The Man on Horseback Part 2

CHAPTER XVI

THE HORSEMAN

Tom's whole life, his whole philosophy, his whole decency, was a rough fact reduced to rough order. A simple man, he did not practice that maddening and useless mental stenography known to the elect as analytical psychology. He never dissected either his own or other people's emotions. Always had he believed that every question in life could, and should, be answered by a simple yes, or an as simple no; and once the answer, positive or negative, was given, it had to stand.

Thus, when he had gone back to bed that night, he felt disturbed in his equanimity.

For the anonymous telephone message had recalled to him Martin Wedekind's spoken and cabled warning not to sell the mine in the Hoodoos, and Martin was his good friend, had proved himself his good friend, besides being the father of the girl he loved.

On the other hand, he had led Baron von Götz-Wrede to believe that it was his intention to part with the property; and so here he was face to face with a moral dilemma which, to his simple, clean-cut conscience, threatened to assume very grave proportions.

He was, therefore, agreeably surprised when the next morning at precisely ten o'clock the German officer called on him and waved the whole perturbing question away with a negligent gesture of his gloved hand. The man seemed neither astonished nor indignant.

"That's all right, Graves," he said. "Don't you worry about it the slightest bit. I'll make my peace with the Prince. I had rather an idea that—" and a less ingenuous mortal than Tom Graves might have noticed that at the words von Götz-Wrede gave a slight wink in the direction of the immaculate Krauss, who was busy with the breakfast dishes—"yes! I had rather an idea that you would change your mind. Why not? People are always liable to do that."

That last was a statement which jarred unpleasantly on the Westerner, since a change of mind was the very thing which clashed with his solid principles.

"But—but—" he stammered in a sort of flustered self-defense. He was going to give his reason for refusing to sell. But at once he remembered that Martin Wedekind's warning, whatever its cause, was sure to have been meant confidentially, while something—he did not know what, but it was very compelling kept him from speaking of the anonymous telephone message.

"I—I …" He was silent.

"Never mind, never mind," smiled the officer. "Forget about it and slip into your riding togs. My man is downstairs with the horses and the brutes are a bit fretful this morning."

Then as the other, greatly relieved, turned to the door the German went on:

"By the way, people here ask me a raft of questions about my adventures in the wild West, and I forgot the name of that old partner of yours. Comical old chap with whiskers and an eternal plug of chewing tobacco bulging his right cheek."

"You mean Truex. Old Man Truex. But he isn't my partner any more."

"He … Ah!" The Baron's well-modulated voice rose to a strangely high note, quickly changed into a cough. "Sorry. Must have caught cold last night." Again he coughed. "Did you buy him out, Graves?"

"You mean Truex?"

"Yes."

"Well, not exactly. We just signed a little agreement," and, led on by the other, who professed interest in American business methods as well as great admiration for American business shrewdness, he told what had happened between him and the old prospector.

"Bright chap, aren't you?" smiled the German. "All your own idea?"

"Lord, no! I'm a horse wrangler, not a money wrangler. It was Martin Wedekind who tipped me the wink."

"Oh—the Colonel's brother?"

"Sure!" and Tom added that Truex had gone once more into the wilderness, that he had left him control of the property, with the one stipulation that in the case of his death his sister, if ever she should turn up, or her children should inherit his share.

"Oh—Truex has a sister?"

"Has—or had. She ran away years ago with some foreign fiddler. Old Man Truex don't know if she's alive, don't even know her married name."

"Very extraordinary, I'm sure," said the Baron. Then, for after all he was trained to the special game he was playing, he decided that even a man as blissfully ignorant of international intrigue as the young Westerner might suspect something if he overdid his interest in the family affairs of the old prospector. So he asked Tom again to get into his riding things.

"All right. With you in a minute!"—and Tom went to his bedroom while the German, as soon as the door was closed, stepped up to Krauss and engaged him in a whispered conversation in explosive German.

Krauss bowed.

"Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann," he said. "I shall …"

Then, with a warning cough, he stepped quickly back and occupied himself once more with the breakfast dishes, for Tom was returning.

"Here I am all cocked and primed!" he said, and Baron von Götz-Wrede stifled an involuntary exclamation of surprise.

For Tom, product of the West, loyal son of the West for better or for worse, was dressed as he would on the Killicott range—a sweat-stained stetson tilted over his brow, a clean, gray flannel shirt showing beneath his open threadbare coat that still bore tell-tale stains of Idaho alkali, a horse-hair quirt looped over his leather encircled wrist, and a pair of ancient, blue drill trousers tucked into high-heeled cowhide boots, stitched with an elaborate pattern and ornamented with a pair of heavy Mexican silver spurs.

The Baron was himself again in a moment. But he gave a silent prayer that not many of his comrades in the Uhlans of the Guard might use that particular Sunday morning to stroll or ride down the Kurfürstendamm towards Halensee and the Grunewald. He could imagine the jokes that would be made, with himself and his wild Western friend as targets, at regimental mess and Liebesmahl.

"All right," he said in rather a weak voice. "Let's start." And a minute later they were on the street, on the earth-covered, bush-framed riding track that paralleled the sidewalk, where Tom, appreciating the fine points of the two bay mares with the quick, loving eye of the connoisseur, petted their soft noses and their coquettish, tufted ears with knowing hand. The Baron's Bursche looked on open-mouthed, wide-eyed.

But he opened mouth and eyes still wider when Tom bent and made as if to take off the saddle of his horse.

"What are you doing?" gasped the Baron, embarrassed, furious, for by this time a crowd of loiterers had assembled on the sidewalk, only restrained from jeering, jocular comment by the respected, admired, feared uniform.

Tom straightened up.

"Look here, Baron," he said; "I gave you fair warning I wasn't going to ride on any postage-stamp saddle. I want a stock saddle!"

"There wasn't any to be had in all Berlin for love or money."

"Well," laughed Tom, "that isn't my fault," and he slipped his hand underneath the horse's belly and loosened the cinch.

"What—whatever are you going to do?"

"Ride her as God made her!"

And off came the saddle with a scraping of waxed leather, a jingling of brass rings, and up vaulted Tom on the horse's bare back, sitting well down on his seat, legs hanging loose like an Indian's. He tickled the mare's ears with his quirt.

"Get up, you little beauty! Let's see how you can travel. Yip-yip-yip!" he yelled at the top of his lungs and he was off at a gallop while the Baron mounted and followed, swearing under his breath.

Berlin was out in all its summer Sunday morning glory.

The women were, there, trying to copy the fine feathers of Paris and Vienna, and the men trying to ape those of New York and London. The army was there in all its branches: Cuirassiers in cream and silver, Gardes du Corps in white and gold, crimson Hussars from Potsdam, brown Hussars from Elberfeld, black "Death Head" Hussars from Dantzig; Jägers in rifle green, gunners in sober dark blue, sappers and men of the Service Corps, all clanking their sabers truculently against the pavement, ogling the women, twirling their mustaches, sure, if not of themselves as individuals, then of themselves as a caste. A sprinkling of the navy was there, and a good deal of the nursery: in large white or black enamel perambulators wheeled by nurses from the old Slav colony near Berlin that is called the Spreewald, heavy women, in white corsages and aprons, pleated red skirts divulging massive ankles, with immense bonnets on their heads that spread right and left like the wings of airplanes, and talking their uncouth Wendish dialect.

The police was there, armed and panoplied and caparisoned like butchers with a penchant for homicide, and dozens of pimply faced schoolboys, in tight trousers and bowler hats, swinging canes like the grown-ups, aping their elders who, in their turn, like all good Germans, aped the British, and making archaic, sentimental love to stodgy little girls who looked up admiringly at the coming generation of the Blond Beast.

Tom rode his horse now at an easy hand gallop, the nearest approach to a lope of which the bay mare was capable, and looked about him with wondering eyes. It was all so different from what he had expected. The Germany of which he had read, of which some homesick Germans in the West had told him, was a kindly land, a slow land, perhaps coated with a lot of sentimental sugar pap, yet a land which you loved, though at times it made you smile. He had also heard of another Germany, a Germany of simple, pure, naked strength, of stout walls built only for defense, of a kind of ancient, barbarous, Teutonic contempt for useless decorations, a land of bare stone, hard wood, brick floors. Yet here was this great boulevard "we are proud of it," said Baron von Götz-Wrede. "It's the finest in the world. Fifth Avenue? The Lake Shore Drive? The Champs Elysées? Pshaw! They can't compare with it!"—and it was banal, baroque, overloaded, stuccoed, shallow; like some immense, second-rate watering-place, a cross between Chicago without the clouting strength of Chicago, and a Paris that was without its charm, that was entirely, shamelessly cocotte.

Of Paris smacked the open-air cafés that were on every block. They were filled to overflowing with the élite of the Berlin West end: Assessoren, junior judges, in all the crushing dignity of recently acquired sheepskin; students with droll flat caps, sky blue and pale green and hopeful lavender and virulent magenta, insignia of the Corps or Burschenschaften, the 'varsity fraternities, to which they belonged, their faces scarred and bloated, their paunches belying their youth; stout bankers and brokers' wives filling in with pastry and heaped plates of strawberries and whipped cream the time between their "second" breakfast, which they had eaten an hour earlier and the two o'clock Sunday dinner; more officers and "One Year Volunteers" of all the branches of the service; laughing Americans, and Englishmen and Scots smoking their short briars very much as in protest.

More passed down the street, talking stridently. Whole families out for their Sunday promenade, the pater familias in high hat and frock coat, the mother in a rustling silk gown clashing horribly with heavy boots and cashmere stockings, scolding the children. Russians there were in exaggeratedly modern clothes; a handsome Roman with the staring black eyes of his race, making the shameless love of his race to the blond, green-eyed Castilian woman who tripped by his side on high, red Cuban heels; a Chinaman from the Legation in embroidered peacock blue and looking with conscious imperturbability through his horn-rimmed spectacles; a Lutheran clergyman with curling white side-whiskers and a dusty bowler hat; a couple of "millionaire peasants" from Teltow, immense gold chains spanning their fat, peaked stomachs.

People on foot. People on horseback. Many in motor-cars of rakish shapes. A very few in carriages.

Berlin taking its swagger Sunday promenade in the year 1913, proud of itself, enormously certain of the fact that it was ahead of the rest of the world in art and civilization and culture!

Berlin a twelve-month before a mad Kaiser, helped by mad Junkers, mad professors, a mad army, a mad clergy, assaulted the decencies of the world … A year before the free world rose in self-defense and struck back at the crazed Beast!

Berlin, and warmth, and sunshine. Thousands walking and riding and driving.

And there were few who did not turn and look after the strange pair: the Baron in all the glory of his regimentals, riding his mare very much like an English squire, and the Westerner, as free and careless as the plains whence he had come, his legs dangling loosely, without saddle, fanning his horse's steaming nostrils with his stetson and letting out war-whoops from time to time.

But few remarks were made. For the Baron wore the uniform, the King's Coat that demanded respect; and even Tom noticed it.

"Great little talisman, that mottled Joseph's coat of yours, Baron," he said; and the other replied in a matter-of-fact voice: "Of course. I'm an army officer, you know—and these chaps—civilians, what?" His lips went up in a contemptuous curl. The next moment he gave a cry of fear, of warning:

"Look out, Graves! For God's sake …"

An old lady, accompanied by a young girl, had tried to cross the riding track, She had fallen. The young girl stood above her, white faced, shielding the frail, prone form against the two mares that came on at a thundering, rushing gallop, frightened at the cries of warning and horror that rose from the people on the sidewalks.

Tom thought, weighed, measured, acted in the tenth part of a second.

The Baron's mare had taken the bit between her teeth; she was beyond control. And out flew Tom's left foot, kicking the Baron's horse with mule-like strength in the tender spot below the shoulder so that the brute swerved, snorting, slid, swerved again and passed to one side, barely grazing the old lady's bonnet.

At exactly the same instant, unable to stay his own horse or jerk it to one side, as the sharp kick had shifted his weight and balance, he leaned well forward, gripping the horse's bare back with his knees. He clutched the mane.

"Up, you devil! Up, you beauty!"

And, adding his own strength, his own skill, to that of the mare, fairly lifting the animal bodily, he sent it at a long, splendid jump over and across the head of the young girl, not even touching her.

Twenty feet further he brought the mare to a stop. He jumped down and ran back. The girl had fainted.

He looked at her.

"Why, Bertha! Dear!" he stammered.

A moment later, she regained consciousness.

"How is grandmother?" she asked feebly; then she fainted again; and ready hands carried both her and old Mrs. Wedekind to a motor-car that had pulled up at the curb.

The German officer looked at Tom admiringly.

"Gad!" he said. "You can ride!"

 

CHAPTER XVII

THE OLD WOMAN SPEAKS

Bertha left the room.

She had escaped without a scratch, and was off to dress for a dinner dance to be given that night by the bachelor officers of the Uhlans of the Guard, leaving her grandmother alone with Tom Graves, who had called, armed with a gigantic box of roses, violets, and orchids, to inquire after the health of the two ladies.

Old Mrs. Wedekind lay on the couch in her little boudoir furnished in a style different from the usual neo-German affair, crowded with ornaments that were no decorations, and with decorations that were no ornaments, with bulbous or angular monstrosities in wood or metal that were the fruit of some diseased artist brain from Berlin or Munich. The little octagonal, balconied room spoke of a former generation, both more gentle and more sophisticated. There was a simple rug of taupe and claret velvet, gray panelings of carved tulip wood, a lightly frivolous touch in the figures of women and tiny, paunchy cupids surrounded by love trophies which filled the angles of the cornices. There were some fine old enameled plates framed in dark green velvet, frail Tanagra statuettes and frailer tortoise-shell boxes; a mass of cushions covered with sumptuous Byzantine dalmatics, and a great Sèvres vase topped by a delicate, silvery spray of guelder roses.

Mrs. Wedekind was past eighty years of age and, besides Heinrich and Martin, she had given birth to four daughters all married to high ranking officials in the judiciary and all mothers of large families of their own. But she was still full of vitality, eagerly interested in what was going on in the world.

She smiled to herself as she lay there, studying Tom's open, boyish features with her shrewd, snapping old eyes that sparkled under bushy eyebrows, above which rose a high, wrinkled forehead negligently dusted with Rachel rice powder.

The daughter of a Westphalian nobleman, she had married Martin's father, a Bürgerlicher, a commoner, in the teeth of her family's aristocratic prejudices; and she still belonged to a former generation that had taken its cue from the best in Paris, that spoke French by preference, and German with a faintly French accent. The new Prussia rather bored her. To her it seemed too much flavored, as she expressed it, with kitchen, nursery, and sabers.

"New Prussia is frightfully bad form," she would say at times to her intimates, and even to her son Heinrich, who would invariably reply: "Yes, yes, liebe Mutter, but please keep your opinion to yourself. Don't forget …"

"I know," she would reply, with a malicious twinkle in her eyes, "you are in the army and my respected sons-in-law are Beamten, officials. And—honestly, Heinrich!—once in a while I forget that my father was a Baron von Sierstorpff, and then I feel a good deal of sympathy for the unwashed ruffians of the French revolution. Now that precious Emperor of yours …"

"Mother! Mother! You are speaking of the All-Gracious …"

"Fiddlesticks, Heinrich! The Barons of the house of Sierstorpff are a much older and a much better family than your Hohenzollern parvenus!"

In her youth she had been an enthusiastic horse-woman, riding both to stag and fox hounds, and she had told Tom how she admired his feat of that morning.

"You saved my life, young man," she said in her sharp, didactic old voice, and when Tom shook his head and mumbled something about it being not worth mentioning, she replied:

"I do not think my life is much to bother about either way. I am past the biblical limit—you see, as I am getting older, I try to believe in the Bible, so as to be on the safe side. But Bertha … There's a young life you saved …"

And then, quite suddenly, she looked straight at Tom Graves and went on:

"Young man, will you take the advice of an old woman who is not quite as blind as her children like to believe?"

"Sure." Tom was embarrassed.

"Very well, then. Leave Germany."

"Why, yes. I wasn't going to live here. I'm going back home, to Spokane."

"All right. Go. But don't dally. Leave just as soon as you can."

"But, Mrs. Wedekind!" Tom was both flustered and hurt. "I know I'm a free and easy sort of chap. I know that once in a while I say things I oughtn't, and do things that I …"

"It isn't that."

"Well—what is it?"

"Don't ask me for my reasons, young man. Do not quote me, either. I am telling you confidentially, because I like you, and because you have saved my life and Bertha's. Yet, if you should quote me, I shall simply deny that I ever said a single word to you on the subject. But take my advice!"

"But—why?"

She sat up on her couch, her fine old eyes sparkling with intelligence and with a motherly sympathy for the young horse wrangler.

"Mr. Graves," she said, "you are an honest man, a simple man, a clean man. All considered virtues in your native West, I have no doubt, and virtues once in this Germany of mine. But to-day honesty and simplicity are at a discount in Berlin. They are considered morganatic virtues, virtues on the left hand, to be sneered at, to be meanly pitied, purposely misunderstood. A simple man, a man of fine, square, old-fashioned ideals—ein echter Ehrenmann, as we say, rather, used to say in Germany—has no business here!"

And she dismissed Tom, who for the first time in his life, knowing neither why he did it nor how, bent over a woman's hand and raised it respectfully to his lips.

CHAPTER XVIII

LORD VYVYAN SPEAKS

A week later—and it was a week crowded with dinners and suppers and theater parties and dances, with the tawdry, hectic frivolities of Berlin At Night where Tom was usually the guest of Baron von Götz-Wrede, who was trying, he said, to repay a fraction of the splendid hospitality with which he had been treated in Spokane—old Mrs. Wedekind's warning was repeated.

Tom Graves had not seen very much of Lord Vyvyan during the last days. Nor was it his fault. He would have liked to introduce him into the gay set in which he was moving, had even suggested it to the Baron, who shrugged his expressive shoulders and said with a drawl, not a very cordial one, that of course any friend of Tom's was welcome. Tom noticed the lack of cordiality, but decided to overlook it, for, as he put it in a letter to Martin Wedekind: "Most of these young Prussian fellows seem to have been born with a sneer on their faces. I guess they can't help it. Must be merry hell to live in a country where every man you meet is either your superior or your inferior—never your equal!"

It was Lord Vyvyan's own fault that he had not seen more of Tom since coming to Berlin, and he explained that he was being kept frightfully busy at the Embassy; said he fancied "Old Titmouse"—that's how he had nicknamed Sir Francis Bartlett, the ambassador—was deviling his soul to make him pay for the mess he had got into in Washington.

But, late one Saturday evening, having first made sure that the Westerner was at home, he called on him.

"Hullo, hullo, hullo!" he greeted him with his usual cheerful, slightly inane manner, sat down, and asked for a cigar.

Krauss, who hovered in the background, brought a box of panatellas, which the Englishman examined critically.

"Not your brand?" asked Tom.

"I know I am a tactless beast, Graves," replied Vyvyan. "But, you know, I must have one of those fat, pudgy little Bock havanas. Dined with the Titmouse, and the old boy fed me on greasy mutton and caper sauce. I need a havana, a Bock, to drive away the mutton grease, what?"

"I'm sorry," laughed Tom. "Panatellas is all I have in the house."

"Oh … Send out that man of yours. Here. I'll tell him where to buy them." And he told Krauss exactly where to go. "There's a little store just the other side of the Friedrich Strasse two doors from the corner of the Behren Strasse—on the south side. Ask for Boch claros, number four. Tell 'em they're for Lord Vyvyan of the British Embassy."

"But, Milord," suggested Krauss, bowing, "it will take me half an hour to get there and half an hour to return …"

"That's all right, Krauss. I'm always willing to wait for a pretty woman or a good smoke."

"But, Milord," the valet was evidently flustered. "I am sure I can get you the right sort of cigars at the corner store below!"

"No, no, no! I'm rather a bit fussy about my baccy."

"Sure," agreed Tom heartily. "I feel lost myself when I can't get Duke's Mixture and brown paper. Don't argue, Krauss. Get the cigars. A little fresh air will do you good."

Krauss left, and as soon as the outer door had closed, Vyvyan turned to Tom.

"Graves," he said, without the slightest preamble, "leave Berlin!"

"Gosh—there's that same old croaking again!"

"Again?" Vyvyan pounced on the word. "Did somebody else warn you?"

"You bet. Seems to me I'm considerable pumpkins here the way folks look after me."

"Who warned you?" insisted the other.

"Old Mrs. Wedekind, the Colonel's mother—and, believe me, she's a dear!" The words were out of his mouth before he thought. Too late he remembered that the old lady had asked him not to quote her.

Vyvyan looked very serious.

"Graves," he said, "that woman is a good friend of yours."

"Sure. I know."

"And, Graves," continued the Englishman, rather haltingly, being an Anglo-Saxon, thus wooden, flustered, easily embarrassed when giving voice to an emotion, "so am I—a good friend of yours!"

"You bet!" replied the Westerner, impulsively shaking the other's hand.

They were silent. They knew that they were good friends and that, though they had known each other only a fortnight or so, though no chance had risen through which to probe each other's heart and soul, they utterly trusted one another. Yet, immediately, Tom felt that, in spite of it, there was to-night a slight barrier of reserve between him and the Englishman, and that it was of the latter's making. He felt it, and said nothing. For he knew how honorable a mutual reserve can be between friends, how it is the great, deep, sudden silences that are the real proof of friendship.

So he tried to change the conversation.

"I had a cable this morning from Spokane. A little annoying …"

"Never mind that," said the Englishman, returning to the first subject with the pertinacity of his race; and, suddenly assuming his habitual drawl and slang: "Graves, at times I am most frightfully bored with my jolly, pig-headed old ancestors."

"Are you?"

"Rather! They made such a damnable blunder when they gave you Colonial Yanks a chance to kick—and incidentally lick us. Hang it, old chap—you and I are of the same breed, the same blood, the same decencies, the same jolly old saving prejudices. There are some things you and I wouldn't do—simply because they aren't done. Well, I am not trying to gush. I'm not that sort. But—I wish you were an Englishman!"

"I don't!" screamed the eagle.

"Don't be a silly, bloody jackass! I didn't mean to offend you. But I wish—yes—I wish your nation and mine would stop talking of what happened over a hundred years ago. I wish Great Britain and America would talk together frankly, act together—and prevent together. I wish …" He caught himself. "Never mind. I'm not the Prime Minister and you're not the President. All I ask you is to get out of Germany."

"I won't."

"Why did you come here?"

"To—to … I told you on board ship."

"Right-oh!" said Vyvyan. "To keep your promise to that German Baron and to get away from a girl."

"What of it?" asked Tom, a little belligerently.

"Oh—nothing much. Only, remember tellin' me about the cable Miss Wedekind received, begging her to hurry to Berlin, since her grandmother was about to kick the jolly old bucket?"

"Well?"

"Grandmother hasn't kicked the bucket yet! Grandmother is as hale as a four-year filly!"

"There was a mistake in the cable."

"Of course there was, Graves. That's what cables are for—German cables—to make mistakes, to forge words. That's how they bullied France into the War of Seventy by making a little mistake in a telegram. I know." Again he caught himself and returned to the subject. "Graves," he continued, "mistake or no mistake—she received that message after you left Spokane—and she is here!"

"Yes, yes." The Westerner was getting irritated.

"Don't you think," went on Vyvyan very gravely, "that she was sent for—that she is being used, I mean, like—oh—a bait? Like a web, to keep you here?"

"Me!" Tom laughed. "Gosh! I'm not of enough importance."

"Not personally, perhaps. But there may be something you possess that is of importance."

"Hell! I've got nothing in the world except a sense of humor, good health—and the Yankee Doodle Glory mine!"

"Right." The Englishman jumped up. "Look here. I'll tell you …"

The next moment he was silent. He shook his head.

"Sorry, old chap," he continued. "Can't tell you. There was that silly old ass of a King George the Third who split your nation and mine. I made one mistake—in Washington—and I've learned my lesson. Only remember!" He stepped up close to his friend. "If ever you should get into trouble here in Berlin, if by any chance your American Ambassador should refuse to help you, or should be unable to help you …"

"Lord! I shan't get into any trouble. And why, if I did, should our Embassy refuse to help?"

"Purely hypothetical, old dear! But, given the double hypothesis—your trouble and your Ambassador's refusal or inability—remember that I work at the British Embassy, in the Wilhelm Strasse, three doors from Unter den Linden!"

"Unless," laughed Tom, "you yourself get into another row with your people and get chucked, as you did in Washington!"

"Right. Bright lad!" said the Englishman, but he was very serious. "There is always a possibility that I …"

He drew a ring from his pocket and asked Tom to examine it very thoroughly. Tom did. It was a simple affair of silver with the figure of a grayhound engraved on the round shield and above it the letters B. E. D.

"Know that ring now?" asked Vyvyan.

"Yes."

"Remember if you'd see it again?"

"Yes."

"Positive?"

"Yes, yes! Sure! Why?"

Vyvyan slipped the ring back in his pocket.

"Just this," he said. "If, I repeat, you should ever get into trouble and your Ambassador can't help you, if by that time I should have left Berlin, you must go to the British Embassy. Any time of the day or the night. Once inside the building you must use your own wits. You must find, somehow, without asking too many questions, the man who has the duplicate to this ring. Him you can trust. And nobody else. Also, forget what I told you to-night!"

Tom laughed. "Quite like an old-fashioned melodrama, with me as the villain, isn't it?"

"I hope you won't be the persecuted hero," smiled Vyvyan, and then, to turn the conversation: "You said something about a cable you got from Spokane?"

"Yes. Some mistake, I guess. Seems mv old partner, Truex, died up North, in the British Columbia wilderness, about a week back, and a nephew of his turned up, son of that sister who ran away with the foreign fiddler. Seems he's trying to make a row. Says I swindled old Truex. That really Truex owned a controlling interest in the mine."

"What's the nephew's name?"

"Lehneke. Eberhardt Lehneke. Young German. Hasn't been over there very long, the cable says."

"Who sent you the cable?"

"Martin Wedekind."

"And what are you going to do?"

"I'm going to fight the young cub and lick him. I cabled straight back to Martin and to Alec Wynn, my lawyer. Just some darned hold-up game. But, believe me, I'll beat that young Mister Lehneke!"

"Gad!" said Vyvyan, with utter sincerity, "I hope to God you will, Graves!" And he added, after a moment's thought: "Don't you think you'd better go back to Spokane and supervise the fight yourself?"

Tom shook his head.

"Vyvyan," he replied, "I'm not going to leave Berlin, happen what may, without …"

"Without?"

"Without Bertha! Bertha Wedekind!"

The Englishman was studying the pattern of the rug.

"Perhaps you are right," he murmured, half to himself.

CHAPTER XIX

THE VOICE OF BERLIN

Tom Graves loved Bertha Wedekind with all his fine, pure, close-fibered strength.

But he was no purblind fool.

Never having had much experience with women, his judgment was fresh and unclouded. He was free from the incubus of lying sensuality. Thus he recognized her faults; and he loved her none the less dearly.

And her greatest fault, rather her misfortune, was that at the most impressionable stage of her girlhood, she had come under the spell and glamour, for spell and glamour it was for all its harsh, mean tawdriness, of the Prussian military clique.

Her experience in life was nil. Her knowledge of history, civilization, and economics was the usual use less average, the usual useless hodge-podge of school text-books and romantic fiction.

Carefully hedged in by her Uncle Heinrich, by her uncle's friends, by the young officers and high officials she met, she was only allowed to see what was best in Berlin, and in a mistaken sweep of loyalty to her father's native land she compared it with what was worst in America. She gloried in the pomp and circumstance, enthusiasm shining in her clear young eyes when she walked down Unter den Linden with Baron Horst von Götz-Wrede or the little Hussar, when she felt the respect and admiration with which the civilians regarded her martial companions.

Her former life in Spokane flashed up at such moments in sad, gray streaks of remembrance. At the time it had been pleasant enough, she thought, with the weekly hops at the Country Club, the horseback rides in the evenings across Hangman's Creek and out to Fort Wright, the quiet, simple, sunny summers spent at Hayden Lake or on the Killicott ranch, the plain-spoken, square-shouldered men, mining engineers, ranchers, merchants, lawyers, and young Canadian bank clerks from the local branch of the Bank of Montreal, who called each other Tom and Dick and Jack and Jim.

No! Back yonder there had been no romance, no glamour, no clanking of sabers, no clicking of heels, no kissing of hands, no whispering of: "Gnädigstes Fräulein, Sie sehen ja ganz fabelhaft entzückend aus!" no gay, challenging music of fife and drum.

Looking through the spectacles of her youthful imagination, she admired and loved this new Berlin which had sprung up, fungus-like, since the Franco-Prussian War, which had been built up with the money stolen from France. She was untrained in artistic judgment, and she admired the broad, sweeping streets framed by houses tumbled together of every style from peaked Gothic to ultra-modern Sezession; the department stores that tried to look like Florentine cathedrals and the churches that tried to look like department stores; the rococo palaces of the nouveaux riches decorated with meaningless stucco ornaments and monstrous caryatides supporting nothing in particular; the great public ballroom of the Behren Strasse, the Palais de Danse that endeavored to go Paris one better by using fifteen colors, clashing, cruel, hideous, where the same French artist had used no more than three, perfectly blended.

Bertha was too young to understand the over-emphatic, unæsthetic, bragging spirit of it all. She was caught in the whirl of gayety.

And there was gayety in the Berlin of the Autumn of the year Nineteen Hundred and Thirteen, nine months before the War. A future historian may some day call it the hysterical gayety that precedes the coming of madness.

Madness of too sudden success!

Madness of a nation, overfed, oversexed, cursed with national paranoia, intoxicated with the poisonous wine of self-glory!

Laughing, screaming, shouting madness that wound up in blood, and misery, and cruelties unspeakable—and punishment!

All that autumn Berlin danced. Berlin flirted. Berlin laughed. Berlin spent money like water. And the clique in the Wilhelm Strasse, the rulers of Germany, helped it along. They realized their own danger. They decided that there should be no national, wholesale awakening to the fact that the huge business colossus of modern Germany had feet of clay, a heart that was hollow, and empty pockets, that over-speculation had drained the imperial exchequer and that the most gigantic national failure and bankruptcy was imminent.

The exchequer must be filled. And there was but one way to do it:

Conquest! Conquest by the sword!

In the meantime, until the blow was struck, swiftly and successfully, the people of Germany must be kept in good humor.

On with the dance!—was the dictum of the Wilhelm Strasse. Sing and drink and shout! Spend money! Buy, buy, buy!

On with the whirl of gayety! … Lest the people see the misery, the terrible threat of failure and bankruptcy that yawned at their feet like an abyss of Fate, lest they see beneath the pomp and circumstance of glittering uniforms and recognize the grinning skeletons … Like symbolic shapes!

Horribly expressive of something!

Suggestive of—what?

And in the midst of it all, with the best in the land, Bertha danced. Of course she saw a lot of Tom for the young Westerner went everywhere, was invited everywhere, and he, too, enjoyed himself. It amused him to meet Princes of the blood and aristocrats, who boasted twenty-four quarterings on their armorial shields. There was not the faintest shade of snobbishness in him. But the surface of his mood was exuberant. He felt an almost boyish delight, tempered with whimsical humor, in his growing power to comport himself correctly towards the élite of Berlin—and his correctness spelled simplicity, manliness, the natural, good-humored dignity of the free man of the plains.

As such he was accepted by the young officers and, if the truth be told, really liked.

Bertha, too, liked him, had always liked him, occasional tiffs apart, with unquestioning fondness. But rather with the sort of fondness one has for a beloved and thoroughly satisfying domestic animal.

But love? Real flesh-and-blood love?

"No, Tom," she said, a little sadly, when, one October evening, he had asked her for the tenth time that month to marry him and to return with him to Spokane. "I do not love you—and I shan't marry you."

"Still the same old reason, I guess?" he smiled.

"What ever do you mean, Tom?"

"Go on! You know well enough," he said rather brutally. "You wouldn't marry me even if you loved me …"

"Which I don't!"

"All right. But even if you did, you wouldn't marry me. Because …"

"Let's change the subject, Tom!"

"I won't! I repeat you won't marry me because I am not wearing one of those cute, pea-green monkey-jackets and because I don't drag three foot of pointed steel behind me."

"Well?" demanded Bertha belligerently, "suppose you are right? What are you going to do about it, Tom?"

"Do about it? Why! I am going to get me that monkey-jacket and that bit of steel. That's all!"

And Bertha would not have laughed had she known what had happened to Tom during the last couple of days.

CHAPTER XX

WHAT HAPPENED BACK HOME

Back in Spokane, about a week earlier, lawyer Alec Wynn had paid a late call on Martin Wedekind.

"Well, Alec," asked the latter, anxiously, "how's it coming on?"

"Punk. Pretty damned punk. I am afraid that Tom Graves has not a leg to stand on."

"Oh, well, Alec, you're a lawyer, a professional pessimist. You're paid to look at the hopeless side of life, you know."

"No, Martin. It looks bad. Honest, it does! Have a peep at this!" He opened his leather case and took out a sheet of foolscap, sealed with the arms of the Dominion of Canada. "An affidavit, executed in regular form, attesting and swearing to Old Man Truex's death. Signed by the coroner of Crow's Nest Pass, and by three witnesses!"

"Who are the witnesses? Let's see!"

Alec Wynn pointed at the scrawling signatures.

"John Good …"

"The fellow who keeps that ramshackle hotel and bar at the Crow's Nest?"

"Yes, Martin. The same."

"He's a bad actor. Used to be a cattle rustler in the old days before the Royal Northwestern cleaned up the land."

The lawyer inclined his head.

"Sure," he said. "I know. Good gives the lie eternal to his name. He's no good at all. Neither are the other witnesses. See here! Arthur Forsythe …"

"That shyster lawyer from Fernie, B. C.?"

"Right—and Lawrence Walsh."

"Who's he?"

"Chap from Berlin …"

"Berlin!" cut in Wedekind excitedly.

"Berlin, Ontario," laughed Wynn. "He isn't a German. Walsh. Irish name, that! Came to Western Canada about a year ago, and my brother Roy had some rather unpleasant business dealings with him."

"So it seems that all the three witnesses are a bit …"

"Off color?" asked the lawyer. "Sure enough. But the coroner believes them evidently. There's the cold-blooded legal fact. According to the regular Canadian records Truex is dead. Slipped off his horse, tumbled down a mountain-side, broke his neck, and was buried."

"Yes, yes!" Martin Wedekind rose and paced up and down the room. "And yet," he said, "somehow …"

"Somehow you don't believe that Truex is dead. Somehow you think the whole thing is a cooked-up game to cheat friend Graves!"

"Exactly!"

"But you can do nothing," continued Wynn, "unless you produce the old prospector in the flesh."

Wedekind stopped in front of the lawyer.

"Alec," he said, "I have reasons, good, sound reasons, for believing what I do believe—namely, that Truex is alive, that Lehneke—or the party Lehneke acts for—is trying to do Tom out of the Yankee Doodle Glory."

"What are your reasons?"

"I can't tell you, Alec."

"I always thought you and I were pretty good friends."

"We are, Alec. But I can't tell you just the same. Only don't give in. Fight—that!" bringing his fist down on the Canadian affidavit. "Get the body exhumed. Have a look at it."

"Impossible!"

"How so?"

"Impossible without long legal rigmaroles," the lawyer corrected himself. "They cost both time and money."

"I'll supply the money, Alec!"

"Yes, yes. But the time. Who in Hades is going to supply the time? You see, while you and I'd be getting ready to carry that affidavit mess into the Provincial Supreme Court, Lehneke has Tom by the short hair on his neck. Look at this!" And he flung a long, legal-looking document on the table.

"See?" he continued. "Statement sworn to by the German Consul-General in New York and declaring that Eberhardt Lehneke is the only son and heir of Paul Lehneke and Mary Lehneke, both deceased. Also statement by the same Consul-General swearing that he has on files in the consular archives a certificate of marriage contracted between Paul Lehneke and Mary Truex, only sister of 'Old Man' Truex, and daughter of John and Priscilla Truex, natives of Oswego, N.Y. And birth certificate of Mary Lehneke, née Truex—and half-a-dozen other papers, establishing young Lehneke's position as Truex's heir without the shadow of a doubt."

"But …"

"Wait! Here's still another paper to complete the sweet circle. Look. An injunction handed down this afternoon by the Supreme Court of the State of Washington, making it incumbent upon Tom Graves to give a complete accounting of ore taken, shipped and sold from the Yankee Doodle Glory mine, injuncting his further working of the mine until the case has been settled and turning over Tom's money in the Old National to a receiver until that same date. Not only that. Lehneke seems to be ace high back home in Germany. For they even got busy there and put their paws on Tom's money in the Deutsche Bank in Berlin. I tell you Graves is in a rotten bad hole, Martin!"

"Only for the time-being. I know that youngster. I tell you he'll fight harder than ever."

"I hope so. But meanwhile he's in Berlin, strapped to his last ducat, I reckon. What in thunder is the poor boy going to do?"

And exactly the same question was bothering Tom a few days before his interview with, and his tenth proposal that month to, Bertha.

"What am I going to do?" he asked himself, reading over Alec Wynn's lengthy, detailed cablegram; and then, with a smile, at another he had received that morning and in which Martin Wedekind offered to stake him to his ticket back to Spokane.

"Come straight home," Martin's cable wound up; "up to you to fight."

"I'll fight all right!" Tom's answer flashed back across the Atlantic and the North American continent. "But I am not coming back just now;" and it was just after he had sent Krauss to despatch the cable that Lord Vyvyan called on him, immaculate in morning coat, topper, gray-cloth spats, and gold-topped malacca.

"Looking blue, Graves," he said. "What's the matter? Bad developments in your mining litigation?"

The Westerner showed him the telegrams without a word.

"Oh! I'm sorry! What are you going to do?"

Tom's jaws set like a steel trap.

"Fight!" he replied, laconically.

"Good!" exclaimed Vyvyan. "Jolly old spirit! Jolly old Anglo-Saxon quality! Fight! That's the ticket, old dear!"

Tom gave a rough laugh.

"I know. Only … at times I wonder if I'll be able to win."

"What?" The Englishman was horrified.

"Yep. It may be like—oh—like tackling this German army, with their Krupp guns and their trained millions, with our two-by-four American army. Damned stiff, Vyvyan! And …"

"Don't you dare say hopeless, Graves!"

"Sure. I won't. To please you. Only—" suddenly the whole despair of his situation surged upon the horse wrangler "—I've nothing left to fight with. They put their filthy, legal hands on everything I possess in the world, even the money I have in Berlin, at the Deutsche Bank. I don't know how I am going to pay for my dinner to-night, how I'm going to meet my rent. Yes. I've nothing left to fight with …"

"Except your friends!" cut in the Englishman. "You've got me!"

Tom smiled.

"Mighty kind of you, old fellow. I appreciate it, you just bet! But—not meaning to hurt your feelings none—how can you …"

"Shut up, and watch my smoke, Graves! What you got to have to fight that Lehneke person is the nervus rerum, money in other words …"

"That's no news!"

"And I'm going to supply it. I'm going to be the cute little bright-eyes who's going to plank down the war chest!"

"You?" Again Tom laughed. He remembered that the other had frequently told him how "stony" he was, that he did not have a cent in the world and had to depend on his brother, the Duke, for everything. "You—help me? Like the blind helping the lame!"

"Not at all. I have the makings, as you Americans say."

"Quit your bluffing. I know you're bust!"

"I am not!"

"You told me yourself that …"

"Old aunt of mine went out. Died, I mean. Left me oodles of cash."

"Oh!" Tom's exclamation was frankly incredulous; but Vyvyan slapped a check book on the table.

"Stop arguing and doubting," he said. "I'll write you my check now. As much as you want. Enough to fight that Lehneke person and to pay for all your living expenses here. Just name your figure," and, when Tom did not reply, only laughed, "how'll five thousand guineas do for a starter?"

"Five thousand guineas? That's twenty-five thousand dollars, isn't it?"

"Rather a little better, old cock. More if you want to. It'll be a pleasure."

"Must have left you a mint o' money, that aunt of yours."

"Right. Splendid old dear, wasn't she?" He waved the check book. "How much?"

But Tom shook his stubborn red head.

"I won't accept it," he said.

"Don't be a silly goat. You have got to win that case. You must give that Dutchman beans! Come on. Let me write you that check," urged Vyvyan.

"I'll think it over."

"All right, then. But I have to leave town for a few days, and so—here!" He made out his check for five thousand guineas on the British Linen Bank in London. "It's yours to use if you want to while I'm gone. Cash it at the American Express Company's local office."

"Wait," said Tom, "I must …"

"Receipt for it? Tommyrot!" And the Englishman was out of the room and the flat.

Tom looked at the check.

"Mighty convenient aunt, that one of Vyvyan's," he said to himself, "and died at a mighty convenient time. Well …"

He heard a faint noise behind him and turned. Krauss was standing there. His eyes were glued on the slip of pink paper and, acting quite instinctively, Tom put it in his pocket.

"Sent off that cable?" he asked.

"Yes, sir."

"Well?"

"Baron von Götz-Wrede is calling."

"All right. Show him in," said Tom; and a mornent later the officer came into the room.

"Has Vyvyan been with you again?" were his first words. "I just met him on the stairs."

"Yes," replied Tom.

"Do you like that drawling, supercilious Britisher?"

"Sure." Then, quickly, suddenly, Tom's temper got the best of him. "Look here," he added, belligerently, "I don't think it's anybody's damned business with whom I choose to herd, see?"

"That's where you are wrong, Graves. It is my business—as your friend!"

"Tickled to death you call yourself my friend. But—Vyvyan's my friend, too, and …"

"Let me explain!"

"All right, all right."

"Vyvyan is an Englishman."

"What of that? What's wrong with Englishmen?"

"Wrong? Oh … Nothing …"

The man was silent. He was very quiet, a smile playing on his handsome, dark features.

Then, with a terrible suddenness, a change came over him. His eyes flashed fire. His flaring nostrils dilated and quivered like those of a thoroughbred stallion. He shot out his long, strong, hairy hands, gesticulating, like clutching at an invisible, hated object. His heart, his soul, his whole being seemed to acetify, and all his well-trained, well-subdued emotions danced away in a mad whirligig of passion.

"I tell you what's wrong with them!" he cried, his voice peaking up to a high, broken screech. These English—these hypocritical, supercilious tradespeople—dieses verdammte Krämervolk! … Why, Graves … Wherever you go, wherever you turn, Africa, America, Asia, the South Seas, you find them squatting in their damned, smug self-content! Their flag is everywhere, their ships, their drawling, monocled fools of younger sons, their prating clergy, their contemptible little, scarlet-coated army … They are everywhere …"

"Sure," laughed Tom, "they are everywhere. And don't they do things right wherever they are? Don't they govern well? Don't they give all the world, including you Dutchmen, a fair chance to trade on equal terms and make money wherever they are? Say, I don't know much about politics, but just judging from what I know of horses, I reckon you're jealous …"

"I, a German, jealous of an Englishman?"

"You bet your boots. You're as jealous as hell. Otherwise you wouldn't curse them as you are doing now and the next moment try to ape them."

"We're not aping them!"

"Sure you are. I got eyes to see. There isn't a man in this town who can afford to who don't turn up his breeches when it rains in London. Look at the names of your swell stores: Old England, Prince of Wales, London House—and your hotels: the Bristol, the Windsor, the Westminster. Why, man, I've seen you ride. And you yourself try your darnedest to ride like a Britisher!"

"I don't have to try! I do ride like them. I went to the London horse show, at Olympia, and …"

Tom burst out laughing.

"Bit, didn't you?" he asked. "Caught you with the goods, eh? Been to London and learned the trick! Sure. That's just what I am saying …"

And when the Baron worked himself into another storm of passion, speaking about "dieser gemeine Englische Pöbel"," Tom cut in with an impatient:

"Forget it. You talk like an old-fashioned Cleveland Democrat on the stump. What's the use? You aren't running for Congress, and I'm not Irish. The days when you had to tweak the lion's tail to cop a hatful of votes are gone. We're sane these days."

"You mean to say that you Americans are satisfied to sit still while the English …"

"Yep. We're satisfied with our own little block of real estate from the Lakes to the Gulf, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. We aren't hogs. We got plenty and we don't envy our British cousins."

The German looked at Tom. There was an expression of utter astonishment on his aquiline face. Then he laughed.

"Ever heard of Nietzsche?" he inquired.

"No. What is it? Sounds like a guy sneezing."

"Nietzsche was a writer," the German went on, "and he wrote a book called Zarathustra. In that book there is a passage which speaks of the Ear, big as a man, on a slender stalk, and against the stalks dangles a bloated—soul shallow, untrained, helpless. And that soul, my friend, is the Anglo-Saxon world!"

"Nutty! Ab-so-lutely, completely hickory!" was Tom's simple comment; and to wind up the argument, he added: "Anyway, Vyvyan is a pal o' mine. Sit down. You look all excited. I'm going to get you a drop of my private stock Bourbon."

He walked out of the room. On the threshold he brushed against Krauss, who was just coming in, and he did not notice that the valet's nimble fingers had rapidly dipped into his side pocket to come out with a slip of pink paper.

CHAPTER XXI

THE TIGHTENING OF THE WEB

"Krauss," said Baron von Götz-Wrede while Tom was out of the room, and examining Lord Vyvyan's five-thousand-guinea check, "you have done well. I shall speak of you to … You know …"

"Thank you, sir."

The officer gave him back the check, and the valet was about to tear it up when the other stopped him.

"No, no! What are you doing, man?"

"I thought, sir, I would …"

"Heavens, no! Put it back in Graves pocket. Better still, drop it on the floor—over there—near the little taboret."

"Zu Befehl, Herr Hauptmann!" Krauss clicked his heels. The check fluttered on the rug.

"That's right. No use having Graves suspect. He's deliciously simple, our American friend. But still …"

"Any other orders, Herr Hauptmann?"

"No, Krauss. You stay with Graves."

"But—I beg your pardon, sir—if he has lost his money …"

"Not exactly lost yet, worse luck! Lehneke is doing splendidly. So are the others. But the case is not yet finally decided."

"But …" Krauss cut in again, anxiously; and the Baron smiled condescendingly.

"Krauss," he asked, "have you ever known our branch of the service to make a mistake?"

"No, Herr Hauptmann!"

"You have worked for the service in America, haven't you?"

"Yes, sir. Also in England, and in France."

"Very well. You know the ropes. You know that we are never caught napping. We are armed against all contingencies. The army? The navy? To be sure. They will do their share when the day comes …"

"Yes," whispered Krauss, "the day—der Tag!"

"But," continued the other, "we—our branch—are the real people! Our names are unknown. We get little thanks. But we are the heart of Germany. We have the will, the brains, the clear-cut, cold efficiency. Thus in the case of this delightfully simple young American. He will … Ah!" as Tom came back with a bottle and two glasses, "Thanks! I need a drink."

"Say when," smiled Tom, pouring.

"That's plenty." Von Götz-Wrede raised his glass. "Fill yours, Graves."

"Sure. Never refused one yet."

"All right. And now—let me give you a toast!"

"Fire away!"

The Baron threw back his shoulders. His heels came together sharply. He spoke in a ringing, metallic voice:

"I drink to the newest officer in the invincible army of our All-Gracious Sovereign Wilhelm the Second, King of Prussia, Emperor of the Germans! I drink to Lieutenant Tom Graves of the Uhlans of the Guard!"

Tom put down his glass.

"Say!" he inquired. "What's biting you? What sort o' hop have you been hitting? What's the big joke?"

"Joke? There's no joke!"

The Baron walked up to him and put his hand on his shoulder.

"Tom," he said in low, earnest accents, "be one of us! Put on the blue and crimson of the Uhlans of the Guard! Ride with us! Drink with us! Tilt lances with us! Laugh with us! And if such be God's will—fight with us!"

"But—but …" Tom was utterly dumbfounded.

"There are no Buts. We like you. We want you. Come! Be our comrade in arms!"

"But"—stammered Tom "I know nothing about the army. I know nothing about …"

"You can ride, man! There's no better horseman in Germany than you. Why, how can you say no? You are young and healthy. Can't you feel the glory of it, the zest, the splendor of it? A soldier's life? A cavalryman! A dashing Uhlan!"

For a moment he was silent. He tossed down the whiskey.

Then he continued in an epic abandon, and deep down in his heart he was sincere:

"The army, Tom! The cavalry! The right life for a man like you, a man of the plains, a man on horseback!"

From the distance, drifting up from the Kurfürstendamm, came the many sounds of a brigade marching out to maneuver. Brasses and fifes and drums brayed and shrieked and thumped their separate notes, blending with the hollow tramp-tramp-tramp of drilled feet, the low, dramatic rumbling of the guns, the neighing of horses, the scraping of lance butt and sword scabbard on saddles.

The Baron threw open the window.

"The army!" he went on. "God, man, can't you feel it? Doesn't it give you a thrill? The tightened reins! The call of the trumpets! The thunder of the hoofs! And—if war should come—the shock against the enemy's phalanx, the curses and the slashings, the sudden numbness of the sword arm when the steel strikes horse or rider! Empty saddles! Dust! Blades that cross and slash and flicker! And then the reeling victor's fist! Then the waving of the enemy's captured pennant! Oh, the triumph, the glorious, glorious triumph of it!"

He paused. He gripped Tom's hands.

"Come! Be one of us!" he added in a tense whisper.

The young Westerner had been steadily thinking, and the more he thought, the more fascinating seemed the Baron's proposal.

It was not only the glamour of the army which captured his imagination. He did think of it. Assuredly. For he was young and eager.

Also there was his dry American sense of humor. What a lark it would be! He, Tom Graves, horse wrangler, in the blue and crimson of Prussia's crack Uhlan regiment. Gosh! Martin Wedekind and Alec Wynn and Newson Garrett and all the other fellows back home would open their eyes some!

Herr Leutnant Tom Graves!

It was a scream!

Not only that. For there was Bertha. She was always speaking about the army, the officers, the gorgeous uniforms. Well—he studied himself complacently in the mirror which hung between the windows—he'd look all right in blue and crimson, with gold epaulettes, and a trailing, clanking, crooked cavalry saber.

And finally it would solve his financial difficulties. He would draw regular pay and save enough to fight the Yankee Doodle Glory litigation.

So there was no reason in the world why he should say no. There was every reason why he should say yes.

And he did say yes!

"Fine and dandy!" he cried enthusiastically. "I am with you! You just bet your boots I am with you!"

Then he had a sobering thought.

"Say, Baron," he went on, "are you sure the thing can be fixed?"

"Of course. I have already talked to Prince Ludwig Karl. We are anxious, very anxious, to have you in the army!"

And Krauss, who was standing in the doorway, smiled. He said to himself that there at least the Baron had spoken the unvarnished truth.

CHAPTER XXII

HERR LEUTNANT GRAVES

After Baron Horst von Götz-Wrede had left Tom found Vyvyan's check where Krauss had dropped it. He had not missed it before. He picked it up and, deciding that he would not need it now his immediate future was assured, was about to tear it up when there was a ring at the front door bell.

He had sent the valet out to get him some cigarettes, and so he went to the door himself to admit a telegraph messenger.

He tipped him and opened the crinkly, manila envelope.

"Gosh," he said, "it's raining cables to-day!"

He read. Then he gave a low whistle.

"Bully, Alec! Bully for you!"

He paused and looked at Lord Vyvyan's check.

"Damned lucky I didn't tear you up, you little rosy-cheeked beauty. You'll come in mighty handy!"

For in a lengthy missive, regardless of expense, lawyer Wynn had cabled that through a sudden change there was now a first-rate chance for Tom to win the Yankee Doodle Glory case, but that he must remit at once a stiff sum of money, say five thousand dollars. Wynn added that he would have asked Martin Wedekind for the amount, but the latter was out of town. And he himself was strapped.

So Tom decided that he would use five thousand dollars of Lord Vyvyan's check, give him back the remaining twenty thousand, and repay the balance just as soon as the case was settled.

He walked down the stairs and whistled for a taxi.

"American Express Company!" he said, speaking in German. He had been making steady and conscientious progress in the mastering of the language. "Mohren Strasse corner of Friedrich! Rasch!"—and twenty minutes later he was leaning across the oak counter of the local branch of the American Express Company and explained matters to the little, black-haired Welshman who presided over the cashier's cage.

"To be sure!" said the Welshman. "We know Lord Vyvyan. We always honor his checks."

"Always?" asked Tom, intrigued. "I thought his aunt only died the other day."

"Beg pardon, sir," replied the diplomatic, suspicious cashier. "I know nothing about his Lordship's deceased aunt. But the check is all right. What? Yes, sir, I shall make the cable transfer."

He figured for a few minutes, asked Tom to sign some papers, and gave him the rest of the money in German bills.

"Don't mention it, sir. Thank you, sir."

Tom dismissed the waiting taxicab.

"I'll walk," he said, and he struck out at a good clip down the Leipziger Strasse, across the Potsdamer Platz, towards the Westend.

The Berlin streets lay in the embrace of a golden afternoon of late autumn, the pale sun still warm with the glory of harvest, with no foretaste of winter tang and winter sadness. The roofs of the great, braggart department stores took on beauty for the time-being, glittering in every shade of green and blue and purple, like the plumage of some gigantic peacock. The oak and beech trees bordering the Spree dipped to the water in a rustling, shimmering rain of yellow and crimson leaves; the spotless windows of the many shops mirrored the cloudless evening sky with a myriad rainbow facets; and even the ugly, pompous statues that rose from every square, were relieved with delicate sprays of color that touched them with the gentle, mellowing hands of romance.

The streets were filled with people. Workmen in brick-powdered clothes went past, smoking cheap cigars, dinner pails swinging from their arms, discussing with loud voices the last editorial in the Vorwärts. Stalwart nurses wheeled their charges home from the Tiergarten. Merchants and bankers purred along in great motor-cars to join their families in an open-air supper at the Zoölogical Gardens. Back of the tennis court to the left of the Charlottenburg depot, on a rough plat of ground, some high schoolboys were playing football, not cleverly, but with a certain lusty Teutonic zest, filling the air with riotous shouts.

Tom stepped amongst aristocrat and burgess and student like a conqueror. His thoughts were with Bertha—and the blue-and-crimson uniform of the Uhlans. For, although there seemed a first-rate chance now of his winning the Yankee Doodle litigation, he had made up his mind nevertheless to accept the Baron's proposal.

It would be such bully fun. And—there was Bertha!

He grinned good-naturedly as he was bumped into by two arrogant "One Year Volunteer" privates of the Maikäfer regiment of grenadiers.

"Wait, my lads!" he thought. "Just wait till I get my uniform—my little monkey-jacket and my pointed roasting spit! I'll make you toe the mark. I'll teach you how to bump into people!"

And, stopping at the Gross Berlin American Bar, where a morose, nostalgic ex-Coney Island barkeeper was earning his living by introducing the gilded youth of Berlin West to the mysteries and delights of trans-Atlantic mixed drinks, he very much astonished that worthy by waving a lofty hand when the man addressed him as: "Hullo, Tom, you old son-of-a-gun! Have one on the house!" and by asking him, in mock dramatic accents, to call him in the future: "Herr Leutnant!"

"Say! Wot's eatin o' you?" asked McCaffrey, the barkeeper, to receive the mystifying reply, pronounced in the horse wrangler's best German:

"Rechts um! Kehrt! Präsentirt das Gewehr! Marsch! Marsch!"

"What'd ye think ye are?" demanded the aggrieved McCaffrey. "A gol-dinged Prooshan lootinant?"

"Right!" snarled Tom, trying his best to copy Colonel Heinrich Wedekind's martial accents. "Hoch der Kaiser!"—and he swaggered out of the bar while McCaffrey looked after him in speechless astonishment.

When Tom reached his flat, he found it filled by a jolly company.

Baron von Götz-Wrede was there, accompanied by Colonel Wedekind, the little Hussar whose name was Graf von Bissingen-Trotzow, the wizened professor with the tiny, red ears, whom he had met that first night at the Colonel's house, and half-a-dozen other officers in glittering regimentals.

They greeted him with jokes and laughter and enthusiasm:

"Guten Abend, Herr Kamerad!"

"Ist ja ganz famos, Herr Kamerad!"

"Grossartig, Herr Kamerad!"

"Herr Kamerad!"

"Herr Kamerad!"—and, again:

"Herr Kamerad!"

They shook his hands. They congratulated him, themselves, the army, and Germany, until the Colonel enjoined silence.

"Gentlemen! Gentlemen, if you please!"

He turned to Tom and wished him luck in a few well-chosen words, both in his own name and that of the regiment.

"Thanks!" smiled the Westerner. "But I'm not in the regiment yet. I guess there are some formalities."

"Everything is arranged. You will receive your commission to-night, Mr. Graves."

"To-night? Gee whizz! That's darned quick work!"

"Isn't it?" replied the Colonel. "But Prince Ludwig Karl spoke a word in your behalf. To-night you will be presented to His All-Gracious Majesty, der Kriegsherr! To him personally you will give the oath of fealty. Hurry into your dress clothes, my dear sir. The audience with His All-Gracious Majesty will be in an hour!"

Krauss helped Tom change, and ten minutes later he was sitting by the side of the Colonel in the latter's motor-car. They drove through the Brandenburger Thor, where the sentinels on duty jumped out, presenting arms. The Colonel saluted. Tom waved a negligent hand.

Up to the Alte Schloss they drove, where Tom was taken in tow by a chamberlain in silken, black knee-breeches, who led him through a long suite of rooms, all furnished rather dingily in the style of two generations ago, and into an antechamber where he was received by Prince Ludwig Karl.

The latter said something about: "Charmirt, mein Herr, ganz charmirt!" and preceded Tom into a large, octagonal salon.

Near the balconied window, sitting stiffly erect on a hard chair, was a short, oldish man in the full uniform of a field marshal, his chest blazing with German and foreign decorations.

"His Majesty!" mumbled Prince Ludwig Karl, and Tom looked curiously at the Prussian War Lord.

He beheld a lean, yellow, dissatisfied, rather morose face, with large ears, and sagging lips brushed by an upsweep of gray, martial mustache. With his blood shot, roving eyes, his haggard cheeks, his high, wrinkled forehead, he seemed to Tom like an old, weary bloodhound.

The ceremony itself took little time. Tom bowed and repeating word for word the oath of fealty, by the terms of which, only half knowing what he was saying, he bound himself to serve His All-Gracious Majesty in peace and war, and to obey all orders, then shook the Emperor's limp, hairy hand, and was ushered out of the salon and the palace.

The Colonel was waiting outside.

"To-morrow I'll take you to my tailor to have you measured for your uniform, Lieutenant Graves," he said.

And it was thus that, the next day, to Bertha's belligerent question of what he was going to do about it, he replied that he was going to get himself the monkey-jacket and the bit of steel.

In fact, both had already been ordered from "Paul Hoffman & Cie, Hoflieferanten, Purveyors to His Majesty the King of Spain and His Majesty the King of Sweden, Militäreffektenlieferanten" … The latter a jaw-breaking noun which even Tom, in spite of his rapidly improving German, could not translate as "army tailors" without the help of the dictionary.

CHAPTER XXIII

TRUEX

On the afternoon of the day on which Alec Wynn had sent his first, rather hopeless, cable to Tom—the cable which within forty-eight hours of its arrival in Berlin was destined to precipitate the young Westerner head over heels into the iron web of the German army—the lawyer entered his office in the Mohawk Block to find there waiting for him a half-breed French Canadian by the name of Baptiste Lamoureux, whom he knew, unfavorably, from former occasions. He had defended him more than once in the local courts for minor offenses as well as for a couple of shooting scrapes, and so Wynn's greeting was appropriate:

"Hello, Batis'! Going to croak somebody and coming to me in advance to arrange for the proper alibi?"

The Canadian laughed with a flash of even, white teeth.

"No, M'sieu!" he replied. "M'sieu, I am a frien' of yours!"

"Purely disinterested, I reckon." By birth the lawyer was a Southerner and all the years spent in the Northwest had not been sufficient to make him drop his North Carolinian phraseology.

"Alas, no, M'sieu! Disinterested? Ah! One must eat an sleep, hein?"

"Surely—and get one's nose full on occasion. Batis', I appreciate your charming personality, but I am a busy man. Close the door on the outside. I have no time for either social intercourse or the swapping of philosophical observations."

"Sure Mike. But—ah"—Lamoureux winked rapidly one little beady black eye—"you would have time if I whisper to you one, one tiny leetle word as to M'sieu 'Old Man' Truex. That no so, M'sieu?"

The lawyer dropped his forensic calm. He jumped up and took the other by the shoulder.

"Come through! What is it?"

"The information costs money. I tol' you, M'sieu, un pauv' type comme moi … I must eat an' sleep an', as you say, occasionally get my nostrils full of whiskey blanc!"

"How much, you damned rascal?"

"M'sieu! M'sieu!" exclaimed the other. "You must not misunderstand me. It is not for me, the money. I—I am your frien'. Also am I a frien' of M'sieu Graves. Once he help me an' I do not forget."

"Well? Who wants the money then? Speak out, man!"

Followed a long, tense, whispered conversation, the lawyer making objection after objection, asking question after question, all satisfactorily answered by the Canadian.

Finally Wynn inclined his head. The man's story seemed very convincing. If it was the truth, Tom was sure to win the case.

"You are speaking the truth, Lamoureux?" he asked, glaring at the other with his piercing blue eyes.

"Yes, yes, M'sieu! I swear it by the dear Virgin!"

"All right. Wait."

Came a frantic telephone call to Martin whom he had left only an hour earlier.

"Martin has gone out of town," Mrs. Wedekind said across the wires.

"Where to? I must communicate with him!"

"I am sorry. He has taken the motor and his fishing-tackle—and you know he keeps his trout streams a dead secret …"

"That's so. No reaching him, I reckon. All right. Thank you just the same, Mrs. Wedekind."

And then the second cable to Tom Graves, who acknowledged it, before the evening was out, by telegraphing five thousand dollars through the American Express Company in Berlin to the lawyer's account with the Merchants and Traders Bank.

"Quick work!" said Wynn, cashed the money, rushed to the Spokane & Northern Railrpad Depot and took the next train for Nelson, B.C., accompanied by Lamoureux.

Back in Berlin, Tom was very busy considering the duties and pleasures of his new situation in life.

"You'll catch up to all that drill stuff quick enough," Baron von Götz-Wrede told him. "Saber and lance you'll learn in no time …"

"Shooting and riding I know. I'm a pippin at it if I say it myself."

"Rather. And as to the rest, you'll learn the ropes very quickly. You'll make a first-rate cavalryman." He slapped Tom on the shoulder.

"Tickled to death you think so."

"I know it. Of course," the German continued, lighting a cigar, "there's the social life to be considered. You know the military keeps itself aloof from the civilians. We have our own clique, our own interests, our own etiquette, our own catchwords even."

"Sure. I know."

"But perhaps you don't know that there is a great deal of difference between the Guard regiments and those of the Line. Our regiment belongs to the Guard."

"Well?"

"An officer in a Line regiment can live on his pay. We of the Guard cannot. We have all sorts of unwritten laws, unwritten obligations, unwritten duties. We pay for the regimental band. We all have to keep a string of horses. We entertain a frightful lot. All very expensive, very expensive. In fact—at all events in the Uhlans—a chap must have at the very least sixty thousand marks a year private income—that's fifteen thousand dollars in your money, Graves."

"That's all right, sonny," said Tom.

The German looked up, studying the other's open, boyish features intently.

All morning he had spent at a certain office in the Tauentzien Strasse near Jensen's department store, which was labeled innocuously "Imperial German Ethnological Survey Bureau," where large steel filing cabinets were locked nightly behind double steel doors, and where men seldom spoke above a whisper.

There he had studied certain reports, two of which had come by cable from America, the third by telegraph from England, and all in cipher code.

The first cable was signed by Ethnological Survey Operator Lawrence Walsh, alias Grant Stickley, alias Jacques Mersereau, drawing his pay as simply Number 789, a former resident of Berlin, Ontario, and at present stationed at Fernie, B.C. According to him the case of Eberhardt Lehneke versus Tom Graves, while not yet completely settled, was nearly certain to be decided in the former's favor. He added that Mr. Alec Wynn, counsel for the defense, seemed to consider the case hopeless since he had left town, accompanied by a French-Canadian Indian guide by the name of Baptiste Lamoureux, to hunt mountain sheep in the vicinity of Nelson, B.C.

The second cable, by the same Lawrence Walsh, had arrived that morning and was a trifle less enthusiastic. It said that Mr. Alec Wynn had suddenly returned from British Columbia and, immediately upon his return, had had a long conversation with Mr. Jonathan Small, Prosecuting Attorney of Spokane County. Mr. Wynn had seemed to be in very good humor after he had left the Prosecuting Attorney's office, but although he, Walsh, Number 789, had gone through the lawyer's files, correspondence, desk, trunks, and clothes with minutest care, he had not been able to find out anything whatsoever. Nor had Mr. Wynn made any attempt to lift the injunction on Mr. Graves' property. It was the respectful opinion of Number 789 that Mr. Wynn was practicing that great American game called Bluff.

The third message, the telegram from London, had been sent by a certain Kurt Blumenthal, son of Israel Blumenthal, the great Hamburg banker, and clerk, thanks to the influence of his father, in the London office of the British Linen Bank. Modestly calling himself Number 554, he reported that the check for five thousand guineas drawn by Lord Vyvyan in favor of Mr. Tom Graves, about which he had been requested to give information, had not been cashed or presented for payment. Neither in the London office of the bank nor in any of the provincial branches.

Here, then, was the situation, and it was a little puzzling:

Mr. Wynn, in Spokane, seemed of cheerful mien, but had brought no action to annul the injunction. Tom was evidently not hard up in spite of the fact that he had not yet cashed Lord Vyvyan's check, for Baron von Götz-Wrede did not know that the check, cashed in the Berlin office of the American Express Company, had passed through intricate and peculiar channels. A fair-haired, innocent-looking Englishman had erased its entry in the ledger of the Express Company, had forwarded it to another fair-haired, innocent-looking Englishman in the London British Linen Bank who, seeing a minute B. E. D. written in the upper left hand corner, had taken it direct to a house in Whitehall Street. There a patriarchal, white-haired, blue-eyed gentleman had paid it in crinkling Bank of England notes and had torn it into shreds, afterwards carefully burning them to flaky ashes.

Yes. The thing puzzled the Baron. On the one hand there was the report of Number 789, on the other that of Number 554.

Thirdly, there was Tom's cheerful smile, his cheerful admission, when told that he had to have a large private income, that he knew it.

Thus the Baron decided to make assurance doubly sure. It might mean money thrown out of the window. But the "Imperial German Ethnological Survey Bureau" resembled the office in Whitehall Street in so far that it kept no record of monies received or spent.

"Tom," he said, "are you sure you're all right? I mean—about that private income?"

"Don't you bother," laughed the Westerner, who had complete confidence in Alec Wynn and who knew that the latter would not have asked him to cable the money unless he had a first-rate chance of winning the litigation. "I'm as right as rain."

"You are—positive?"

"Yep."

"But—" the German was momentarily nonplussed. He wondered if the "deliciously simple" American was less innocent than he seemed. He decided to put one of his cards on the table, face up. "I say," he went on, "I read something in the papers about a litigation against the Yankee Doodle Glory …"

"Sure. That's right. But I guess I'll win it with flying colors."

"I hope you will. In the meantime … well … I am still willing to buy the mine."

"Not on your life," replied the horse wrangler. "If my title to the Yankee Doodle is punk and I lose the case, I'd hate like the devil to see you stuck. And if my title's all right I don't want to sell. That's pretty darned square logic, isn't it?"

And the Baron had to admit that it was.

CHAPTER XXIV

ALL DRESSED UP

Tom Graves wanted to surprise Bertha Wedekind with his new rank and station, and so he had sworn the Colonel, the Baron, and his other friends amongst the officers of Bertha's acquaintance to secrecy.

Monday morning, shortly after ten, Paul Hoffmann & Cie, Militäreffektenlieferanten, delivered his uniform and full accouterments, and an hour later he was on the street in all his pristine, blue-and-crimson glory and, if the truth be told, feeling not the slightest bit self-conscious. He had been excused from active duty for the rest of the week and was entirely his own master.

In front of the house he met Kurt Meissner, the irascible banker who had the apartment below. The man stared, open-eyed, open-mouthed. Tom grinned, saluted, and went on his way.

He was in splendid humor. The tip of his sword scabbard bumped behind him on the granite pavement. He liked the sound of it. He felt like on that morning before he had won the broncho busting medal at the Pendleton roundup: quite sure of himself, but without the least conceit.

He turned down the Kurfürstendamm, and his first stop was at the "Gross Berlin American Bar."

Even at that early hour the place was fairly well filled. There were a few sporting German men-about-town talking to each other in English, very proud of their London cut tweeds, and trying not to make wry faces as the American cocktails trickled down their beer-trained throats. There was furthermore a sprinkling of Americans and Englishmen; most of them boxing and roller skates instructors, and jockeys and trainers attached to the great racing establishments of such German plutocrats as Baron von Oppenheim, Prince Salm-Horstmar, and Freiherr von Matuschka-Greiffenklau, the Silesian "coal baron."

All the habitués of the bar knew Tom Graves. He had bought them many a drink since he had come to Berlin, had helped out more than one of the Anglo-American contingent with loans of money. But at first none there recognized him.

Finally it dawned upon Pat McCaffrey that the dapper young Uhlan of the Guard was his countryman from the Far West.

He leaned across the polished bar, breaking a couple of whiskey glasses in his excitement.

"For the love o' Moses, King o' the Jews!" he cried. "Go on home, Tom, an' take 'em off!"

"Take what off?"

"Them duds, man! That there uniform o' yourn!"

"I can't," answered Tom, a twinkle in his eyes. "It's against the military regulations to wear civilian dress without special permit."

"Tom! Tom, me boy!" implored the barkeeper, while the Americans and Englishmen crowded round, laughing, joking, and while the Germans, catching on to what was the matter, made audible remarks about "verfluchte Yankee Frechheit—cursed Yankee insolence."

"Tom!" went on McCaffrey, "don't ye know there's a German law ag'in the wearin' o' them duds without ye be entitled to it? Upon me sowl, they'll pinch ye sure an' send you to jug! An believe me—" he spoke from melancholy experience, "them Prooshan jails is hell!"

Tom laughed.

"Mac," he said, "keep your shirt on. I am …"

"Look here!" cut in a snarling, guttural German-American voice.

Tom turned. The speaker was Neumann, the young German bank clerk from New York, whom he had thrashed aboard the Augsburg.

"Yes?" inquired Tom gently.

"You have no right to that uniform, you damned Yankee! It's an outrage!" He turned to his compatriots. "I appeal to you, gentlemen. Es ist eine gemeine Schande!" Once more he addressed Tom, shouting at the top of his lungs. "You'll go to jail for that, you impostor! You have no right to wear the King's Coat!"

"Oh, haven't I?" rejoined Tom, smiling. "Well, well, well!"

He took Neumann's ear between the fingers of his left hand, pinching cruelly, while with his right he slipped a paper from the top buttons of his tunic.

"Look at that, my lad!" he went on, still pinching, and, unfolding the paper, he showed it to be an army commission signed by the Emperor and countersigned by General von Bissingen, PlatzCommandant of the Berlin garrison.

"I—I beg your pardon, Mr. Graves!" stuttered Neumann.

"Call me Herr Leutnant!" thundered the Westerner, giving the clerk's ear a final, twisting pinch, and the other complied and slunk out of the room.

By this time McCaffrey was arranging bottles and glasses on the bar.

"This one's on the house," he cried. "What's your tipple, Tom, me boy?"

But Tom shook his head.

"Got to keep as sober as a judge this morning, Mac! Thanks just the same!"

"What's the matter? Callin' on yer best girl?"

"You said it!" came Tom's reply, and he walked out to the street.

He hailed a taxicab, drove up to Colonel Wedekind's apartment, and gave his card to the Pomeranian Bursche.

"Ach du lieber Herr Jesus!" was all that honest peasant could utter, but the sight of the respected uniform galvanized him into action and he took Tom's card.

A moment later, he bowed over the hand of Bertha.

She, too, was speechless.

But Tom had learned his experience in the "Gross Berlin American Bar." Instead of speaking he put his army commission on the table and asked the young girl to read.

She read, and looked up.

"Why, Tom dear!"

The latter grinned.

"See?" he said, triumphantly, "I got me my little monkey-jacket. And here's my roasting spit!" drawing his saber and making passes at an imaginary enemy.

The girl laughed delightedly.

"Tom! Tom!" she cried. "I am so proud of you. And I'm proud of Germany for having chosen you …"

"Bully! Thanks for the compliments. Sounds like the chairman of the Democratic Party introducing me to a gathering of hicks. And now, just to finish up in style, aren't you proud of Spokane, of America, for having given birth to as dashing a warrior as me? Say!" he went on, very seriously, "aren't you proud of America—just the least little bit?"

"You're a German now, too, Tom. As I am!"

"Get off, kid! You're not German, and neither am I! Not on your life! We're both Americans! Three cheers!" he shouted, "three cheers for the American Eagle! May he scream for all time to come …"

"Don't let the Eagle scream so loud," came a voice from the door.

The Colonel's mother had come into the room. She studied Tom with her snapping old eyes, and her voice was threaded with delicate malice.

"So you did not take my advice?"

"What advice?" asked Bertha.

"Nothing for frivolous young ears," replied her grandmother, and then to Tom, in an undertone: "Well, since you refused to leave Germany when I told you, since you insisted on staying here, you did the right thing. It is better to hunt with the hounds than to run with the hares."

"What—what d'you mean?" stammered Tom.

"That!" replied Mrs. Wedekind, touching his epaulettes, "and that!" pointing at his sword. "In Germany you must be a soldier—you must belong to the ruling caste—the hounds who hunt! Only—don't forget that the American Eagle is no more in your life. From now on it is the German Eagle, young man! You are a German!"

"I am not!" stoutly declared Tom, but he discovered before the month was out that Mrs. Wedekind had spoken the truth.

CHAPTER XXV

DER DEUTSCHE

Towards the end of the week Lord Vyvyan returned to Berlin and called on Tom. He was not a bit surprised to see the latter in a German uniform—which rather disappointed the horse wrangler.

"Papers spoke of it," the Englishman said casually, dropping into a chair. "The Daily Mirror brought your picture, flanked by that of the latest Pimlico wife beater and the most recent Celtic poet. Must have snapped you when you weren't looking—and labeled you: Only American cowboy who goes to sleep to the lullaby of Hoch der Kaiser!"

"I don't," laughed Tom.

"Don't you?" Vyvyan drawled the words. He was a little stiff, a little reserved, in spite of his jocularity, and Tom was conscious of a disagreeable feeling that was almost sharp mental pain. Too, there was a certain mockery in the way in which the Englishman studied his uniform through the concave lense of his monocle.

"Well, there you are, old cock. All in purple and fine linen like a regular bally hero," went on Vyvyan as stiffly as before. "How's your litigation coming on?"

Tom welcomed the turn in the conversation. So he explained what had happened, how he had used five thousand dollars to comply with Alec Wynn's cabled demand, and drew the remaining sum from his pocketbook.

Vyvyan waved the money aside.

"You'll need all the dough you can lay your hands on," he said. "Life in the Uhlans will cost you a pretty bloomin' penny."

"Yes. That's what Baron von Götz-Wrede says."

"Well, keep the money. I don't need it."

Tom looked up. Less and less he liked the tone and manner of the Englishman, but he said to himself that he must be mistaken. There was no reason in the world why his friend should bear him any ill will.

So he replied very heartily:

"Thanks. I'd be very glad to keep the money for a short time. It'll help me a whole lot."

"Keep it just as long as you care to."

The Englishman rose.

"Wait a moment," said the Westerner; "there's just one little condition."

"Oh?" came the Britannic exclamation.

"'Oh,' is correct! I expect to win that suit, and if I do I am going to give you a block of stock in the mine."

"Heavens, no!"

"It's only fair, Vyvyan."

"No, no, no! I have very special reasons why I do not want an interest in the Yankee Doodle." He looked at Tom. Quite suddenly his reserve melted. He smiled; and, under his breath, he added: "No! It wouldn't be playin' the game."

"I won't take no for an answer," said Tom, and he was so stubbornly insistent that finally Vyvyan, though still protesting, signified his acceptance.

They dined together at the "Auster-Meyer" restaurant and it was over coffee and Grand Marnier that the Englishman thawed completely and, with British outspokenness, gave his friend his reasons why at first he had been so stiff and reserved.

"It's that uniform of yours," he said. "I don't like it on an American."

"Shucks! It's only a lark!"

"A lark? Nothing is a lark in Germany. Everything here is done for a reason, a cause, an ulterior, well-thought-out end!" Vyvyan was very serious. "Remember, Tom, a few weeks ago when I said I wanted to take you into my confidence?"

"Yes. Sure I remember." Impulsively he took the other's hand. "Say, old man, if I can help you … Any time …"

Vyvyan was silent. It was evident that he was going through a mental struggle. Finally he shook his head, and, as in Tom's apartment, he said half to himself: "No! It wouldn't be playin' the game. It's what a German would do. I can't. I fancy I'm a fool."

"Don't be so mysterious," said Tom.

The Englishman refilled his liqueur glass.

"Tom," he went on musingly, "that time, a few weeks ago, when I wanted to take you into my confidence there was that old barrier—built by King George and his silly ass ministry over a hundred years ago, during the American Revolution. Now there's another barrier between you and me."

"What?" Tom was utterly surprised.

"Yes. Another barrier. The uniform you are wearing."

"That bit of blue-and-red cloth won't make any difference to you and me. How the devil can it?"

Vyvyan smiled.

"We'll see. But—will you promise me one thing, Tom?"

"You bet—if it helps you!"

"It's just this. Don't ever sell the Yankee Doodle Glory to a German!"

"Well—I haven't won my case yet."

"But—s'pose you do?"

"All right, Vyvyan. I promise." He leaned across the table. "Say it's you who sent me that anonymous telephone message the night of my arrival in Berlin, eh?"

"Maybe."

Vyvyan called the waiter, paid, and he and Tom took a taxicab and drove to the Wintergarten to see the Guerrero bend her graceful body to the rhythm of Spanish music, to hear Max Bender sing slangy Berlin obscenities that sent the audience into roars of laughter, and to applaud the antics of Buck Melrose, the eccentric American tumbler.

The performance over, they decided to have a night cap at the Tauben Strasse Casino, but on the street they came face to face with Colonel Heinrich Wedekind.

Very stiffly he returned the Westerner's salute, but when the latter was about to walk on by the side of his friend, he stopped him.

"Lieutenant Graves!"

Tom turned, surprised.

"Yes, Colonel?"

"A few words with you, Lieutenant!"

There was not a trace of the usual suavity and friendliness in the Colonel's voice. The words popped out, clipped, short, metallic, snarling, arrogant.

"But, say—Colonel!" stammered Tom.

"Was fällt Ihnen denn ein?" came the sharp reply. "That isn't the way to talk to your superior officer. Say: ‘Zu Befehl, Herr Oberst!’"

"Zu Befehl, Herr Oberst!" said Tom, stiffly, a great rage in his throat.

"That's better," sneered Colonel Wedekind, "and now you'll go home. To your quarters, sir. At once. I order you!"

Tom was hurt. He was mad clear through. He longed to strike the other with his clenched fist. But though his secret anger partially submerged his intelligence it did not affect his natural caution. Too, he heard Vyvyan's soft whisper: "Look out, old chap!" and so he only allowed himself a slight irony as he replied:

"All right. I get you. So long." And he saluted, clicked his heels, took Lord Vyvyan's arm, and turned to go.

Again the Colonel's harsh bellow stopped him.

"You will go home alone; without—ah—His Lordship. You will not leave your room. I shall see you in the morning. Guten Abend, Herr Leutnant," he snarled and walked away.

"Now—what the hell …?" commenced Tom, to be cut short by the Englishman's sober:

"Do what you are told. The man's your superior officer. Do what you are told," he repeated, very tensely. "Only—for God's sake!—remember your promise. Do not sell the Yankee Doodle Glory to the Germans!" And he hailed a passing taxicab and was off in his turn, while Tom returned to his flat, thinking deeply.

The next morning, shortly after ten, Krauss announced Colonel Wedekind.

The latter was a little more friendly, a little less sharp than he had been the night before, and Tom was inclined to ascribe the whole scene to a drop too much to drink when the German suddenly said:

"Lieutenant Graves. Let's get to business. I look with great disfavor on your friendship with Lord Vyvyan. That is why I ordered you to your quarters. In the future you will cease associating with the Englishman."

Tom shook his head.

"Nothing doing," he replied. "Vyvyan is my pal."

Again the Colonel flared up.

"What's the matter with you?" he rasped out. "What do you mean by addressing me in that manner?"

"What manner?"

"That American slang of yours. Speak German to me, understand?"

"Say," drawled Tom, "what's wrong with American slang? Isn't it good enough for you?"

"Do not argue, sir, do not argue! How dare you contradict me? Well—you must give up Lord Vyvyan." He rose and buckled on his sword.

Never before, since he had grown up, had Tom Graves come face to face, as it were, with the word Must. It was not contained in the dictionary of his life. He was willing to be proved wrong, to be shown, to be persuaded, to do the right thing as quickly as he saw that it was right.

But … "Must"?

He said so.

"Don't you give me any of that Must dope," he said. "There's no Must in my makeup. Might as well talk Siwash to me!"

Colonel Wedekind had turned purple with rage. His eyes blazed, his mustache bristled like that of an angry tomcat, and the veins on his temples stood out like thick, crimson ropes.

"Are you going to obey, sir?" he asked. "Yes—or no?"

"No!" came the horse wrangler's flat dictum.

"Very well, Lieutenant. You are going to pay for this extraordinary, unheard-of piece of insubordination," and he was out of the room, clanking his saber.

Krauss had come in shortly before the last scene. He was very pale, for, in spite of everything, in spite of his calling, he had grown genuinely fond of Tom.

Tom turned to him.

"Say, Krauss," he asked, "what do you think that old coyote is going to do?"

"I am afraid"—Krauss's voice held the suspicion of a quiver—"I am afraid he is going to court-martial you, sir."

"Well," laughed Tom, "he's got another think coming. Me for the protecting folds of the Stars and Stripes!" and he ran out of the room, down the stairs into the street, and jumped into a taxicab.

"To the American Consulate!" he ordered. "In the Friedrich Strasse!"

He knew John Poole, the Vice-Consul, a Westerner like himself, who had watched his progress through the military society of the German capital with a great deal of glee, and was proud of the fact that Tom had obtained a commission in the Uhlans.

Thus, when Tom called on him that morning, he waved him into an easy chair and pushed towards him the cigar box marked "Visitors."

"Have a smoke, Tom," he said hospitably.

Tom lit a cigar, blew out the smoke in a thick, straight line, and touched Poole on the shoulder.

"Poole," he said, "you old Oregonian web-foot, I am in a hell of a mess and I got to have help."

Help to Poole meant money, and he was careful by nature.

"I am sorry, Tom," he said, a little less cordially, "I'm bust myself."

"I'm not asking you for money. I want protection."

"Protection—you? And from whom?"

"I got into a row with my Colonel. Krauss, that's my valet, says I'm going to be court-martialed sure pop. So here I am. This is the American consulate. Go ahead and do what the tax-payers back home chip in their little jitneys for."

Poole cleared his throat.

"Tom," he said, "the American Consulate cannot protect you."

"Eh?" queried Tom incredulously, "what're you giving us? Didn't you hear me say that I am in a pickle up to my fetlocks?"

"Yes. I heard you all right. But—Tom—you are not an American."

"What?"

"You are a German! Ein Deutscher!"

"Get off your perch! I didn't take out any citizenship papers."

"You didn't have to. You got your commission in the army. Swore fealty to the Emperor, didn't you?"

"Sure. Well?"

"That little ceremony changed you automatically into a German subject. Tom," he added, "I am sorry."

"So am I, Poole. Damned sorry, to put it mildly!"

And he left the Consulate a sadder and wiser man.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE ARMY

The days passed, rounding into the swing of the week. But no spurred, booted, helmeted orderly knocked at Tom's door to hand him the dread blue envelope, sealed with red, of the summons to Militärgericht, to court-martial.

The waiting, the period of uncertainty got on Tom's nerves, and he turned to Krauss for an explanation.

"I have served my three years in the army, sir," replied the valet, "and I found it to be a velvet hand in an iron glove. You never know what to expect—velvet or iron."

"Well, I know what I'm going to give them if they drive me too far. Neither velvet nor iron. Just a good, plain, old-fashioned mule kick!"

But he felt less brave than his words. It was not that he was afraid. Not for himself, that is, for he did not understand that complicated emotion called Fear. He was thinking of Bertha. He had donned the blue and crimson of the Uhlans really more for her sake than for any other reason.

And to lose it now! To be court-martialed, perhaps disgraced?

Why, Bertha was a proud girl, quick, high spirited. She would look upon him with contempt. It would be the end of his love dream—the end of everything worth while in his life, he added bitterly.

And so he was greatly relieved when on a Tuesday, quite early in the morning, Baron von Götz-Wrede called on him and told him that cavalry riding school drill was on.

"You're detailed to it, Graves," he said.

"Me? Gosh. There's nothing they can teach me about a pony."

"I know," smiled the other. "Nor are you going to be taught. You are going to teach us, the other chaps."

"Bully," cried Tom, and he accompanied the Baron.

The riding school of the Uhlans of the Guard was a great, square, frowning brick barrack in the North ern part of the town, the ancient part of Berlin, way beyond the Janowitzer Bridge, which, many generations ago, at the time of Frederick the Great, had been the center of Prussian fashion.

To-day it is gray and hopeless and sad. Mile upon mile of jerry-built houses, covered on the out side with stucco, that panacea against all the social and hygienic evils of Berlin, but inside—the inside which the foreign tourist never sees—hotbeds of dirt and vice and degeneracy. Poor students live side by side with laborers, with the countless "police licensed" prostitutes of the capital, with underpaid, underfed clerks. A police station, presided over by a red-faced, bullying, saber rattling sergeant is every five blocks, and on every corner there is a Destille or Stehbierhalle—a low drinking den. It was in similar surroundings that the Parisian conceived the germs for the great French Revolution that, over night, swept away the cobwebs of Crown and Bourbonism with the clouting, unwashed, impatient fist of Democracy. Not so in the stuccoed slums of Berlin.

Not the slums of liberty gloriously, terribly in travail. Only the slums of hopeless misery, choking in their own stench and despair.

Liberty, Democracy, healthy Revolution, can only come to Germany from the outside!

It was in that quarter that the Uhlans had built their new riding school, their new, immense stables that were far better than the tenements surrounding them.

Inside, the first man whom Tom Graves saw was Colonel Heinrich Wedekind.

Tom saluted. The Colonel returned the greeting, then talked to the Westerner in an easy, friendly manner as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and the Baron, seeing both Tom's belief and astonishment, whispered to him not to mind "Old Ironside" (that was Wedekind's nickname), as he was liable to have martinet fits at times, and there was never any harm done.

Tom was shown through the stables, and the warm reek, the neighing, stamping horses made him forget his uniform. He was himself again, the horse wrangler, the rider, the free man of the plains born and bred to the game of hoof and saddle and quirt.

With zest he entered upon his new duties. Too, with absolute mastery. There was nothing about a horse that he did not know. He did not belong to the older generation of Westerners who broke a horse and, incidentally, its spirit. Tom trained them, with gentle voice, with infinite patience, with knowing hand and a certain sense of humor that seemed to establish a link between man and animal.

And thus he taught the others.

"Back up there!" he yelled to a fussy old major who was pressing his fat knees into a bay mare's withers. "This isn't a contest of strength between you and the horse! No, no! This isn't the way to make a horse go! Let your legs swing loose. What? Never rode on a long stirrup? Well, here's where you are going to start!"

And, waving aside the stable sergeant who came running up, he himself lengthened the stirrup leathers and adjusted the saddle girth.

He clacked his tongue.

"Get up, major! There—down on your seat … Down, I say! Don't hold on to the reins like that! My God, why do you have to have martingales in this benighted country?"

Again, to a young lieutenant:

"Don't lose your nerve, sonny. I'll show you. Got such a thing as a straight bit? No? All right!"

He turned to a farrier sergeant.

"Here. Take this and flatten it out. This way—hammer down the corners. Make it an inch shorter. And look out for the leather slips!"

Thus all morning, and that night, at mess, a consensus of opinion amongst the younger officers would have established the fact that Tom Graves, ex-horse wrangler, was the most popular man in the Uhlans of the Guard.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE STATEMENT

Tom Graves discovered that Baron von Götz-Wrede had not been guilty of exaggeration when he had said that an officer in the Guards must have a private income of at least fifty thousand marks a year.

The demands upon his pocketbook were heavy and incessant.

His uniforms alone, and there were over a dozen of them, from simple fatigue and stable uniform to a gorgeous affair used for parade drill, cost more than Tom back home would have spent for clothes in a life time. His full dress sword was a hammered, chiseled, engraved work of art worth its weight in silver.

Then there were the horses, those for himself as well as for his Bursche and his stable boy, the latter two new acquisitions. And the horses were not the shaggy, round-eyed range ponies one can pick up at a bargain in the West after roundup. These animals were thoroughbreds, English, Arab, Kentucky, and Hungarian, and they cost a thoroughbred price.

He had to subscribe to the band fund, the regimental charity fund, the mess fund, the Liebesmahl fund, and half-a-dozen others. He had to entertain lavishly. Thus the sum which Vyvyan had advanced him melted like snow in a Northwestern chinook wind, and it was not many weeks before he saw the tail end of his roll.

The Baron must have guessed something of the sort.

"I'll buy that mine of yours," he said time after time, with wearying Teutonic persistency, thinking that repetition was synonymous with argument; chiefly one day, late in November when Tom had been initiated into the delights of baccara at a private Club for Guard officers and high Prussian officials called sardonically: "Verein der Harmlosen—Association of the Innocent," where, finding out that all his poker training did not help him a whit in a pure game of chance, he had dropped over eight thou sand marks to the little Hussar, Graf von Bissingen-Trotzow.

So it was with an ear-shattering whoop of relief that early one morning he opened and read a long cablegram, signed Alec Wynn, which brought the startling news that Truex was not dead, that the litigation against the Yankee Doodle Glory had been dismissed, that Lehneke was in jail, and that once more Tom was on the high crest of prosperity.

"Wedekind and I are celebrating to-night!" wound up the lawyer's message. "I'll add the cost of it to my fee."

"Go to it!" Tom cabled back. "I shall do some little celebrating myself at this end!"

He did.

First he telephoned to Vyvyan, who congratulated him, but was unable to attend the festivities. Then he gathered about him a baker's dozen of chosen spirits of his regiment.

The celebration began with a dinner at Dressel's, progressed through the half-dozen layers of the Berlin night-life-layer-cake, from a look-in at the latest Metropol Theater Review where, typical of the German capital, the American actress, Madge Lessing, was the female lead, and Giampietro, an Austrian ex-cavalry officer, the male lead, to the newest Cabaret where the long-haired artist at the piano, a cross between Paul Verlaine and Ernest Dowson, trilled passionate serenades that would have curdled both County Council and Comstock blood; to wind up in a rapid, impromptu switch into civilian dress, at Bissingen-Trotzow's apartment, and a dance at one of the Westend all-night places where stout provincials, on their annual spree, were opening wine, where cocottes from all the world had their nightly rendezvous, and where a Bavarian orchestra was trying hard to bring Teutonic order and efficiency into the disorderly, syncopated swing and rhythm of the latest American ragtime tune.

Results: a headache and a brown taste, and a none too pleasant word when early the next morning (Tom thanked his stars that it was a free day, without stable or drill duties) Krauss announced Baron von Götz-Wrede.

"For the love o' Mike, Baron," Tom said weakly, holding his tousled red head, "don't speak to me! Have a heart. I have a feeling like …"

"I know. Wait. I'll mix you something that will touch the right spot," laughed the other. He went to the kitchen door and spoke a few words to the valet who, a few minutes later, brought in a steaming cup of coffee cut with kirsch.

"Swallow that!" commanded the Baron.

"You're the doctor!" Tom drank the steaming, aromatic mixture, blinked his eyes, smiled, and sat up. "Say," he continued, "and you're a great little doctor. I'll call you in again. Thanks for coming."

"I had to come. Matter of duty. You see, I am the adjutant of the regiment …"

"Sure. Say—is old Wedekind kicking up again? Threatening me with court-martial for some sin or other?"

"No, no. Just a simple little routine matter." And von Götz-Wrede explained to the Westerner that he had not yet made out his sworn statement of property for the regiment, to be filed with the War Office.

"What statement?"

"Oh—just a little statement. You know our army administration is nuts on system. Here you are!" pulling a blank from the leather manuscript case he was carrying—"Have a look at it!"

Tom took the blank, glanced at it, and, under the direction of the Baron, filled it out.

It read as follows:

Name:	Tom Graves.
Regiment:⁠	Erstes Garde Uhlanen Regiment, Kaiser Alexander.
Squadron:	A.
Stationirt:	Berlin.
Oberst:	Heinrich Wedekind.
Ich erkläre hiermit auf Eid, dass das folgende mein gesammter Besitz ist: (I give oath herewith that the following is my entire property:)
In check account with Deutsche Bank: Mark:	5789,50
In check account with Old National, Spokane: Dollars:	9883,37
⁠Horses:	Bay mare "Searchlight,"
	Grey gelding "Harold,"
	Bay mare "Foxhall,"
	Chestnut stallion "Boxer,"
	Black mare "Upsala."
Bonds:	None.
Stocks:	None.
Real Estate:	None.
Other property: The Yankee Doodle Glory Mine, Hoodoo District, Idaho, U.S.A.

"Sign here," said the Baron, after Tom had filled out the rubrics under his supervision. "That's right!"

He turned the paper:

"And now sign here, Tom."

Again Tom signed his name.

"Thanks," said the Baron, "that's finished. Sorry to have bothered you." He returned the document to his case. "Go back to sleep, old man. Au revoir!" and he left.

All the rest of that week Tom Graves had not a single moment in which to see any of his friends, not even Lord Vyvyan or Bertha Wedekind. He was on duty mornings and afternoons, and had furthermore been detailed to special lectures every evening, including Sundays, at the Kriegsschule—the War School—in the Dorotheen Strasse.

It was a typically German experience through which he was passing.

Whatever Baron von Götz-Wrede's ulterior reasons for suggesting an army career to the Westerner, whatever the ulterior reasons of Colonel Wedekind, of Prince Ludwig Karl, of the Emperor himself for confirming the Baron's choice and granting the gazetting, now that Tom actually was in the army, the army proceeded—tried to proceed—to Prussianize him, his speech as well as his limbs, his thoughts as well as his unborn thought-germs, his very imagination, his very morality, his very prejudices. He had entered the crunching maw of the great machine—the greatest, for sheer, cold-blooded, soulless efficiency, the world has yet seen—and it was up to the machine, to the trained engineers who directed its destinies, to turn Tom into the finished product, the stiff, rectangular, disciplined Prussian pattern.

The machine, the engineers, began by calmly assuming that Tom's human life had commenced the moment he joined the Prussian army. What had gone before, his American blood and birth and training and freedom, was not to be considered. It simply was forgotten. Did not exist. Never had existed.

Tom's was one mind, untrained, against a crushing, overwhelming majority of trained minds.

Yet he fought. He resisted.

Unconsciously, of course, for he hardly realized what was happening to him. But there was in his veins a drop of Scots blood from his mother's side, and his father's family had once or twice intermarried with Vermont Yankees, who had left their worked-out farms and taken the wilderness trail. Thus he was of a combative, an argumentative turn of mind. He was in the habit of replying to questions by asking one. He argued in a dryly, persistent manner.

"This is right—and that—and again this!" said his teachers at War School.

"Why?" said the irrepressible horse wrangler. "I want to know."

And it was this incessant "I want to know" which, in the end, saved Tom from a great tragedy.

Thus he resisted unconsciously.

But there was one thing which he fought quite consciously, one thing which he refused to learn, simply because he was not able to.

And that was machinery.

"I'm all right with horses," he told Major Kurt Werningerode, the chief instructor, "and I caught on to the saber and lance trick. But—Gosh!—I'm in the cavalry. What the hell's the use of my learning all that dope about wheels and electricity and steam and things?"

"The cavalry are the eyes of the army," said the Major sententiously. "But what earthly good are eyes without nerves to register what they see, brain cells to store the knowledge away, without hands and arms and legs and feet to obey the nervous reaction of the brain cells? Furthermore," he went on, "what chance has the bare hand against the hand armed with machinery?"

"Sure," admitted Tom. "But, Gee II am a cavalry man. No getting away from that. Let somebody else act the part of the hand, the machine."

"No. In modern warfare nobody knows what might happen."

"Go on! Who's talking of war?"

"I am!" the Major replied succinctly. "That's what we are here for, Lieutenant Graves. The army isn't all cakes and ale and glittering uniforms and parade reviews in front of visiting royalty. War may come …"

"Not if I can help it!"

"You won't be consulted. And if war comes, nobody, I repeat, knows what might happen. Just suppose your squadron is rushed in suddenly, on foot …"

"Not on foot?" groaned the Westerner.

"Yes. On foot. Suppose you are rushed in to support a brigade of infantry. Suppose the day is critical. Suppose the battle, the whole campaign, the very fate of the Empire, depends on the defense of a certain bridge head. For hours it has been shelled. Nearly destroyed. Nearly taken. The sappers and miners have been decimated. The infantry barely holding its own. The reserve is cut off by a vicious barrage fire. But your squadron has been scouting, is there, in direct communication, direct support. Then it would be up to you, Lieutenant Graves, to do the sappers work. Up to you and your squadron. That's why you must familiarize yourself with machinery."

He pointed to the blue print on the table.

"Now—as to this lifting- jack," he recommenced his lecture in dry, academic accents, and Tom bent his red head and listened.

But it was of no use. He could not understand, try as he might. His was not the mind to grasp and retain mechanical and scientific details. In every other respect he was a good officer. He knew horses, of course, and had mastered quickly and thoroughly the art of saber and lance. Too, he was an excellent squadron leader, for he had the natural knack of the free Westerner, the "good mixer," to make people obey him without bullying them, and he got on splendidly with the privates and the non-coms. It was the same with his brother officers. Of natural dignity, not to forget natural humor, clean and straight and square, he was socially easy and sympathetic.

But machinery? The machinery of modern warfare?

"Auf Ehrenwort, Herr Kamerad!" snarled little, rosy-cheeked Ensign Baron von Königsmark, recently graduated from the Lichterfelder cadets school and gazetted to the Uhlans of the Guard, "if ever you should have special reasons for quitting the army in a hurry and there was a ninety horse-power Rolls-Royce at your door, all gassed up and ready to leap, you wouldn't know which button to push."

"Right, young fellow," grinned Tom. "I'd rather have one horse-power, as long as it's a horse of flesh and blood and bone, than ninety horse-power of steel and spark plugs. I'm the original little man on horseback!"

The result was that finally, at least in that one particular, the Prussian war machine gave in. Tom was released from special lectures, and was detailed altogether to stable duties, where he made supremely good.

Thus his evenings were his own, and he spent more than half of them with Bertha.

Regularly he proposed to her. Regularly she refused him. And the next day he would come right back to the attack with a certain affectionate defiance.

"All your fault, Bertha," he said, when she objected laughingly; "you want to turn me into a Dutchman, and I have learned the first trick of their game. I've become pig-headed, see? Therefore—will you marry me, Bertha? I'm just plumb crazy about you!"

CHAPTER XXVIII

HAMBURG-TACOMA

A few days later Tom received a letter from Alec Wynn in detailed explanation of the cable that the suit against his ownership of the Yankee Doodle Glory had been thrown out of court.

First the lawyer described the visit of Baptiste Lamoureux, the French-Canadian half-breed, to his office. Together, as soon as Tom had wired the five thousand dollars, they had taken the train to Nelson, B.C., where they had met a friend of Baptiste, another half-breed by the name of Jean Marie Trudeau, a trapper, who had returned a few days earlier from a look at his traps in the Elk River country, where Truex had prospected and where he had supposedly found his death. The three of them had left Nelson on horseback, and had struck across the hills. With the utmost silence and caution, the trapper guiding, they had dropped into a cup-like valley where they had come face to face with …

"With Truex," the letter went on, "alive, tied, gagged, and as mad as a hornet—and watched by a two-gun ruffian. But we had the drop on him, released 'Old Man' Truex, who at this writing is still swearing terrible cuss words, and turned Mister Ruffian over to the sheriff at Nelson. The trapper, who had come across the thing by accident, received two and a half thousand dollars, so did Baptiste, and on last accounts they are both still painting Nelson, B.C., a rich crimson. I returned straight to Spokane, and had a talk with the Prosecuting Attorney. Of course the case was clear. Truex had been kidnapped, and the coroner as well as the three witnesses had been bribed and had perjured themselves. But at first we kept quiet. We did not say a word to Herr Eberhardt Lehneke or his side-kicks. You see, we wanted to catch him good and for keeps. In certain respects, we succeeded. In another, we failed.

"As to the latter, while we got the coroner and the three witnesses by their short hair, we found it impossible to establish legal connection between them—the kidnapping, the fake burial, the perjured statement—and Lehneke. Those fellows must have been paid darned well, for they absolutely refused to implicate their principal. Too, his papers seemed all right. We had to accept them as such, since there were the several sworn statements of the German Consul-General in New York who, thanks to his office, is above suspicion.

"On the other hand, Herr Lehneke made one little mistake. He was too all-fired impatient. You see, the mine had been turned over to a receiver, Seafield Granahan, until the case was completely settled. There was an injunction "against your working it. But, as long as the litigation was not finished one way or the other, the same injunction applied to Lehneke. He had no right to work the mine.

"But he did, with the connivance of Granahan, the receiver, who also must have been thumpingly well bribed.

"Lehneke mined some of the ore, treated, and shipped it. We jugged both him and Granahan and caught the ore shipment, twenty-seven car loads, at Tacoma, where they were backed into a water-front siding awaiting transportation by sea.

"By the way, and this is funny, Lehneke may be a clever crook, but he is a rotten judge of ore. For, after treating it, he carefully left the gold at the mine, merely taking the bulky residue, which contained just a little silver and copper, and of course that unknown ingredient, metal or whatever it is, which disturbed the scientific world so much at the time when Newson Garrett made his assay …"

That evening Tom met Vyvyan at the "Gross Berlin American Bar." The Colonel had said no more to Tom about his friendship with the Englishman since their scene on the subject, and so the Westerner saw a good deal of his British friend.

They were sitting in a box, to the left of the bar, where McCaffrey had served them with his own hands.

Tom read the letter to his friend.

Vyvyan listened without a word. Only when it came to the passage of the ore shipment, he gave a little exclamation.

"Well," he said, "it makes no difference. For you …" He cleared his throat, and was silent.

Poole, the American Vice-Consul, had come into the room, saw the two, and gave greeting:

"Hullo, fellows!"

"Hullo yourself! What're you drinking?" came Tom's hospitable voice.

"The usual!" Poole said to McCaffrey, who brought him a high-ball of rye and ginger ale.

Poole sat down, opened his evening paper, the Vossische Zeitung, read a few lines, chuckled, and looked up.

"Say," he gave judgment, "these Dutchmen aren't half as smart as they imagine."

"Aren't they?" drawled the Englishman.

"Exactly! Greedy pigs, that's what they are. Forever trying to cop all the world's trade by fair means or foul. But once in a while their greed sort of absquatulates with their gray matter."

"Ah—dry up!" Tom gurgled into his glass. "We know you're in the Consular line of easy job and got to look after the dollar-squeezing end of the diplomatic game. But what do we care?"

"Well," replied Poole, "you and I are both from the Wild and Woolly. And this … Well, I don't want to bore you …" He folded the paper and put it in his pocket.

"What is it?" asked the Englishman.

Poole laughed.

"Just what I told you. Once in a while the Germans overshoot their mark. You see, the paper says that the German Government has decided to subsidize a line of steamships, fast steel freighters, half-a-dozen of 'em owned by the H. A., to run between Hamburg and Tacoma, through the Suez Canal, stopping at Singapore and Hongkong for coal."

"Well?" asked Tom.

"Heavens, man!" went on the Vice-Consul, "there isn't enough direct business between Hamburg and Tacoma to subsidize a measly tramp boat. Governments only pay subsidy to compete with foreign ships. And what great foreign line goes direct from Europe to the Northwestern ports? Why, it's ridiculous. It's a great, big, reeking, nickel-plated commercial bull! Yes—these Dutchmen sure overreach themselves once in a while. Hullo?" to Vyvyan, who had risen and had taken his coat and hat, "leaving us?"

"Yes. I have some business to attend to."

"Mighty sudden," said Tom. "I thought we were going to spend the evening together."

"Yes, yes!" The Englishman was already on the threshold. "I forgot something rather important!" and he was out of the room.

CHAPTER XXIX

PERSONA NON GRATA

The telephone bell cut through Tom's revery with a jarring, acrid twang.

Lazily, half reluctantly, he turned from the open window where he had been sitting, since his return from the "Gross Berlin American Bar," pleasantly shivering in the sudden chill of autumn leaping into winter. It was such a long, still night. Few people roamed the streets of the Westend. A glittering veil of stars was flung across the crest of the night, and a sweet smell was in the air, a mixture of far-off snow and decaying leaves.

Tom had filled his lungs with it. It had made him think of home, his own country, the Northwest.

Dr-rr-rrr came the telephone bell again, with an impatient, accusing note. Tom left the window. He took down the receiver. Next door, in the valet's room, Krauss, too, was gluing his ear to the hard rubber tube.

"Hello."

"Hello, hello," came the voice from the other end of the line. "Is that you, Tom?"

"Yes. Who's that?"

"Vyvyan. Got to see you at once."

"Why—I thought you told me you had important business …"

"Exactly! That's why I got to see you. And I don't want that nosy servant of yours to hang 'round and listen."

"Ah—keep your shirt on. Krauss is in his little chaste dada, dreaming of blond beer, a blond breakfast roll, and a blond hausfrau."

"All right. Be straight over."

Fifteen minutes later a motor-car purred to a stop in front of the apartment house. There was a ringing of bells, angry, impatient voices, a drawing of bolts and slamming of heavy doors, and Vyvyan came into the flat.

"Sure Krauss is asleep?"

"You bet. Convince yourself if you do not believe me."

"That's just what I'll do. Where is his room?"

"There—to the left," said Tom, pointing; and the Englishman walked over on tiptoe, pressed his ear against the door, and listened.

There wasn't a sound.

Very cautiously he opened the door. The electric light from the hall danced into the room, sharply out lining the valet's face. The man was sleeping the sleep of the just, breathing rhythmically and peacefully. Only, as soon as the Englishman had closed the door again, the sleeping man groped underneath his pillow, drew out a long, silk-covered rubber tube that disappeared in the direction of the wall, and inserted the narrow orifice in his right ear.

"Well, what's biting you?" Tom asked his friend, back in the other room.

Vyvyan looked the Westerner up and down, with cutting, sneering contempt.

"I tell you what's biting me," he replied, his voice at first low, then leaping up extraordinarily strong, all his habitual British phlegm suddenly dancing away in a whirlwind of temper. "You are a damned, double crossing, traitorous …"

"Hold on! Back up your horse!" Tom's words came in a deep, soft, feline purr. "Don't you say things for which you might be sorry afterwards!"

"I? Sorry? My God, I'm only sorry for you, you damned …"

"Vyvyan," cut in the Westerner in that same soft purr, "I gave you warning!"

"Warning of what?"

"That I am going to lose my temper in exactly three seconds—unless you behave and tell me straight what is the matter!"

The Englishman -looked at him in silence for a minute. His Adam's apple worked up and down like a ball in a fountain. He seemed to swallow his rage as if it were some nauseating drug, choking him.

Then he spoke. And his voice was quite cold, quite passionless.

"All right. I know that Germany is a swine of a land. I know that the rulers of Germany hold the charming belief that the rest of the world is a dirty, decadent shrub that must be mulched with caked blood and that the German sword will supply that same blood. I know that Germany intends to …"

"For the love o' Mike, what are you driveling about?"

"Wait. You asked me to explain. And I am doing it. I know that Germany is an ugly beast ready to jump at the throat of civilization the moment the word is said, the moment the leash is slipped. I know how they are working here, for that one end, blood and conquest and booty, with all their might, their energy, their strength. I know Germans. They believe. They obey. They think that whatever is told them by their master is the truth. But you, man …"

"What have I got to do with it?"

"You're an American, an Anglo-Saxon, a free man, an independent man. You are an individual, not a Prussianized number! I can excuse the German man in the street. He doesn't know any better. He has been clouted and flattened into a pattern. But you … My God!" Again his passion was getting the best of him. "You …"

"Cut out the melodrama! Come to the point!"

"You gave me your promise, your solemn promise, and you broke it! That's all!"

Vyvyan turned to go when Tom's hand caught his shoulder and twirled him round.

"That isn't all by a long shot. What promise did I give you?"

"The Yankee Doodle Glory! You promised that you would not let it get into German hands!"

"Well—didn't I keep my promise?"

"You didn't!"

"I did!"

"You didn' 't!"

"I did!"

"You …"

"Scissors, Vyvyan! One of us two is nutty. Let's figure out who!" The words were spoken with such evident good-humor, such utter sincerity, that Vyvyan controlled himself.

"Tom," he said very quietly, "didn't you sign a statement just the other day?"

"A …? Sure. I remember. The morning after Alec cabled me that I had won my suit and after I had gone on that grand, celebrating spree. Yes. Statement of property for the regimental archives."

"Did you read through the whole document?"

"Well no!"

"Would have been better if you had," Vyvyan said dryly.

"Why?"

"Because on the back of that little statement—and you signed that, too—was a clause by the terms of which you turned your whole property, including the Yankee Doodle Glory, over to the German Government."

"Gee!" Tom was dumbfounded. "I never thought …"

"You should have. You should never sign anything, anywhere, chiefly here in Germany, without reading it through first." The Englishman spoke with a certain hopeless, weary despair. "Well—the harm's done—and there you are. I am sorry I lost my temper, old chap. I thought …"

"That's all right, Vyvyan. I know what you thought. You thought I double-crossed you. You made it pretty damned plain. And …" Suddenly he laughed. "Why," he went on, "there's no harm done. They won't steal my little pot. I am sure the Germans won't take advantage of that clause."

"They won't steal your money. I know. Only—they're going to work that mine for you."

"I have my own engineer in charge. Fellow called Gamble. Good man."

"All right. I lay you long odds—say a hundred to one—that Gamble is going to get the boot, that the Germans will work the mine, and put one of their own men in charge."

"I take that bet," replied Tom. "I am nuts over easy money."

It was only after his friend had left that Tom considered how strange it was that Vyvyan should have known about the statement to the regiment. He was quite certain that he himself had never said a word about it, had not considered it worth while, and he also knew that the Englishman was not popular with the Uhlans.

Still, there had been a leak somewhere.

Too, he remembered other odd circumstances in which Vyvyan had figured: His appointment to the Berlin attachéship by wireless when the Augsburg's apparatus had been out of order; the fact that his aunt had died at that convenient time, leaving him enough money to come to Tom's support when the litigation against the Yankee Doodle Glory seemed hopeless; the Baron's dislike of the Englishman, and his row with Colonel Heinrich Wedekind on the same subject.

"Young fellow," he apostrophized his absent friend, "I don't know a darned thing about that Chinese stink pot called European politics, but I bet you know more than's good for you, and you aren't half the silly fool you try to make yourself out at times."

It was a rather rueful Tom who, the next morning, opened and read an indignant cable from the Hoodoos, signed "Gamble," in which the latter complained that a party of German engineers had suddenly come to the mine, had produced fully authorized papers, had taken over the workings, and had given him three days notice.

Tom went straight to the British Embassy in the Wilhelm Strasse.

He found his friend packing his trunk.

"You win, Vyvyan," was his greeting. "Gamble got sacked. The Dutchmen are working the mine. Here you are," giving the other a bank note in payment of the wager.

Vyvyan slipped it into his waistcoat pocket.

"Thanks, old top," he said dryly, with a return to his usual inane, slangy drawl. "Come in jolly handy, what? It'll pay my fare."

"Going away for long?"

"Right-oh! Don't s'pose I'll ever come back again to Berlin."

"What?" Tom was astonished. "You mean—you are leaving for good?"

"Exactly. The Ambassador—'Old Titmouse'—chevied me. Just as I got chevied from Washington. For frightful incompetence. Oh, well … I fancy my brother, the Duke, will have to pull a few more wires."

He finished packing, and shook hands with Tom.

"Sorry," he said. "I like you. Well—good-by." Then, suddenly lowering his voice: "And—don't forget—if ever you are in trouble, if ever your own people at the American Embassy should refuse to help you …"

"Yes, yes," replied Tom. "I remember. I have to find the guy with the ring. All right."

He drove to the station with his friend, and thence to the regimental barracks.

"Looking blue," was Baron von Götz-Wrede's greeting. "Anything wrong?"

"Yes. My friend Vyvyan has left Berlin. The Ambassador chucked him."

"Oh, no, he didn't!" laughed the Baron. "The German Government demanded His Lordship's immediate recall. His Lordship is persona non grata with His All-Gracious Majesty the Kaiser." He put his hand on the Westerner's shoulder. "You see," he went on, "I know. That's why I warned you against Vyvyan. Awfully good for you that he has been sent away."

"I'm not sure of that," mumbled Tom under his breath.

CHAPTER XXX

STORM CLOUDS

The year drew to its close. Christmas came with snow thudding softly, with jingling sleigh bells, with motley gifts packing the shop windows, with glittering trees.

Came the New Year—Nineteen Hundred and Fourteen—and the Uhlans of the Guard celebrated it with a Liebesmahl, worthy of Lucullus, to which not only the officers of the other crack cavalry regiment came, but even the Emperor himself, Prince Ludwig Karl, and the Crown Prince.

The long table at the Hotel Adlon, where the feast was being given, was a mass of crystal and silver, broken here and there by banks of fern and violets, and by tall gold holders with miniature pennants—souvenir regimental pennants, each inscribed in gold letters with the name and date of some historic victory: "Rossbach," "Lützen," "Belle Alliance; "Metz," "Königsgratz" "Sedan" "Gravelotte," "Leipzig" … The list seemed endless.

Tom was at the far end of the table, with the younger officers, but he had sharp eyes and could see the length of the room. He studied the Emperor's face. Again, as at that other time when he had seen him, the man reminded him of an old, weary blood hound.

Tom shivered a little. He was not an imaginative man, but something unpleasant had touched his soul. He raised his glass of sparkling Moselle and drained it.

The next moment his neighbor, the little, rosy-cheeked Ensign Baron von Konigsmark, nudged him in the ribs.

"Graves! Graves!" he whispered.

Tom looked up from the depths of his wine glass.

All had risen to their feet. They stood at attention, facing the Emperor who, his face flushed with wine and excitement, had got up in his turn.

"Meine Herren Offiziere!" the Emperor boomed.

Then hushed, tense, dramatic silence through which the Emperor's words rattled and cracked and thudded like machine-gun bullets.

Tom had steadily improved his knowledge of the German language. But he could not understand everything the War Lord was saying.

Yet here and there a word, a whole sentence, stood out. And he understood—the words at least.

As always, when the Emperor had been drinking, the mysticism, the religious half-madness in his soul, rose to the surface. It blended with his soldier's soul and peaked to a very terrible, a very sinister apex:

"The world—the world outside of Germany—is Babylon!" cried Wilhelm. "Remember the words in the Bible—Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city! And again Babylon shall fall … To the touch of the German sword …"

Then, later on:

"I see the angels of the Euphrates let loose! Angels with breaths of flame, with eyes of flame, with hearts and souls and hands of flame! I see them, with their flaming swords of vengeance, rushing upon the weak, decadent, Western world … The world that preaches the ungodly, accursed sermon of freedom for the people and by the people! The angels—the angels of vengeance—the German angels descend and smite Europe and drown a third part of all her people in blood! They stifle and trample and kill with glowing feet the enemies of Him, our God, our old German God, which is, and which was, and which is to come! The sun is overcast with sable blackness! The stars fall from the firmament upon the earth! Upon the earth blazing in a most frightful conflagration! The sea is blood! The fish and all the creatures of the oceans choke with blood! The world, for its own salvation, must be absterged by a lotion of blood—and it is our duty, our shining privilege, our German privilege to obey the voice of our God, the German God! It is our right to smite the ivory towers of Babylon, to …"

"What the devil is he talking about?" Tom asked in an undertone.

"War! War!" The little Ensign's voice was hoarse with a great, unnatural emotion. His china-blue eyes blazed. His small, white hands opened and shut spasmodically.

"Stewed!" was Tom's silent comment. "Stewed to the gills, the whole darned lot of them, including the Emperor/ and he succeeded in taking French leave and returned to his apartment.

There was no more Liebesmahle, no more jolly mess gatherings, as the new year swung into line. The army, from Count Moltke down to the last recruit, passed into a stage of feverish work, and Tom was kept busy, often late into the night, judging the cavalry mounts that came in endless streams from Silesia, the Rhine Province, and East Prussia.

More horses came. Some from Russia, little shaggy brutes that reminded Tom of the Western cayuses; sleek-coated, unbroken ruffians from the South American plains; English thoroughbreds and handsome, long-tailed stallions from Turkish studs; squat, bowlegged Mongolian ponies; heavy-boned Belgian and French mares. All the world sent horses, and Tom was in his element. He had been made chief remount officer for the military district of Berlin, and he did not mind the extra work. He enjoyed it rather. It was his old job of the Killicott, magnified a thousand times.

"You see," he said to Bertha one of the rare evenings when he was off duty, "it gives me an additional reason, this work, for sticking to Germany and the army."

"What's the other reason?" asked the girl.

"You. I won't go home without you."

"Why not?" she asked mischievously, well knowing what the answer would be.

And it came.

"Because life away from you isn't worth the living! Why, girl, I know you don't care for me …"

"But I do, Tom. I love you like a …"

"Stop it!" cried Tom. "Here's that 'brother' again. Cut it out. It makes me mad clear through. I want you to love me like I love you, the right way, the good way, the regular flesh-and-blood way. I don't give a rap for that brother and sister stuff. I want love! The sort that kisses and likes it, by Gosh!"

She laughed.

"I have always thought you were a dear, Tom, and you are. I almost wish I could kiss you."

"Right here's where your wish is going to be gratified," came his quick reply, and he took her in his arms and kissed her full on the mouth.

"Tom, Tom! You mustn't …" She tore herself away and ran out of the room, colliding on the threshold with her grandmother.

The old lady looked at Tom quizzically.

"Ah," she said in her gentle, malicious voice, "I see that you are becoming more Germanized every day. To the victor the spoils!"

"You bet your life!" replied Tom, noways abashed.

Meanwhile the gathering excitement that had struck such a dramatic note in the Emperor's New Year speech gained speed and strength and a certain threatening grimness.

And not only in the army.

A change, at first subtle, then more and more distinct, finally gross, crept into the public life of the cap ital, even into the manners of the individuals. All Germany seemed one gigantic masonic lodge, in which everybody knew the pass word, everybody understood the signs and portents, with the exception of the foreigners, including the diplomatic corps.

People still aped foreign fashions. There were still advertisements in the shops of "Latest Paris Mode," "Latest London," "Latest New York," but an ugly undercurrent began to be at work against the foreigners themselves.

Tom was witness at a scene in the street where a German student, and sober at that, publicly insulted a young English girl for speaking her native language. He was about to interfere, but was immediately stopped by Baron von Götz-Wrede, who was with him.

"Remember your uniform," said the latter.

And by the time the Westerner had torn himself loose from his brother officer's grip and had mumbled something succinct about "Damn my uniform!" the student had disappeared.

Another change came into the wording of the restaurant menus. French was barred from them, by unofficial, but forceful, imperial edict, and this edict, ridiculous, petty, was obeyed by the people with absolute, granite, Teutonic seriousness.

Tom laughed.

"Say," he confided to Bertha, "I've always been as fond of spaghetti as a Wop. But when it comes to calling them Hohlmehlnudeln, I pass. I wonder if they are going to Prussianize the word 'steak.'"

But it was not only in mean, small details that Berlin was changing. Almost it seemed as if beneath the clean pavement of the streets a gigantic, barbaric soul was beating against the fetters of the West, of civilization, of humanity, as if this soul was about to break the fetters, to push outwards into the world with a crackle of forged steel, to flash its sinister message to the far lands.

Strength! Efficiency! The Iron Fist!

These were the shibboleths of the hour; and ever, more and more, their passion, their challenge, their brutal, satanic leer, grew and bloated.

Months later, when the armed citizenry of France and Britain were battling heroically against the invader, certain of the scenes which at the time he had not understood, came back to Tom, like fragments of evil dream that trouble the sun peace of waking day.

He remembered, for instance, one definite picture.

A crisp winter day; the wind rustling the bare trees of Unter Den Linden; a crowd of students leaving the Pschorr Bräu Restaurant for the University; brokers hurrying on their way to 'Change; a file of Grenadiers of the Guard goosestepping down the street to relieve the watch on the Pariser Platz; a few late tourists looking into the shop windows or issuing from the swinging portals of Hamburg-America or North German Lloyd; a chilly, orange sun flaming poignantly.

Tom recalled it all vividly. Also the man he saw swinging around the corner of the Wilhelm Strasse: A certain Mr. Trumbull, an American newspaper correspondent, who had a rare knack for foreign political intrigues and who would have made supremely good but for a thirst that never left him.

Tom had met him several months earlier, before he had joined the army.

"Hullo, Trumbull!" he greeted him, hand outstretched.

Trumbull was the worse for drink, but he steadied himself.

"Tom," he said, picking his words with alcoholic precision, "I'd rather be damned than shake hands with you."

"Why?" laughed Tom. "What's the matter? Isn't my hand clean enough for you?"

"It is not!" hiccoughed the other. "It is spotted with blood. I know—even if those silly fools of diplomats are as blind as new-born puppies;" and he staggered down the street while the Westerner looked after him, shaking his head, and muttering something about D.T.'s.

Then there was another memory. A Sunday dinner at the house of the little professor with the tiny red ears whom he had met at the Colonel's and whose name was Kuno Sachs.

Dinner was over. Tom had been talking to Bertha. She had excused herself to say a few words to her hostess. Tom saw a group of the younger officers gathered about the professor in the latter's smoking-room.

Sachs was holding forth, in a high, shrill voice, his little, wrinkled fists shooting up and down emphasizing his points.

"Nietzsche has said it," he shrieked. "It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, strong beyond measure, daring beyond measure, must see it through to the end. He must not weaken. He must not listen to the cries and threats and accusations of the others, the weak, the useless, the impotent. Strength! Rücksichtslosigkeit! That is it. Women and children? They, too, are potentially dangerous! They, too, must be hurled to the oblivion of death …"

"Say," laughed Tom, who had joined the group, "aren't you the blood-thirsty little wretch?"

And, at once, there was silence. At once the conversation was changed. Sachs commenced talking feverishly about the palaeolithic relics of ancient Egypt; Colonel Wedekind about a horse which he had bought the other day; the little Ensign von Königsmark told a joke which he should have been too young to understand; and Baron von Götz-Wrede mentioned the new ballet at the Opera,

Tom was an interloper. But at the time he did not exactly realize it.

Then there were the new lectures at War School.

"Know anything about French?" Tom was asked one day by Major von Tronchin of the General Staff.

"No! Not a word, except Oui!"

"Not enough. You will attend French lessons every afternoon from three to six."

"All right," sighed Tom, who had found out that it was useless to argue when superior officers adopted that tone, "I'll make a try at the parley-voo."

He did.

But it puzzled him that he was not put through a regular course in grammar. All his instructors expected of him was to memorize, like a parrot, certain lengthy French paragraphs and their German equivalent. These paragraphs were on printed forms, several dozen of them, and the lot was collected in a book, printed by the General Staff and marked "Very Confidential," and Tom learned to the best of his ability.

Here are two or three of the French paragraphs, with their German translations, which he was taught:

"A fine of 600,000 marks, in consequence of an attempt made by ——— to assassinate a German soldier, is imposed on the town of O———. By order of ———.

"Efforts have been made, without result, to obtain the withdrawal of the fine. The term fixed for payment expires to-morrow, Saturday, December 17, at noon. Bank-notes, cash, or silver plate will be accepted."

"I have to acknowledge receipt of your letter dated the 7th of this month, in which you bring to my notice the great difficulty which you expect to meet in levying the contributions. I can but regret the explanations which you have thought proper to give me on the subject; the order in question, which emanates from my government, is so clear and precise, and the instructions which I have received in the matter are, so categorical, that if the sum due by the town of R——— is not paid the town will be burned down without pity."

"On account of the destruction of the bridge of F———, I order: The district shall pay a special contribution of 10,000,000 francs by way of amends. This is brought to the notice of the public, who are informed that the method of assessment will be announced later and that the payment of the said sum will be enforced with the utmost severity. The village of F——— will be destroyed immediately by fire, with the exception of certain buildings occupied for the use of the troops." ^[1]

"Say," asked Tom of Baron von Götz-Wrede one night in January, showing him one of the above blanks, "what's it all about? Are you fellows preparing a Pancho Villa raid on a gigantic scale?"

"No, no. But you know the Kaiser's maxim: 'In time of peace prepare for war.' By the way"—the Baron added suddenly—"if you are tired of the German army, I fancy I can …"

"Me? Tired? Not on your life. I'll stick right with you."

"Are you sure?"

"Positive."

"You know what it means?" went on the Baron.

"You bet your life. I'm going to stay with you until …" He was going to say until Bertha returned to America, but checked himself. "Yep," he went on, "I'm going to stick all right."

The Baron did not reply.

And, a few days later, tragedy stalked into the even path of Tom's life.

1. ↑ See "MILITARY INSTRUCTOR FOR USE IN THE ENEMY'S COUNTRY," printed by the German General Staff in 1906. With thanks to Mr. Bruce Barton, editor of Every Week.

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