baron!"
"What German Baron?"
"Von Götz-Wrede!"
"What promise?" the Englishman inquired after a while, rather casually, looking into the amber depths of his whisky-and-soda; and Tom told him.
Carried away, he told him everything that had happened since his partner, Truex, had sent him the telegram with the cheering news that he had struck it rich in the Yankee Doodle Glory. He mentioned the unknown metal, the offer by cable of Johannes Hirschfeld & Co., in Berlin, the Baron's arrival in Spokane, the second offer raised to a million cash, Martin Wedekind's warning, and his promise to visit Berlin.
"I s'pose you are on your way there now?" asked Lord Vyvyan.
"Yes. I'm going to get through with it. I want to get back home just as soon as I can …"
"You'd better," said the Englishman, in a low voice, half to himself; and Tom looked up sharply.
The Englishman was staring straight ahead. His eyes, usually so round and innocent and ingenuous, were keen, with a hard, curling glitter, like sun rays on forged steel. His lips were compressed into a thin line. The whole man seemed different, changed.
The next moment, noticing that Tom was looking at him, he was his old self again. He screwed in his monocle. Something like a mask of silliness descended upon his face.
"I say, old dear," he drawled, "let's have another snifter, what?"
CHAPTER XI
THE WIRELESS
Holding on to one of the life-boats just the other side of the wireless operator's hut on top deck, braced against the pitch and roll with straddled feet and standing aslant when the gathering wind came in fits and starts, Tom Graves looked out into the west, where the sun had died in a flat disc of unhealthy, decayed brown to give way to a dense bank of olive-tinted cloud that rushed down with the speed of a stage drop, lay motionless upon the sea that was like dirty oil, suddenly changing into a slow, immense roll that sent the ship down a slope and up again.
A moment later, with savage rapidity, the full force of the hurricane struck the Augsburg, and she pitched crazily to leeward, taking a drunken lurch into the inky void, straightening again, again tripping like a bulky matron on a waxed dancing-floor, then riding up with a certain measure of heavy, challenging grace. The song of the whipped, tortured air came with a gigantic roar and sob, and Tom, landsman from the rim of his stetson to the curve of his knees where they had gripped saddle leather, decided that discretion was the better part of valor and that the smoking saloon held warmth and comfort.
He turned to go.
Passing the wireless hut, the wind struck him in the small of his back and he tumbled against the door. It was thus, quite by chance, that he overheard a scrap of conversation which later on caused him to wonder and speculate.
Inside the hut the ship's doctor, a young American, was talking to the wireless operator.
"Sorry," said the latter. "I know you are anxious to send wireless waves to your best girl in New York. But the thing's out of order."
"Out of order?"
"Yes. Has been for two days, and we won't be able to fix it till we make Bremen. Makes no difference though. She's a sound old tub."
"Sure …"
Just a scrap of talk, temporarily forgotten, yet stored away in some back cell of Tom's brain, and remembered an hour or two later when, as he was washing in his cabin, Lord Vyvyan knocked at the door, came in, sat himself on the edge of the narrow bed, and begged the American to shake hands with him.
"Sure," said Tom, complying. "What for?"
"To wish me luck. Regular, jolly, sizzling whirlwind of luck, old cock!"
"What's happened?" laughed the Westerner. "Sat in a poker game with that St. Louis brewer and held a royal against his four o' the kind and copped his wad?"
"Rather not. Much bigger. Guess again."
"Fell in love?"
"My word, no! Can't afford to. I'm stony, you know. But"—he rubbed his hands—"my brother, the Duke, you know, did a damned rapid bit of wire pulling. In again, out again! Chevied out of the Washington embassy about a week ago for frightful incompetence—and …"
"What? Can your mysterious dope!"
"Chevied into a fat attachéship—where, d'you imagine?"
"Paris."
"No. Berlin. Corkin'—what? Same bully old place you're bound for. Just got my appointment by wireless."
Tom looked up sharply.
"Did you say—by wireless?"
"Right-oh. The Duke is a terribly modern sort of chap. Takes to all these jolly new inventions like a fish to water."
"Seems so," rejoined Tom dryly.
He remembered the scrap of conversation he had overheard on top deck: "Wireless out of order. Has been for two days." There was no doubt that Vyvyan was lying. But he decided to keep the knowledge to himself. He had an idea that the diplomatic game was the same as poker, and bluff, another word for lying, is permissible, even virtuous, if you have sweetened the pot to the tail end of your roll and have hopes of filling an inside straight. And … He cut off his thoughts, and stretched out a hearty hand.
"Tickled to death, old man," he said.
"So am I. Let's have a drink. By the way, are you going straight from Bremen to Berlin?"
"Yes."
"Fine. We'll travel down together. I have to report to the Embassy immediately. Frightful bore, though."
Twenty-four hours later, Bremerhaven came out of the low, coiling shore fog in a neat checker-board pattern of white and gray and bister brown, punctured here and thereby the spires of square churches, the solid bulk of some braggart warehouse, the rigging and funnels and smoke-stacks of ships that rode breast-high above the stone quays. It came stolidly, massively, German to the core, striking Tom's ears with the cumulated sound waves of hundreds of lips speaking a strange, guttural language that made him feel homesick, and caused him to hold close to Lord Vyvyan as to an anchor in a storm.
The farewells of passengers. An exchange of cards and of promises, soon forgotten, to write, to call, to keep in touch with one another.
Then the short ride to Bremen itself, through a wedge-shaped stretch of rolling fields with plump Holstein cattle that looked ridiculously small and ridiculously tame to Tom's range sense, and through a sweep of box-like suburban houses, each framed by a bit of lawn that was almost English in its moist, pristine greenness.
Bremen at mid-day. Bremen—clean-cut, hard, preoccupied, blending the tortured Gothic of ancient Hanseatic buildings with the pinchbeck, stuccoed efficiency of modern Germany.
"Haben Sie was zu deklariren?" a customs inspector, in blue with narrow gold braid, truculently mustached and bearded, asked of Tom.
Tom became flustered. The little German he had learned flew away like rubbish in a wind, and he looked appealingly at Vyvyan.
The latter laughed.
"Right!" he said. "I'll be dragoman," and he addressed the official in fluent German for which afterwards he apologized, really apologized, rather shamefacedly.
"You see, old fellow," he said, "when I was a little nipper they deviled my young soul with governesses and Fräuleins and tutors and what-not. Taught me German …"
"And French?"
"Rather!"
"And a few more assorted lingoes?" suggested Tom dryly.
Vyvyan looked up quickly. But Tom was a poker player. There was no twinkle in his eyes, only an honest question, and the Englishman said that "Yes!" He had quite a few languages at his command.
"But keep it under your hat," he added. "I, well, you wouldn't understand, being an American. But we Englishmen, Englishmen like me, y know … have the devil's own horror of being thought clever or gifted. Not that I am clever," he wound up hurriedly.
"Oh, no!" Tom's accents were ingenuous and sincere.
"But I do speak languages. Can't help it. They crammed me no end. Frightfully sorry and all that. And now—" turning to a taxicab driver dressed in brown, red-faced and with a nose that beaked away from the plump, shiny cheeks at a tremendously exaggerated angle, "Nach dem Bahnhof! Rasch! The next train for Berlin leaves in a few minutes," he explained to Tom, "unless you want to stay over in Bremen for a day or two?"
"No. I don't."
Tom shook his head and his eyes followed Bertha's lithe figure, dressed in a becoming greenish tweed, a tiny toque pressed deep over her silken tresses. She was accompanied by a tall, elderly man in the uniform of the Uhlans of the Guard, in tightly fitting regimentals of dark blue, a double stripe of crimson running down the trousers and disappearing in the high, lacquered riding-boots, crimson collar and plastron, epaulettes of heavy twisted gold braid, and the uhlanka, the helmet with its Polish top-piece that made it look like a glorified mortarboard, tilted slightly over the right eye. The saber, carried on a long chain, clanked belligerently against the ground.
He turned when he heard Tom's unmistakable American voice, and Tom saw a full, round, high-colored face, not unhandsome with its well-shaped lips brushed by a small, iron-gray mustache, its long, straight nose, and small ears set close against the head.
The officer bent from his great height and spoke to Bertha. Tom saw her shake her head, as if angrily, turn, look at him, then whisper a quick word to the German.
The latter gave a short laugh, patted her on the shoulder, and walked up to Tom with outstretched hand.
"You are Mr. Graves?" he asked in English.
"Yes … Sure …"
"Charmed! Charmed!" The other saluted. "I am Colonel Wedekind—Colonel Heinrich Wedekind. Martin's brother!"
CHAPTER XII
COLONEL WEDEKIND
Tom was flustered.
He did not know what to say or how to behave with Bertha a few feet away looking on very disdainfully and very impatiently, evidently intent on not recognizing him.
He turned for moral support to Lord Vyvyan who had slipped away. He saw his broad-shouldered form disappear in the taxicab, the roof of which was piled high with an assortment of extremely British-looking luggage: from golf sticks to plaid roll, from pigskin Gladstone bag to a bundle of canes and umbrellas.
Tom's first idea was that Martin Wedekind must have cabled to his brother in Berlin. He could not have written, since Tom had taken the first steamer out of New York, and so there would not have been margin enough for a letter to go by the same ship, reach the German capital, and give the Colonel time to get to Bremen. Perhaps Martin Wedekind had included the news of his coming in the wire advising that of his daughter.
Tom was surprised at the thought. But he was even more surprised when the Uhlan's next words showed him that no such cable had been sent or received.
"Captain von Götz-Wrede told me you were coming, Mr. Graves."
"But … I didn't tell him when I was coming."
The Colonel laughed.
"My dear sir," he said, "you didn't have to. The famous owner of the no less famous Yankee Doodle Glory coming to Germany! Why, sir, the names on the passenger list have been cabled over here and your intended visit has been duly heralded in certain sections of our press. Charmed, my dear sir, charmed!"
And when the young Westerner, in want of something better to say, mentioned that Martin Wedekind in Spokane had given him a letter of introduction to his brother, searched in his pocketbook, found the note, and handed it to the German, the latter read it, ejaculated once more his favorite slogan of: "Charmed, my dear sir, charmed!" and linked his arm familiarly through that of Tom's.
"I have a compartment reserved for myself and my niece. Please do me the honor of sharing it."
Again Tom was not sure what to say. Lord Vyvyan had driven off. He was in a foreign land, for the first time in his life, and everything seemed topsy-turvy to him. Even as simple an action as calling a porter assumed the shape of an immense and embarrassing predicament. He would have liked to accept the Colonel's kindly offer.
On the other hand, there was Bertha, looking through him with stony eyes.
What excuse could he give?
He only knew that he could not tell the officer about the tiff he and the girl had had on shipboard. So he took a deep breath like a man about to risk a cold plunge, accompanied the other like a lamb led to the slaughter and positively quailed when Bertha acknowledged his greetings with an icy word.
A short drive through the Bremen streets brought them to the depot, where the Colonel excused him self for a few minutes to see about some telegraphic messages he had to send off.
Tom was alone with Bertha. He looked at her, and she looked at him. Both were silent, until Tom could stand it no longer.
And he spoke:
"Say, Bertha!"
"Yes, Mr. Graves?" haughtily.
He was going to go back to the old subject which had caused the misunderstanding on shipboard, to explain, but when he opened his mouth, the first words which came were:
"Say, I'm just crazy about you! Just plumb crazy!"
The words were spoken. More came. He could not restrain them. So he gave up the attempt and surrendered himself to his passion, poured out in a riotous torrent of speech, flavored with the deep, decent, clean love that was his, flavored, too, with the tang of the range … and it sounded strange here, amidst the brassy, pompous, unpersonal efficiency of the German railway depot, with the head station master, in a military uniform, bullying the sergeant of police, girded and armed like a warrior about to step forth to savage combat, the sergeant bullying the policemen, the latter transferring the compliment to the public, who continued it on to the railway porters, the latter passing the disciplinary buck to the cab drivers who, seeing nobody whom they could bully in safety, took it out of their horses' hides.
Amidst the roar and riot of it Tom's words seemed homely, simple. They seemed out of place and tinged with a certain nostalgic melancholia, and it was perhaps that which went to the young girl's heart and caused her to droop her eyelids.
"Why, Tom," she said, faltering a little, "you must not …"
"Mustn't I? You just bet I must! How do you know what's going on in my heart, Bertha? Say—at times my love fairly, oh, chokes me, and …" He collected himself. He had spoken with a louder voice than he had intended, and some of the Augsburg's passengers had stopped and chattered, pointing and giggling, amongst themselves. "And there's something else I got to tell you," he went on in lower tones. "I had no idea you were going to Germany. I didn't mean to persecute you. Honest to God, I didn't! Won't you believe me please?"
She looked at him. She saw the honest purpose, the honest dignity, the honest truth in his eyes, and she inclined her head.
"Yes, Tom. I do believe you!"
"Bully!" was his simple comment as he squeezed her hand. "And say, won't you …"
The rest of his sentence was swallowed in the suck and rush of the incoming train and a moment later the Colonel returned, smiling, officious, over-polite, and bundled the two young Americans into a first-class compartment marked: "Reservirt."
The last Tom saw was Lord Vyvyan entering the next carriage. He turned as if to address him, but the Englishman winked rapidly and shook his head.
It was clear that he did not want the other to speak to him or recognize him just then.
But Tom did not mind.
For he sat next to Bertha, and with a little shy pressure of her soft hand she told him that she had forgiven him, woman like, for something he had not been guilty of.
CHAPTER XIII
BERLIN
Whatever prejudices Tom Graves may have had against Colonel Heinrich Wedekind disappeared during his first twenty-four hours in Berlin and he told himself that either the man must have changed to his advantage during the long years when Martin had not seen him, or that the latter must have been mistaken in his judgment of his brother's character.
For, if anything, Martin had warned Tom against Heinrich in the special delivery letter he had sent care of the steamship office in New York, and here was the Colonel the very image of friendliness and consideration.
True, the man was at times over-polite; with the sort of politeness, different from the spontaneous politeness of the American, which is the result of broad, national kindliness, from the French, which is a racial trait and a virtue bred by logic since it is such an effort to a Latin to be rude, from the English, which is careless and supremely sure of itself, from the Spanish, which is a marvelously delicate art … With the sort of politeness which seemed to have been scientifically and efficiently measured, probed, manufactured, chiseled, clouted, and cut into patterns, distributed by order of the Government, drilled, and trained in a mathematical fashion, together with the three R's. A rectangular, a self-conscious, a holier-than-thou politeness!
But that apart, the man did everything in his power to make Tom feel at home in a strange land.
For it was he who fell discreetly into a doze, in the railway carriage, when he noticed the young Westerner's naïvely clumsy attempts to speak to Bertha in an undertone. It was he who steered him through the throng and mazes of the Lehrter Bahnhof when the train arrived at the capital. It was he who insisted, when Tom wanted to go to a hotel recommended to him by the desk clerk of the New York hotel where he had put up, that he would be more comfortable in a little flat in the West end, on the Kurfürstendamm.
"Snug little four room affair," said the Colonel, "nicely furnished. Belongs to a friend of mine who left town for six months or so and wants to sublet it."
"But," smiled Tom, "I'm not going to stay long in Berlin."
"Na, na!" laughed the Colonel. "We're not going to let you get away from here for quite a while. Better take the flat. It's complete in every detail, and my friend has even left his English-speaking valet behind."
Finally Tom accepted, and an hour later saw him in stalled in a comfortable, compact apartment overlooking the broad, pretentious boulevard known as Kurfurstendamm, which runs in a shiny sweep from the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniss Church to Halensee a generation ago a thickly wooded pine forest, to-day the most swagger of swagger suburbs, a Berlin Westchester.
The rooms were all the Colonel had said, and so was the valet, a small, thin, clean-shaven man of about thirty with a perfect command of the English language, including even a working knowledge of American slang which he explained, rather apologized for, when Tom asked him, by bowing and saying that he had spent some time on the other side of the Atlantic as valet to an attaché of the German Embassy in Washington.
"Well, if that isn't bully!" exclaimed Tom. "Been to America, have you? Why, that makes me feel real home like. Here. Have a smoke," opening his cigarette case, "Mr …?"
"Krauss!" said the man, bowing again.
"Cut out the wavy motion. You'll injure your spine, Mr. Krauss."
"No, no—I beg your pardon—not Mister Krauss! Just Krauss!" And he added: "May I venture to suggest, sir, that valets are simply addressed by their family names in Germany and"—he coughed discreetly—"that a German gentleman does not offer his cigarettes to a servant?"
"Don't he? Well—this American gentleman does," laughed Tom, good-naturedly.
But when Krauss blushed, positively blushed, shaking his head in speechless embarrassment, Tom felt sorry for him.
"All right," he said. "Don't you worry. I'll smoke it for you. And now … What exactly are you supposed to be good for?"
"Anything, sir, anything!"
"Pretty large order that, Krauss!"
"Yes, sir. I served in some of the best houses in Berlin, sir."
"You have? All right. Let's try you. Know how to make flapjacks?"
Krauss opened his eyes wide. "Flap … Did you say—flap …?"
"Jacks! Sure. Flapjacks! No savvy? Cute little yellow cakes, all hot and sizzlin', and drowned in maple syrup? No? Well, I got to eat some or bust!"
"Ah, it is food?"
"Sure. What'd you think it is?"
The valet curdled his leathery features into a smile.
"I can make a little of the French cuisine," he suggested.
"Not on your life! I ate that on board ship. French cooking mixed up with German! Chicken broth with prunes! Sour herring with chocolate sauce! Little dimpled spring peas stuffed with garlic! No! Flapjacks is what I want, and flapjacks is what I'm going to get. Got flour in the kitchen, eggs, sugar, milk, baking powder, syrup?"
"Yes, sir."
"Fine and dandy. Lead the way. I'll make 'em myself!"
And to the German's evident horror, he took off coat, vest, and suspenders, rolled his shirt sleeves to the elbows, and invaded the shiny, immaculate kitchen, whistling Casey Jones at the top of his lungs.
"Don't look so all-fired flabbergasted!" consoled Tom. "I'm going to have a little party all by myself." Suddenly he laughed. "Wait. Got such a thing as a telephone in Berlin?"
"Yes, sir. Certainly, sir."
"Bully. Ring up Lord Vyvyan and tell him … No!" he shook his head. "I'm a darned fool. I forgot to ask him his address."
The valet bowed. "Lord Vyvyan is at the British Embassy."
"Sure. That's where he hangs out. But—" Tom looked up sharply—"how in hell do you know?"
The valet coughed. He blushed a little.
"A—a telegraphic report in the Berlin papers," he murmured, "advising his appointment …"
Tom grinned.
"More wireless cabling without wireless?" he laughed, amused at the other's discomfiture. "Say! Europe isn't asleep by a darned sight. She can sure teach us Americans some! Well—scoot! Put a poached egg in your shoe and beat it! Ring up Vyvyan and tell him to come round here. Tell him to bring along an appetite—and say—some whiskey. Rye, Bourbon, or, at the worst, Canadian Club, unless there's some in the kitchen."
Krauss hurried out while Tom busied himself with flour and milk and baking powder. He was very happy. Bertha had forgiven him. She had asked him to call, and through the open window the warm summer air brushed in, sweet with the scent of birch trees and linden blossoms, and a great crimson sun sinking slowly in the west.
"I beg your pardon, sir," came Krauss' voice from the threshold.
"Sure. What is it?"
"Just as I stepped to the telephone, the bell rang. It was Colonel Wedekind telephoning."
"Yes?"
"He begs you to come to his house for dinner to night. At seven o'clock sharp, sir."
"But I asked you to call up Lord Vyvyan!"
"I am sorry, sir. The Colonel wouldn't take no for an answer."
"Did you tell him I was going to ask Lord Vyvyan?"
"No, sir. I didn't have a chance. He wouldn't take no for an answer. Absolutely wouldn't. And he says you are going to meet an old friend at his house."
"An old friend? At his house? Well, I guess I'd better go. We'll leave the flapjacks and Vyvyan for to-morrow, Krauss."
The latter bowed. "Yes, sir. Very good, sir."
Tom Graves went to his bedroom, where Krauss had already opened the trunks and distributed their contents.
"Say, Krauss," went on Tom, "I guess they'll be all dressed in their best soup and gravy at the Colonel's, eh?"
"Yes, sir. There will be mostly officers, and they'll all be in full uniform, sir. May I"—he coughed—"may I suggest that you wear—ah, evening dress?"
Tom glared at him.
"Say!" said he. "I know what to wear all right, all right. You may have served in some of the best houses in Berlin, but believe me—I have danced in some of the best houses in Spokane. I know. Those little chocolate soldiers will all be in their best bib and tucker, pink and raspberry and sky blue and juicy green. And—decorations! I know. I've seen pictures." Suddenly he laughed. "Say! I got an idea! A real, twenty-two carat, all-wool idea! I'm going to do considerable honor to-night to my native West!"
And he let out a high-pitched, blood-curdling war-whoop which caused the irascible banker on the floor below to speak to his man servant who in turn, knocking discreetly at the back door of Tom's apartment, to be told by Krauss that an American had taken the place.
"Yes. Ein Amerikaner! Ein ganz wilder—a perfectly wild one!"
The communication caused the irascible banker to slam his clenched right fist against his left palm.
"Ach Gott!" he exclaimed. "Ein wilder Amerikaner! Schrecklich!"
His servant bowed in silent sympathy. "The American gentleman's valet told me that his master is going to dine to-night with Colonel Wedekind of the Uhlans of the Guard."
The banker sat up straight.
"What?" he asked. "With Colonel Wedekind—in the most exclusive military clique of Berlin? With Colonel Wedekind, the Emperor's friend? Then he must be something very big in his own country, wild or not wild. Minna!" he called to the other room where his wife, large, elderly, not bad looking in a blowzy, amorphous way, was reading the evening paper. "Minna! Early next week we must send our cards to the American gentleman upstairs …" And husband and wife fell to talking.
In the meantime, the wilder Amerikaner had finished dressing. He entered the taxicab which Krauss had summoned, heard the valet give the driver the Colonel's address—"Dahlmann Strasse No. 67"—and chuckled quietly to himself.
Once or twice he opened the light top coat he wore and looked down at the lapel of his evening dress.
"Sure," he mumbled, "I'm going to do considerable honor to-night to my native West!"
CHAPTER XIV
THE STRETCHING OF THE WEB
It was about five minutes after seven when the Bursche, the Colonel's military servant, an immense, chubby-faced, curly haired Pomeranian peasant lad whose legs in their tight trousers looked like plump sausages, whose chest beneath the crimson cloth plastron was exaggeratedly round and extended, like a pouter pigeon's, and whose hands in white cotton gloves looked like those of a German edition of Fred Stone in the rôle of the "Scarecrow," opened the double doors of the Wedekind salon and announced in a stentorian voice:
"Herr Graves!" which he pronounced as if it were spelled "Graafase."
Tom, a sunny smile on his face, stepped into the room, shook hands first with the Colonel, who greeted him effusively, with the Colonel's wife, a tall, raw-boned woman in cut purple velvet and diamonds, with a hooked nose, very intelligent black eyes, a fringe of false reddish hair falling over her forehead, and the voice of a grenadier, and was then introduced the rounds of the company. There was one civilian, a Professor Conrad Heifer, a small, spectacled man in illy fitting evening dress and a crumpled white necktie that had worked its way past the collar and was threatening the professor's tiny, red ears. The other guests were all officers and their wives, in full regimentals, some in the uniform of the Uhlans, others in the cream and silver of the Cuirassiers of the Guard, and one dapper, bowlegged man in the crimson and gold of the Potsdam Hussars. All wore decorations, and Tom, who held his left hand over his lapel, chuckled to himself as he noticed it.
"Charmed! Delighted!" some of the officers said in English, clicking their heels and bowing from their waist lines in rectangular fashion.
Others gave German words of greeting … And even Tom knew that it was different from the German he had heard on shipboard, on the customs pier, and in the railway stations: it was snarling, cutting, pronounced with a jarring twang:
"Grosse Ehre!"
"Ah! Kolossales Vergnügen!"
"Servus! Servus!" from a South German.
Finally the Colonel introduced him to a short, broad-shouldered gentleman sitting on a green plush sofa at the other end of the room, very pompous and very erect—"like some darned idol in a Chink joss house," thought Tom—who wore the uniform of a general and whose breast outshone all the others in its splendor of stars and medals.
Colonel Wedekind clicked his heels and bowed very deeply.
"Königliche Hoheit—Royal Highness!" he said, in an awestruck whisper, "permit me graciously to introduce Mr. Graves, the American gentleman of whom I spoke to you!" and, in Tom's ear: "His Royal Highness, Prince Ludwig Karl, the Emperor's cousin!"
His Royal Highness rasped something about "Vergnügt!" while Tom, chuckling to himself for the first time since he had entered the salon, took his left hand from the lapel of his coat, exposing an enormous gold medal, set with diamonds, and barbarously ornamented with various designs—the figure of a cowboy riding a refractory mare and waving his stetson, that of an Indian, of a buffalo charging head down, and the whole surmounted by an enameled American flag.
Prince Ludwig Karl opened his eyes wide.
"I—I …" He said, in halting English, "may I inquire what decoration you are wearing? I—ah—I thought I was familiar with all foreign orders eh?" turning to the Colonel, who bowed and seemed flustered.
Tom laughed out loud in the innocence of his heart, sure that the Prince and all the others would fall in readily with his Western sense of humor.
"Say, Prince," he exclaimed in a hearty voice that carried the length of the room, "I knew all you fellows would be decked out like cattle at a country fair, with medals and ribbons and all that—seen it in the movies—" touching, to the terrible consternation of the assembled company, the Red Eagle of the First Class, Prussia's highest decoration, that blazed on the Prince's chest, "and so I said to myself I was going to do the right thing by Spokane and the whole Northwest. Swell little medal this, don't you think? Won it at the Pendleton round-up for breaking the broncho-busting record. Take a look at it, Prince Believe me—the boys had to chip in considerably to pay for it!"
It was a familiar voice which broke the pall of utter, horrified silence that had followed Tom's little speech.
"Well, Graves, I see you kept your promise!" and Tom knew who the old friend was of whom Colonel Wedekind had spoken over the telephone, Baron Horst von Götz-Wrede, the German officer who had wanted to buy the Yankee Doodle Glory; and "Yankee Doodle Glory" was the only word which Tom caught from the flood of German which the young officer was whispering to the Prince, causing the latter to come out of his indignant trance and to wave a condescending hand in the direction of the young Westerner.
The Baron took Tom by the arm.
"I am so glad you kept your promise," he repeated. "It was awfully decent of you to break your engagement with Lord Vyvyan."
Tom was about to give an astonished reply, for he remembered that Krauss had told him he had not had a chance to tell the Colonel about the invitation to Vyvyan. But his first surprise was quickly swallowed in a second when the Baron, still blithely rambling on, advised him jocularly to be careful how he applied his "charming American sense of humor with us stodgy Germans. We want you to like us, Graves, and we'll take corking good care of you. We'll see that you get into no more such Homeric scrapes as you did with that fellow Neumann aboard the Augsburg."
"Say!" This time Tom was amazed. He had nearly forgotten about the little contretemps with the bank clerk, and here it was being quoted at him on his first day in Berlin. He was familiar with the quickness and shrewdness of American reporters, but it seemed that their German colleagues—for it could not be anything else—had them beaten by many miles.
He was going to say something of the sort when the German Baron, seeing the expression of surprise in Tom's honest eyes and feeling instinctively that he had been guilty of some error of judgment, quickly and successfully changed the conversation. He pointed at Bertha, who was just then coming into the salon, a charming figure in her dress of white Chinese crepe with a tunic of rose-pink chiffon, the whole covered with a very spider's web of silver beads and silver thread.
She was walking by the side of an old lady, dressed in black, with snow-white hair and snapping brown eyes.
"I am not a jealous man," lightly laughed the Baron, walking away and leaving Tom a clear field.
The latter stepped up to Bertha as straight as an arrow.
"Hello, Bertha!" he said. "You're a mighty comforting sight for sore eyes."
The girl smiled.
"Grandmother," she said, turning to the old lady, "this is Tom Graves, a good friend of mine from Spokane."
"Grandmother?" exclaimed Tom. "I thought—why—" he stammered, hesitated, then went on in an undertone. "I thought your grandmother was dangerously ill … Not expected to live—and that's why you came over here in such a hurry!"
"It was a mistake, Tom," she said. "Just a mistake in the transmission of the cable. Some words were misspelled."
And the next moment the Bursche opened the doors to the dining-room, announcing dinner:
"Abendessen is servirt, Fran Oberst!"
"Sounds good to me," laughed Tom, tucking Bertha's hand under his arm. "I'm as hungry as a bear!"—and, unceremoniously, used to the free ease of the West, utterly ignorant of the finely shaded rules of etiquette, he walked into the dining-room just one step ahead of His Royal Highness.
CHAPTER XV
ANONYMOUS
It was not as if Tom Graves had been slow-witted or unobserving of what was going on about him.
No man of his ancestry, straight American, Scotch and English, descendant of sturdy, independent, courageous, fairly well-educated people who for generations had not felt the pinch of want nor the lessening of mentality that goes with it, who had lived away from the reek of city slums yet away, too, from the stultifying influence of meager, worked-out farms, who following the keen call in their own brains, their own imagination, had taken the trail of the ever-broadening Western frontier from Virginia via Kentucky, Kansas, and California to the Northwest; no man of his bringing up and early surroundings, with the sweep and tang of the open range about him, and the range of a decade or so ago where often a man's quickness of wit counted as much as his quickness on the draw; no such man could be slow, could be entirely unobserving.
What was wrong with him was a national American fault, rather habit, which blinded him to everything that went on about him during this, his first, visit abroad except his love for Bertha Wedekind and the frivolous, shifting interests of the passing minutes.
A national habit which caused him to see foreigners entirely through the smoked, distorting spectacles of provinciality and, in judging them, to accept certain cut-and-dried verdicts and well-defined standards that were nearly always the result of frivolous newspaper comment, of light fiction, of music-hall catchwords, of a motion pictures director's abysmal ignorance, of smart, would-be witty remarks coined by returned travelers!
Standards hoary with age! Standards more hoary with lies! Yet standards accepted and repeated!
To Tom Graves (and small blame to him for believing it since the majority of his countrymen, including even those who, thanks to a better education, a better chance to see and compare, should have known better, shared his belief) a Frenchman was a man who wore a flat-brimmed, comical silk hat, white spats, and a pointed beard, who gesticulated and shrugged his shoulders, lived rather exclusively on pastry and cloudy, opalescent absinthe, had neither manhood nor stamina nor virtues—Verdun in those days was only a geographical term!—and spent his hours of leisure fighting bloodless duels and flirting with the wife of his most intimate friend. The typical Russian was an enormous, bearded half-savage who ate candles, got dismally drunk upon raw spirits, called his fellow Russian "Little dove!" and "Little brother!" and amused himself by roasting Jewish babies on a spit.
And the German was simple, good-natured, naïve, even stupid; a man who wept copious tears into his beer glass, sang the Lorelei, and was as guileless as the whitest, woolliest, softest baby lamb that ever gamboled on the green.
Thus small blame to the young Westerner that he did not notice what was going on below the surface in Colonel Wedekind's dining-room, what had been going on about him ever since he had taken ship and even before: in fact, ever since Newson Garrett had discovered the presence of the unknown metal in his assay of the Yankee Doodle Glory ore.
Tom was a stranger to the word Intrigue.
Of course he was aware of occasional lapses from the straight and narrow path of truth on the part of some as, for instance, when Baron Horst von Götz-Wrede mentioned the broken engagement with Lord Vyvyan although Kraufes had told Tom that he had not said a word about it to the Colonel. He had also been taken a little aback that the Colonel knew he had taken passage on the Augsburg, that von Götz-Wrede was familiar with his fight on board ship, and that the cable summoning Bertha from Spokane to Berlin should have been so thoroughly distorted in transmission.
But he dismissed and condoned it all as an instance of European characteristics. Generally European; not typically German any more. For to him all Europeans were slightly mad.
"Otherwise," as he explained to Bertha during dinner, "the poor simps wouldn't insist on living in Europe with all the Northwest to choose spots in for their wigwams!"
One of the mad European characteristics—and for this he had the man's own words at the time when he had begged him not to speak about his stubborn intention to acquire the Yankee Doodle Glory since people might make fun of him—was the Baron's returning to the subject when dinner was over and he had drawn the horse wrangler into a corner of the salon.
"Look here," replied the Westerner, "that subject is taboo. You told me you would never speak of it again if I came to Berlin."
The Baron laughed.
"Did I?" he asked, lighting a cigar.
"You sure did, sonny!"
"Well—I can't help it. Here you are in my clutches, helpless, what? And you must listen to me."
"Why must I?"
"Because the Prince …"
"The fellow with the decorations and the grouch?"
"The same. You see, this is not America. Germany is not a Republic. A chap like myself simply has to kowtow to a man like the Prince. I told him quite casually about my trip to the West, mentioned the Yankee Doodle Glory, and he …" He was silent, then went on in a whisper. "You know," touching his forehead significantly, "some of our German royalty are slightly—oh …"
"Loco? Too much inbreeding. Just like horses. Sure, I know."
"Well, there you are, Graves."
"What'd you mean there I am?"
"Mad or not, Ludwig Karl is a Prince of the Royal House and a big man in the war office. He can make me or break me. And he's got it into his head that it's up to me to buy the Yankee Doodle Glory. I was a fool ever to have told him!"
"But why should he be so nutty about it? For the Lord's sake, pipe me the reason, man!"
"Because—well—the Prince is one of those thorough paced Germans, not a cosmopolite like myself. He thinks that whatever is German is right, and what ever is foreign is wrong."
Tom inclined his head. "No wonder the poor old gink is loco!" he said with conviction.
"Yes, yes," agreed the Baron. "But that's the way the field lays and—you must pardon me, old chap—he thinks that I, being a German, should be able to persuade you, an American, to sell whatever I want to buy. Sort of national conceit, I suppose. National stubbornness, too."
"Well," laughed Tom, who had dined and wined well, who felt in a generous mood, who was anxious to finish the conversation and join Bertha, who was talking to the dapper little Hussar. He had completely forgotten Martin Wedekind's warning. "You and he are a pair when it comes to being as stubborn as a mule. And I'm not a mule skinner. Horses for mine. And so, just to oblige you, I'll …"
"You'll sell me the Yankee Doodle?" cut in the Baron, quickly, excitedly.
Too quickly. Too excitedly.
For Tom knew poker. At once, watching the other's features, he drew back a little. "Over anxious," he said to himself, and then, in a loud voice: "I'll let you know in the morning."
The Baron studied the Westerner's calm, clean-shaven face. He knew that it would be lost time to argue any more to-night.
"I'll be at your place at ten in the morning sharp. I have a spare horse and we'll take a little gallop together if you care."
"Fine and dandy! But—say!" Suddenly he remembered the riders he had seen cantering down the Kurfurstendamm from the windows of his apartment. "None of your measly postage stamp saddles. Either you get me a good old forty-pound stock saddle with a horn to swing my leg over when I get tired, or I'll ride that goat of yours barebacked, see?"
An hour later Tom was in his flat. Two hours later he was sound asleep. Three hours later the jarring ring of the telephone bell startled him wide awake.
He rushed out and took down the receiver.
"What?" he asked. "Say that again! I shouldn't sell the Yankee Doodle Glory? Who's that talking? Who …? Anonymous? Don't know a party by that name, but your voice sounds darned familiar. Oh—Anonymous isn't your name—you don't want to tell me your name … Oh! Look here, stranger, I don't cotton to that sort o' thing—if you got a square, decent reason for butting into my affairs, there isn't a reason in the world why you shouldn't tell me your name. Politics? Politics—hell! I mixed up considerable in politics when my boss ran for sheriff. What? German politics? Say, what do these Dutchmen know of politics? Eh? More than I think? … All right, all right! Keep your hair on, Mister Anonymous. Maybe I won't sell—yet!" and he went back to bed.
He did not know that in the servant's room, hidden in the clothes press, there was another telephone instrument connecting with his own, and that Krauss had taken down the receiver and had listened to every word of the conversation.
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