The Man on Horseback Part 3

CHAPTER XXXI

THE INSULT

In the morning the new battle standard of the Uhlans had been solemnly presented by the Emperor, accepted in the name of the regiment by the assembled officers in parade uniforms, after which special service, Doctor Emanuel Dryander in the pulpit, had been held at the Cathedral, across from the Schloss.

In the evening Prince Ludwig Karl, the honorary Chief of the regiment, was giving a supper to finish the celebration in his palace near Potsdam that overlooked the placid surface of the Havel Lake.

Tom had been officer of the day at stables and so it was late, nearly eleven o'clock, when he arrived. He walked briskly from the railway station to the palace that towered to the night sky in a baroque, hectic mass of Prussian Eighteenth Century rococo with here and there a reminder of the grim old mediæval stronghold from which it had emerged, which it had superseded—some huge, barred windows, looking incongruously frowning; an immense arch gaping across the blotched shadows of the inner courtyard; a mean, starved chapel, elbowing a great marble stable, and giving the impression of a huddled beggar; and, of course, the little black and white striped wooden houses of the sentinels.

Tom surrendered helmet and overcoat and entered the great ballroom, where the celebration was being held.

The room, its walls covered with paintings stolen by the Prince's father from French châteaux in the war of Eighteen Hundred and Seventy, its ceiling painted by Tiepolo, stolen during the same war and transported bodily, was immense; but not only the officers of the Uhlans, but also those of the other crack regiments stationed in Berlin, Potsdam, Spandau, and Köpenick, besides a great many high Government officials, had been invited, and so the room was well filled.

Supper was over but for an immense buffet running the length of one wall, where liveried servants ladled out the famous moselle and brandy punch of the Uhlans. The guests had split into numerous little groups, and Tom, with a smile and a nod here and there to friends and acquaintances, joined a knot of officers that had gathered around Colonel Heinrich Wedekind.

They had all been drinking heavily and they greeted Tom boisterously.

The Westerner shook hands and was about to raise the goblet of punch that little Ensign von Königsmark had brought him when a hand snatched the glass away and sent it crashing on the marble mosaic floor.

"You can't drink with us!" said a raucous voice.

Tom turned.

"What the devil …?"

He looked. The man who had snatched the glass away, who had spoken the words, was Baron Horst von Götz-Wrede.

Tom was slow at taking offense. His first thought was that the man must have been drinking. Then he reconsidered.

For the Baron was perfectly sober. In fact, had only just come in. The uhlanka was still on his head, the silver gray cape, lined with crimson, across his shoulders. The insult had been deliberate and for a cause.

The little Ensign had turned very pale. He liked the American.

"Baron " he stammered in his high, childish voice, "Baron von Götz-Wrede …"

Then the Colonel interfered:

"Gentlemen! I beg of you! Please—no private quarrel here, in the Prince's palace …"

Already some of the other groups had heard and seen. They rushed over to find out what had happened. Excited voices asked questions, to be answered by other questions.

"What's the matter?"

"Was ist denn los?"

"Aber, meine Herren," from a white mustached old Colonel, "was fällt Ihnen denn ein?"

Tom was the quietest of them all. He smiled at the little Ensign.

"Thanks, young fellow," he whispered. "You aren't such a bad little chap." Then, to the Baron, in an even voice: "Go ahead and explain—if you can!"

There was hushed silence, the tense silence of expectancy, of waiting for something.

Then the Baron's words, harsh, sibilant, snarling:

"Herr Leutnant Graves! You will remember that some time ago the German Government subsidized a line of fast steamships to run direct from Hamburg to Tacoma, coaling at Singapore and Hongkong."

"Sure," replied Tom, puzzled. "What's that to me—or to you?"

"The very first ship of this line, on its return trip to Hamburg, put into Hongkong to coal."

"Well?"

"The British authorities there, through some legal chicanery, have held up the ship. They refuse to give clearance papers. And—bei Gott!—it's the work of your English friend, Lord Vyvyan, and your own work, you damned Yankee traitor!"

There was another silence. The little Ensign clutched Tom's arm convulsively, but the latter shook him off. He stepped straight up to the Baron.

"Herr Hauptmann!" he drawled, icily, "I don't know what the devil you're talking about. I have nothing to do with your subsidized steamships nor with the harbor authorities of Hongkong. Also I don't give a damn about your calling me a Yankee. But I object to being called a traitor, see?"

And his fist suddenly clenched and crashed straight between the Baron's eyes, sending him reeling to the floor.

The next moment pandemonium broke loose.

Voices. Questions. Exclamations. Hands gesticulating. More officers running up and closing in. More questions. The Prince himself asking excitedly what had happened.

Only the little Ensign kept his equanimity. He took the Westerner by the arm and rushed him to the door.

"Go to your quarters, Graves," he said.

"What for? I won't run away. If he wants something from me …"

"Yes, yes. That's just it! You struck him! You gave him a deadly insult! You must go to your quarters at once! You must wait for his seconds!"

"Oh?" smiled Tom. "A duel is it?"

"Natürlich!"

By this time they had reached the street.

"I say, Graves," stammered von Königsmark. "You know—I like you"—he blushed like a girl—"may I be your …"

"My second? You bet your life, kid!"

And he shook the young ensign's hand.

 

CHAPTER XXXII

THE DUEL

The little Ensign, Baron von Königsmark, though he had only been gazetted a few months earlier, proved to Tom as the Stadtbahnzug, the suburban train, rattled through the night towards the Friedrichstrasse depot, that he was very familiar with duels and their etiquette.

"Yes," he replied to the Westerner's amused questions, "at the Cadets School I was principal and second at several affairs of honor …"

"My sainted grandmother!" cried Tom. "You don't mean to say that you little snut-nosed brats at school …"

"We already wore the King's Coat!" the Ensign cut in a little stiffly, while Tom murmured weakly: "Holy Mackerel!"

"We must have another second," continued von Königsmark gravely, after the other's mirth had subsided. "Some friend of yours, a countryman by preference. Whom would you suggest, sir?"

"Well. Let's see."

Tom scratched his head. Quite suddenly his lack of real friends, now that Vyvyan was gone, struck him very forcibly. McCaffrey? Impossible. And so were the American and English jockeys who fore gathered at the "Gross Berlin American Bar."

A German, then! But—who? He shook his head. Gosh! he said to himself, he had no friend amongst the Germans, not a single one with the possible exception of the little Ensign, now it had come to a show-down.

By this time the train had pulled into the station, and Tom had an idea.

"I'll get Poole," he said, "our web-foot Oregonian Vice-Consul. Won't he be surprised? Oh, boy!" and he went to the station telephone booth and startled his countryman from sleep.

But it appeared that the latter was not only surprised, but also indignant.

"What?" came his voice across the wire after Tom had explained what he wanted of him. "I—to be your second? Preposterous! Absolutely preposterous! Remember that I am in the service of the American Government! Why, man, the Big Boss back in Washington would have my scalp!"

Poole rang off while Tom returned to the waiting-room.

"What luck?" queried the Ensign.

"Nothing doing."

Tom felt dejected and just a little homesick. He turned to go when, coming from the station restaurant, he saw Trumbull, the American newspaper correspondent who, recently, had refused to shake hands with him.

The man was for passing by without a word, but Tom stopped him, explained his predicament in a few words, and Trumbull broke into laughter.

"Sure," he said, "I am your man. I'll be there with bells. What's the next thing on the bill o' fare?" he asked the Ensign.

The latter explained that he would telephone out to the Prince's palace, see if the Baron was still there, ask who his seconds were, and arrange for an immediate meeting between them, Mr. Trumbull, and himself, at his apartment.

"Pardon me a moment, gentlemen." He entered the booth.

"Say," whispered Tom to the newspaper man, "isn't he the little fighting cock?"

But Trumbull did not smile. Very soberly he shook the Westerner's hand.

"Graves," he said, "I guess I was wrong the other day. Otherwise you wouldn't … Never mind. But take my tip. Shoot to kill. At the very least, put him out of action first pop."

"No, no! What's the matter with you?"

"If you don't, he will."

Tom grinned. "I'll just wing his gun arm."

"I'm afraid that won't be enough. Get him through the lung—and quick."

He had spoken in such a strangely tense manner that Tom looked up curiously. He had seen gun fights in the West, and he knew that odd things are liable to happen when it goes for the life of a man.

He cleared his throat.

"You mean …"

"I mean that you are up against a stacked deck!" said Trumbull brutally.

"You're crazy, old man. Götz-Wrede is a gentleman …"

"I guess so. But he's a German gentleman, with German standards as to what it means to be a gentleman. And in Germany the first rule for a gentleman is to obey the orders of his superior officers."

"What the devil do you mean?"

"Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies. I don't know you so very well after all, Graves. I am only helping you because you were an American—once …"

"I am still!" cried Tom heatedly.

Trumbull waived the point.

"Never mind. I just ask you to take my tip, that's all."

"But why? For God's sake, why?"

Trumbull gave a cracked laugh.

"Never mind," he said. "I'm only a hopeless drunkard with a fixed idea. They'll tell you so in Park Row—in Washington too, for that matter. I'm just plain bughoused when it comes to Germany and German politics. Don't you believe a word I say. But"—he gripped Tom's shoulder—"shoot straight!"

A moment later the Ensign came out of the telephone booth and reported with a great deal of business-like precision and, too, a certain well-pleased satisfaction that he had arranged the meeting with the Baron's seconds and that they must hurry.

"See you as soon as we get through," he said to Tom. "I suppose it will be pistols. So you had better eat a good breakfast and top it off with a tumbler of brandy neat. Beer, preferably English stout, is all right for sabers, but when it comes to the little old pop guns brandy is the ticket, Herr Kamerad."

He saluted and was off, together with Trumbull, while the Westerner drove home through the waking streets of Berlin.

Krauss met him at the door.

One look at him convinced Tom that, somehow, the man knew what had happened—perhaps, he thought a moment later, what was going to happen. For the valet's face was gray, haggard, deeply lined. His eyes stared anxiously, as at some terrible specter of night, and Tom smiled rather bitterly.

Everything suddenly seemed very clear—and he had been all sorts of a cursed fool.

Warning? Why, he had been warned right and left, but he had not even taken the trouble to look more closely, to understand.

The Web!

Who was it had spoken about the Web?

Oh, yes! Lord Vyvyan—to be sure!

And other people, too. Martin Wedekind. And old Mrs. Wedekind, Martin's mother. And Trumbull—and …

"Well, Krauss," he asked finally, "what's wrong?"

Krauss stared at him. He tried to speak. Could not. Rather, dared not.

He was a tool, a tiny wheel in the great, cold blooded, crunching machinery of the German Secret Service. They had clouted and stamped him into a number, a drab, gray, monotonous pattern, cuttingly efficient, soulless, hard.

But …

Suddenly he spoke, very rapidly, as if afraid that thought, deliberation, might stop his flow of words; and he blushed very much as the Ensign had blushed.

"Leave Germany, Lieutenant," he cried. "I shall help you. Please leave …"

Tom shook his head. He put his hand on the "servant's shoulder.

"Krauss," he said, in a low, tense voice, "I thank you. You aren't so bad. But you cannot serve two masters. And your master is …"

"You!"

"Not a bit of it! Your master is Germany. I know—now. It took me a long time to see. I guess I am very much of a damned fool. But I know—now. Just you brew me a cup of coffee and," he remembered the Ensign's advice, "bring the brandy bottle."

At seven o'clock his seconds returned, looking very grave.

"Stiff conditions," said Trumbull.

"Of course!" Von Königsmark inclined his head. "It was a deadly insult, you know."

"Well," said Tom, "don't scare me to death. What is it? Bricks at a hundred yards?"

"Six shooters at twenty paces," rejoined Trumbull, "continuous fire after the umpire has counted Three until one of you two is dead or completely disabled. Simultaneous firing. I insisted on that. They were going to give their man first shot—said he was the insulted party. But I held out."

Tom smiled.

"Thanks," he replied. "I guess I'll wing me my little bird. It's a cinch."

Trumbull was excited. "Don't you be so all-fired sure. Remember what I told you …" But he did not say any more, for Tom, with a warning cough, had indicated the Ensign, who had stepped to the window.

The latter was very nervous. Every few seconds he looked at his watch.

"We meet at nine o'clock in a little clearing in the Grünewald just the other side of St. Hubertus," he said. "We'll have to leave here soon. If there, are any letters you want to write …"

"No, no, not to a soul," replied Tom. Then he reconsidered.

He did not believe in heroics. Nor in sugary sentimentalities. On the other hand, he was too natural, too simple a man to be afraid of his emotions. He loved Bertha. There was the one great, all-important fact in his life; and it made no difference that the girl did not return his love.

Should he call on her?

Impossible. It was too early in the morning. Besides, he hardly had the time.

But he must hear her voice, just once, before the duel.

"Pardon me, gentlemen," he said to the two seconds. "Would you mind stepping in the other room for a minute? I want to telephone to somebody."

A moment later Central had connected him with the Colonel's house.

"I would like to speak to Miss Bertha," he told the servant who answered the call.

He waited. Then:

"Hello, Bertha! Is that you?"

"No!" boomed a harsh voice across the wire. "This is Colonel Wedekind speaking. I forbid you to talk to my niece. You have disgraced the regiment, sir. You …"

Tom gave a bitter laugh.

"Say," he shouted back, "cut out the grand-stand play! I get you all right, all right! Efficiency! That's what you call it, eh? But, my God, I have an idea that even German efficiency ought to back water when it comes to a little slip of a girl! Ring off? Sure I'll ring off, you damned old son of a …"

He slammed down the receiver, took a deep breath, and called to the other room.

"Come on, fellows. I'm all ready. Let's get through with the slaughter."

They drove down the Kurfurstendamm, across the Halensee Bridge, through the latter suburb, and out into the snow-clad solitudes of the Grünewald. The woods were silent and crisp, sweet with running shadows and the slanting beams of the chilly winter sun. Far on the edge of the horizon a flush of gold and amethyst was fading into pale blue.

They stopped at St. Hubertus. The old-fashioned road-house was still asleep, with here and there, on the upper floor, a yellow light flickering and leering behind silken window blinds. A circular driveway led up to the massive, cast-iron gates of the little pine park which surrounded the house. Beyond it was the garage.

"Wait for us," said the Ensign to the driver. "We'll be back after a while."

He walked ahead, the other two following, Trumbull talking in an undertone to his countryman.

The Westerner did not reply. He hardly listened. His thoughts were of home. Back there, twenty miles the other side of the Killicott, was just such a pine forest as this one, with just the same cool peace and quiet. He remembered a day, two years ago, when he had ridden through it by the side of Bertha. He remembered how still it had been—he could have heard the breathing of a bird, the dropping of a loosened pine needle.

And the same chilly, distant sun in a haze of gold and silver, and its fitful rays weaving checkered patterns through the lanky trees.

"Here we are, gentlemen," came the Ensign's voice, and Tom looked up.

They had arrived at the clearing. At the farther end was Baron von Götz-Wrede, smiling, debonair, talking nonchalantly to his seconds—the Hussar, and another young captain of cavalry whom Tom did not know. A little to one side was the umpire, Major Wernigerode, speaking with the surgeon who was sitting on a camp-stool, arranging his instruments very much with the mien of a butcher.

The seconds met, the umpire presiding. All the details were quickly arranged. The distance was marked, the six shooters inspected and accepted, the two duelists placed facing each other.

"Meine Herren," said the Major in a loud voice, "I believe you understand the conditions. Fire at the word Three. Not before. Keep on firing until all barrels are emptied or until death or disablement. Breast to breast. Neither budging, swerving, receding, nor advancing is permitted."

He stepped to one side, joining the doctor and the seconds.

"One!" He counted.

Two …"

There was a roaring detonation, a sheet of flame, immediately echoed by another, double intonation, by two sheets of flame that followed each other so quickly that they seemed to be one.

The Baron had fired first, at the signal Two! Deliberately! Shooting on a foul! Shooting to kill—to murder, rather!

But Tom's eyes, his ears, his brain, his nerves, his hand, had acted simultaneously. He had swerved, dropped to the ground. He had fired—fired again, sure of his aim.

He was unwounded. But the Baron lay crumpled up, his blood staining the snow.

It had all happened in the fraction of a second. At once there was excitement, cries, shouts. The Umpire, the seconds, the doctor came rushing up.

"Foul! Foul!" cried the Hussar, threatening the Westerner with the Baron's pistol, which he had picked up.

The young Ensign knocked it aside.

"Your own man shot foul!" he replied feverishly. "He shot first … at the word Two. I saw it. Didn't he, Major? I appeal to you, Major!"

Trumbull gave a strange, cracked chuckle. "You just bet he shot foul. There's no discussing that point—at least"—his voice rose challengingly—"if these gentlemen speak the truth! If their uniform allows them to speak the truth!"

"Mein Herr!" yelled the Hussar.

"Dry up," replied Trumbull. "You can't threaten me worth a whoop in hell. I am not afraid of you, you crimson-coated jackanapes …"

"Gentlemen, gentlemen, please!" implored the Umpire. "Never mind. Don't you see?" pointing at the doctor, who was busying himself over the Baron's prostrate, unconscious form.

The surgeon looked up, with supreme professional calm.

"He isn't dead," he said.

Tom had not spoken a word. Now he laughed.

"Didn't think he would be," he rejoined. "I know I should have killed him, but, somehow, I couldn't do it. Just a couple of flesh wounds, eh, doctor?"

"Yes. You got him …"

"I know," grinned Tom. "I got him through both wrists. That's what I aimed at. Sure!"

He turned to the Ensign.

"Well," he went on, "this is my first affair of—what'd you call it?"

"Honor!"

"Hm!" Tom scratched his head. "Affair of honor. What the devil would you say was an affair of dishonor? Never mind. But I don't know the ropes. Put me wise. What is the next thing to do?"

"Go home. Wait until you hear from the Colonel," replied the Ensign.

"All right. Home it is." He took his seconds arms. "Let's get back and have a bite of breakfast."

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE NOOSE IN THE WEB

When, around noon, Krauss announced Colonel Heinrich Wedekind Tom Graves looked forward to an acrimonious scene, and was therefore surprised, in a way relieved, when the officer, who was in full uniform, the uhlanka on his head, saber trailing, decorations blazing on his breast, the silver sash of formal occasions running from shoulder to waist, saluted stiffly and showed by his first words that he had no intention of mentioning the ugly words that had been swapped that morning across the telephone.

"Ich bin hier in Sachen der Ehrenangelegenheit zwischen Ihnen und Herr Baron von Götz-Wrede, Herr Leutnant—I have called on you in the matter of the affair of honor between you and the Baron," was his opening speech.

"Yes, Colonel?"

"You will consider yourself under arrest for the time-being. Stubenarrest, we call it in the army. That is, you will remain in your rooms, under parole, until you hear from the court-martial."

Tom smiled. He was not very much troubled. He knew that duels amongst officers and students and generally the gentry were condoned in Prussia, in fact hushed up, hardly ever mentioned except by the liberal or radical and, occasionally, the catholic press.

He said something of the sort, laughingly, but the Colonel remained perfectly serious.

"Herr Leutnant," he replied, "you are right. We do not make much fuss over a bloodless duel or one where a participant has only been wounded."

"Well?"

"But Germany needs officers. The Emperor has given strict orders that the death of an officer in a duel must be thoroughly investigated—sharply punished."

Tom was startled.

"Death of an officer? What are you giving me?"

The Colonel rose.

"Herr Leutnant," he replied, "I regret to inform you that Baron von Götz-Wrede died from the effect of his wounds a little over an hour ago and …"

"You're crazy, man," cried the Westerner. "I only disabled him. Shot him through both wrists. What are you trying to do? Scare me? Look here …"

The Colonel's gloved hand commanded silence. He rose.

"The Baron died," he said. "The official, regimental inquest is this afternoon. I repeat that you are on parole until then. You will not leave your apartment nor try to communicate with a soul. I may be allowed to add," he wound up vindictively, "that you needn't try any of your American tricks—that you needn't try to telephone to your so valuable friends at the British Embassy. Central has received instructions to listen in on your telephone conversations." And he left, his saber rattling behind him, while Tom muttered savagely to himself:

"Sure. I get you all right. I know what that parole dope amounts to. Parole? Hell! You got your jackal, Krauss, to watch over me! Trying to catch me with the goods, eh?"

He paced up and down.

His thoughts were in a whirl.

Why? It wasn't credible. It wasn't possible.

He knew a thing or two about flesh wounds. He had had experiences out West, as a boy, before peace had come to the range.

And the surgeon had said that the Baron was not dead, that the wounds were not dangerous.

What was it then?

A—frame up?

No!

He had changed his earlier ideas about Germany and the Germans. No more he believed in the kindly, rather stolid folk that heretofore had been the Teutonic prototype in his provincial, American imagination. He had learned better since then. But he told himself that even soulless German efficiency would stop at killing one man, the Baron, so as to get him, Tom, into the clutches of the law.

Too, why this deliberate intent to get him?

Vyvyan had spoken about the Yankee Doodle Glory. There was some secret mixed up with that cursed mine in the Hoodoos. The Hoodoos! Rightly named!

But—the Germans owned the mine to all intents and purposes. They had their own engineers at work. They controlled the output!

What then had happened?

Perhaps blood poisoning had set in.

No! The Baron was the very picture of health and strength. Blood poisoning wouldn't kill him in such a short time.

Perhaps …

Up and down, up and down, he paced. Only one thing was clear: Somehow, the Baron had died from the flesh wounds, which he had inflicted on him; and, with the realization, Tom became conscious of a sharp regret in the back cells of his brain.

He had not meant to take a life. Of course, the other had shot foul, had fired at the signal Two, had tried to murder him. Still, the man was a German, an officer obeying orders, whose slogan, for right or wrong, was "Zu Befehl—at your orders!"; and, somehow, the Westerner found it in his big, generous heart to forgive.

No, no, before God—he had not meant to take a human life!

Tom felt utterly alone. In all those teeming Berlin millions there was not one soul he could trust, not one friendly hand that would stretch out to grasp his, to pull him from the mire.

Poole? Tom smiled bitterly. Poole was the Vice-Consul, a good enough fellow to drink and joke with, but scabbed with official dry rot, scared to death of losing his pull back home.

Bertha? Old Mrs. Wedekind?

No. He was not the sort to hide behind a woman's skirt, and even if he wanted to, there was Krauss on watch.

Krauss! And how many others? All thin, steely, inexorable meshes in the Web that was about his feet!

He clenched his fists until the knuckles stretched white. He saw red.

In that hour a terrible, corroding hatred of Germany, of all that Germany stood for, was born in Tom Graves soul.

He stepped to the window and looked out. The streets were covered with a thin, flaky layer of April snow, but people were hurrying in all directions, rosy, plump, well fed. A squadron of Dragoons cantered to the West, towards Halensee, their triangular pennants fluttering in the low wind, their lance butts creaking against the saddle leather, their sabers flickering like evil cressets. He heard the snarling voice of the squadron leader:

"Rechts! Rechts! Angaloppirt!"

The army—the army—and again the army! Guns and sabers and pistols and horses!

And why? What for? What was the idea in back of it?

Pomp and circumstance?

No! A nation, an efficient, thinking nation like the German, did not drain its financial blood just for show and glitter!

He remembered the Emperor's speech at the time of the flag celebration—the little professor's words—other things he had heard, from the lips of Colonel Wedekind, the Baron, even the young Ensign. Empty boastings, silly vaporings, he had thought them at the time.

God above! How he hated them! And what a fool he had been—what a cursed, cursed, purblind fool!

And Krauss?

There was another of 'em. He rushed to the corridor. He'd get his hands round that fellow's throat. He would squeeze, squeeze. There would be one of them gone to perdition anyway. Not that the desire to kill was articulate, deliberate. Rather, an instinct, an overpowering, unthinking impulse …

But he stopped on the threshold.

For he saw that the outer door was ajar. He heard voices soft, yet very tense, very excited.

One was that of Krauss, talking through the crack in the door:

"No, no, gnädiges Fräulein. I can't—honestly! I have my orders. Please …"

"Dear Krauss! I must see him," came the other voice.

It was Bertha's, and Tom cleared the length of the corridor, opened the door, drew Bertha inside, and faced the valet who was standing there, a picture of abject misery, terrible indecision.

Tom was very quiet. Gone was his desire to kill.

"Krauss," he said, "I guess you still have a few decent instincts left."

"I—I …"

In his own simple way Tom knew the human heart, the human soul. He slapped the other on the shoulder.

"Sure you have. You bet you have. You're just scared of the fellow higher up. They drilled and trained and punched and kicked your poor old soul till it creaks. But—Gosh—you are a man, aren't you? You got some decency, some kindliness. 'Fess up, man! There's nothing to be ashamed of."

Krauss bowed very stiffly.

"You are right, sir," he replied. "I have some—ah—decency, kindliness. I—am blind, deaf! I see nothing. I know nothing!" and he bowed again and went to his room, softly closing the door while the Westerner ushered the girl into the little salon that overlooked the Kurfürstendamm.

"Well, Bertha?" His words seemed very foolish, very inadequate.

She looked at him, her eyes brimming with tears, her lips working convulsively, her narrow, white hands twitching nervously.

She tried to speak. Could not. Just a faint, choked gurgle deep in her throat; and Tom, his very soul torn by love, by pity, by a great, fine longing, put his arms around her shoulders. There was no thought now in his mind about his own predicament. Bertha was in trouble. That was all that counted.

Clumsily, he patted her cheeks.

"Tell me, child," he whispered. "Tell me, honey. Come on—tell me, best beloved!"

Through her tears she smiled at him, just a little mischievously.

"You mustn't take advantage of me—because I am in trouble—to …"

"To kiss you?" Tom, too, smiled. "All right, Bertha, I'll wait until after you've told me. Now"—very seriously—"What is it? All right. Take your time!"

And Bertha told him: A long pitiful tale, another tale of the Web that out there, from the Russian frontier to the French, from the Channel to the Alps, even far across the sea, in the United States, Brazil, China, Morocco, stretched its fine, steely, pitiless meshes.

CHAPTER XXXIV

BERTHA SPEAKS

Her first words flattened into a low sob, but one that Tom, somehow, was glad to hear:

"I am homesick, Tom. I want to go back to our own country, to America, to Spokane!"

"Why, child," he smiled, "what about …"

"No, no, no! Do not tease me! You must not tease me! I can't stand it, Tom!"

"Of course not. Forgive me, dearest. Sure—you are homesick! You want to smell the scent of the pines. You want to see the open range. And you're going home. On the next ship, see? Straight away! We'll fix that little matter in no time!"

Her reply came very sober, but with a certain tense, dramatic suppression:

"I wish you could. But I am afraid …"

"Afraid that I can't fix it? Shucks, nothing to it!"

She shook her head.

"You don't understand, Tom. Wait. My thoughts are all so frightfully confused. There's so much to tell you, so very, very much. You must be patient with me."

Tom was shocked, less at her words than at the inflection of her voice, the hunted, tragic look in her eyes. Always, as he had known her, she had been high spirited, willful, a little spoiled by both her parents, yet more spoiled by her uncle and the young officers who crowded her uncle's apartment.

But, suddenly, a change seemed to have come over her. She was …

Crushed! Yes. That was the word.

He drew in his breath. Again his hatred against Germany, all things German, surged through his soul like a crimson, murderous wave.

He controlled himself.

"Tell me what has happened," he said, his words coming one by one, staccato, very distinct.

"I will, Tom," and she said that for many weeks past she had wanted to go home.

"But—I don't mean to tease you—but, dear, you told me that …"

"I know. I was stubborn—and foolish—and—I—what do the Chinamen call it? Yes. I wanted to save my face. Before everybody. Before you. Even before myself. I did not want to own up to it that my heart was simply crying for home, simply choking with the desire of it. I guess I must have been homesick ever since Christmas. Perhaps it was the Christmas feeling that started it. You know—back home—at Christmas—mother—father …"

"Sure, child. I know."

She dried her eyes.

"I told uncle. And he said yes. He would get me my ticket. Any time I wanted."

"Well?"

"I asked him time and again. But always he made some excuse. He told me the ship was crowded. Another time that he had forgotten. Again that the Uhlans were giving a dance and that I was specially invited. Then I wrote home to father, and asked him to send me money for the ticket."

"Why didn't you do that in the first place?"

"Uncle and aunt asked me not to. They said that they had invited me to Berlin, that it was up to them to pay my fare back home."

"Well? What happened? What did your father reply?"

"He didn't reply!"

"What?" Tom was utterly amazed; and the girl explained to him that in the Colonel's house all details, large and small, were attended to with absolute military precision. All letters were collected by the Bürsche, who stamped them and took them to the post office. She had written twice a week, asking her father to cable the money. But no answer except some letters that must have crossed hers and that complained because she had not written for weeks.

Then, two weeks ago, she had gone to her uncle's study during his absence to get her grandmother a deck of solitaire cards and, quite by chance, she had looked into the waste-paper basket.

"And I saw there a letter I had written the day before—torn to pieces! Tom! Uncle never mailed any of my letters! I am sure of it!"

"Heavens! What did you do, Bertha? Didn't you kick up a …"

"A row? No."

"Why not?"

"I was taken aback. I was frightened, so frightened. I rushed into grandmother's room and told her. And she made me promise not to say a word to uncle. She told me she couldn't explain to me, that I was an American, that I did not know Germany, the German army, the German system. She said to give her time. She herself would arrange matters."

"Why didn't you come to me—at once?" Tom was hurt.

"But I told you. I was ashamed."

"Sure." He inclined his red head. "Go on, child. What did grandmother do?"

"I guess she must have cabled at once. For this morning she received a letter, and in it was one for me asking me to rely absolutely on you. Father seems to be afraid for me—of something. He doesn't say of what. I suppose he thinks I'm just a silly little goose—and," she sobbed, "he is right. I have been so foolish, so frightfully, frightfully obstinate! He writes that I must be very careful, very silent, very circumspect. He, too, says, just like grandmother, that I would not understand, because I am an American. And, Tom dear," she added with a pathetic little sigh, "I always imagined that I was so thoroughly German!"

Tom could not suppress a smile.

"Little error of judgment," he said. "Happens in the best regulated families. What else did your Dad say?"

"He enclosed another letter in grandmother's—for you. Grandmother believes he must have been afraid to write to you direct."

Tom gave a little exclamation of approval.

"Some little gray matter your father's got! All right. Let's have his letter to me."

Bertha gave it to him, and he read.

"Dear Tom," wrote Martin Wedekind, "you must come back to America as soon as possible together with Bertha. She is safe with you, and with nobody else. She must not go alone. I would come to Germany myself, but I have every reason to believe that that would make matters worse. I doubt, in fact, that the Germans would let me cross the frontier. Tom, it's up to you. You are in the army, but you must get out of it. I rely upon you implicitly. I know that you love Bertha, that, somehow, you will succeed.

"Let me explain to you everything as far as I can.

"Over a year ago, shortly after Newson Garrett assayed the Yankee Doodle Glory ore and discovered the unknown ingredient which at the time made such a stir in the scientific world, I received a letter from my brother Heinrich. He asked me to remember that I am a German by birth, that Germany never forgets her sons, that I owe everything to Germany, my blood, my training, my education. He wound up by begging me to assist Baron von Götz-Wrede, who was coming to the West, if he wished to buy the Yankee Doodle Glory mine. At once I became suspicious. I always am when a German, chiefly an officer or a Government official, asks me to remember that I am a native of Germany. There is always a reason for that bit of clanking sentimentality, and that reason is always fishy. So I decided to be careful, the more so as Newson Garrett told me that he had sent specimens of the ore to a German chemist in New York for further examination, as you had received a cable from Johannes Hirschfeld & Co. in Berlin offering you a tremendously big price for the mine, and as Truex, too, had received a similar cable.

"So, instead of helping the Baron, I put obstacles in his way.

"Then you went to Europe. A day later came the cable from my brother with the news that my mother was very sick and wished to see Bertha before she died. Naturally I let my daughter go. When, later on, I discovered that my mother was well, that the cable had been misspelled in transmission, I thought it strange, but not enough to worry over. Then came the Lehneke affair. You joined the army. Shortly afterwards the affair was settled in your favor. But I did not feel relieved. I was not a bit surprised when Gamble got his walking papers and German engineers took charge of the Yankee Doodle Glory out put. I know how they do things in Germany and had no way of warning you.

"I did not know why the Germans wanted the mine. I do not know now. I only know they do want it—and they have it.

"So I resigned myself to the fact of it until yesterday, the thirtieth of April, Nineteen Hundred and Fourteen, I received my mother's cable asking me to see to it that Bertha returned to America at once. I had not had a line from Bertha for weeks. I can imagine the reason. I repeat, I know Germany.

"I was for going straight over when, just as I was about to arrange about tickets, I received a visit from a German who refused to give his name. But his words were succinct, to the point.

"He told me that a subsidized German steamship line was running from Tacoma to Hamburg, via Hongkong. He told me that the British authorities at the latter place had refused clearance papers to the first steamer. Therefore the German Government wished succeeding steamers to sail under the American flag, since they were sure that the British would not interfere with the Stars and Stripes. He asked me to play dummy, and he offered me two hundred thousand dollars spot cash for the job.

"I refused, flatly. For the man was not a German-American, a plain business man, but the home-grown, home-bred product, short spoken, impudent, rasping. In other words, a German official specially sent for the purpose of seeing me, of offering me money for something that, at first sight, did not seem to pay—them, the Germans. And I always mistrust a German carrying gifts. He is rather like the Greek of history in that respect. So, I repeat, I refused.

"But my visitor smiled. He told me very calmly that I would have to come to terms. I asked why, and he replied, still very calmly, that my daughter would be held a hostage in Germany until I agreed.

"Yes, Tom! A hostage! In this, the Twentieth, the civilized Century!

"Even then I refused. You see, Tom, I love my daughter. But, too, I love America. I owe everything to America. My roots are here, my soul, my heart, my very secret being—and—I do not trust Germany. I don't know what it is. But I just feel that I would do wrong in doing what my unknown visitor asked me to.

"I did not give him all these reasons. I simply showed him to the door. He bowed in the regular, stiff Prussian fashion. He said that it would be quite useless for me to try to go to Germany, to rescue my daughter—for that is what it amounts to—and I know that he is speaking the truth. Thus I rely on you, Tom. It is up to you. You must do it, somehow. You must, Tom! (The words were heavily underlined.)

"I am afraid to address these lines to you. Your mail will be watched from now on. So I am writing to my mother and enclosing this letter, as well as one for Bertha. I don't think Heinrich will interfere with mother's mail. He is nearly as scared of her as he is of his superior officers."

Tom looked up.

"How did you manage to get here?" he asked.

Bertha smiled.

"Oh, it was a regular escapade. You know, heretofore I have never been out alone. I was told by uncle that it was not good form in Berlin. And I believed him. Now I know. He did not want me to be able to communicate with anybody, and so I was always either with him, or with aunt, or with some of the officers. To-day, after the letter came, my dressmaker came to the house, and I"—she smiled through her tears—"I grabbed her coat, rushed out of the room, locked her in, and was out of the house down the back stairs before anybody knew what was happening."

"Bully for you, kid!" applauded Tom. "There's the right American spirit. And now—watch your Uncle Dudley. I'll get you out of Germany all right. Come along. We'll go …" Suddenly he was silent.

"What is the matter, Tom?"

"I—I—" Tom was making a painful effort to choke back his words.

But she remembered the valet's words, how he had told her he could not let her in, that it was against his orders.

"Tom!" she cried. "Tom! Tell me!"

His hands opened and shut spasmodically. Then he told her. He had to. There was no way out of it.

"Bertha," he said, "I am under arrest. I am going to be tried by court-martial …"

"For what?"

"I don't know. Manslaughter, I guess. Perhaps murder. God knows."

"Murder—you …"

"Yes. There was a duel. I shot …"

"Whom? Whom, Tom?"

"Baron von Götz-Wrede. I killed him. No, no!" as he saw that she was about to collapse. "Don't give way, honey! You've been so bully, so brave. Don't give way now. Everything'll be all right. Come with me."

He grabbed his uhlanka and his silver gray cape, and accompanied her out to the corridor. Already his hand was on the door-knob when he heard Krauss voice in back of him.

"Herr Leutnant! I have orders to …"

"Sure. I know. And this time I guess there's no persuading you to be influenced by your decent instincts, your kindly impulses?"

The valet blushed.

"I regret, Herr Leutnant. Somebody may come—perhaps the Colonel himself …"

"And then you'd be in a hell of a pickle. All right. Here's where I turn Prussian—and here's where you give in to the unanswerable Prussian argument!" and he whirled quickly, clenched his fist, and drove it straight to the other's jaw.

The man fell like a tree cut away from the supporting roots.

"Here, Bertha," commanded Tom, "lend a hand."

Bravely the girl helped, and between her and Tom, two minutes later Krauss was in his room, on his cot, securely tied and gagged.

They went down the stairs as if nothing had happened and hailed a taxicab.

"Where to?" asked the driver.

Tom was going to say the American Consulate. But he remembered his former experiences. It would be all right to give the girl to Poole's protection, but there was Martin Wedekind's injunction that she must not travel alone, that it was up to Tom to bring her.

For a moment he was puzzled.

Then, quite suddenly, he thought of Vyvyan, of Vyvyan's warning, of Vyvyan's ring the little simple silver affair with the figure of a grayhound engraved on the round shield and above it the letters—B. E. D.

"To the British Embassy!" he directed the driver. "Just as quick as you can!"

CHAPTER XXXV

BACK FIRE

By the time the machine reached the Leipziger Strasse it was fairly late. The sidewalks were packed with a homing throng of clerks and girls from banks and counting-houses and department stores. Trucks and motor-cars, often driving three abreast, busses and surface cars, clanked and hooted down the main roads, splitting here and there to deliver their freight, human or otherwise, in the Southern and Western suburbs. The white-gloved policemen had their hands full, and Tom fretted as his taxicab was caught in a crush at the corner of the Wilhelm Strasse.

By this time the inquest must be nearly over. Somebody might call at his house, perhaps try to reach it by telephone. He was playing the game by a dangerously narrow margin.

He breathed a sigh of relief when finally the machine made the corner and purred down the Wilhelm Strasse, past the stolid, gray bulk of the Agrarian Bank, past the red sand-stone monstrosity of the Berliner Bank, past the Radziwil Palace and the back entrance to the Chancellor's park, and he felt very much like a Moslem pilgrim when he beholds the sacred Kaaba standing out above the yellow Arabian desert, or a nervous skipper who makes port after a stormy crossing, when the British Embassy came into view, a beautiful little marble building, cool and white and gleaming, pagan in its utter Greek simplicity.

The taxicab stopped.

"Na—hier—sind wir ja, Herr Leutnant!" came the driver's jovial voice, and Tom jumped out, giving Bertha a helping hand.

It was now very dark. The trailing, swift shadows of April were dropping like a cloak—grim, portentous—and Tom shivered a little, involuntarily.

"Come on, Bertha. We've no time to waste, and I've got to find me my unknown friend inside."

Already he had crossed the sidewalk. Already his foot was on the first step of the short flight of stairs that led up to the main entrance of the Embassy when, suddenly, there was a rush that carried him off his feet, away from the girl.

Tom swore, looked, hit.

Half-a-dozen men had jumped from the shadowy gateway of the bank building that was next to the Embassy. They were officers all. Some were of the Uhlans, men he knew, others were infantrymen whom he had met casually.

He heard the Colonel's voice:

"Get him. He's dangerous. No, no—don't kill him!" as a saber flashed free, gleaming evilly in the flickering light.

Somebody had blown a whistle. A platoon of policemen came panting up at double quick step. They drew a cordon around the scene, screening it against the excited, curious crowd that poured up the street and from neighboring houses.

A window opened in the Embassy.

"What is the matter?" inquired a woman's voice, anxious, in English.

Nobody answered. There was no time. For Tom kept his assailants busy. He had left his saber at home, but his fists flew out, right and left, right and left, up and down, like flails. One man went down. Another, cursing:

"Der Kerl ist ja verrückt!"

"Das ist ja ganz unerhört …"

And again Tom's fist descended, taking toll. He fought silently, shrewdly, with a certain savage, ringing joy in his heart.

He heard Bertha's stifled outcry; and he redoubled his blows.

"Damn you!"—as a man grabbed him around the neck, from the back, and his foot kicked sideways and up—and a howl of pain.

But the odds were against him. The flat of a saber struck his right elbow, paralyzing it. He fought on with his left, blindly. That, too, was disarmed. Somebody hit him in the face. Blood squirted, half blinding him; and the last thing he saw as he was being dragged towards the cab that was still at the curb, was Colonel Wedekind. He was holding Bertha by both arms, pressing the elbows back until they touched each other. The girl's lips were tightly compressed, but she did not utter a sound. Somebody had called another taxicab, and a young lieutenant of infantry was holding the door open.

The Colonel forced the girl inside. He addressed the lieutenant in a snarling, cutting voice:

"See her home, Baron von Blitzewitz. Let nobody near her. Watch over her until my return. No excuse, no loop-hole! She is your prisoner, and you are responsible. Understand?"

"Zu Befehl, Herr Oberst!"

Lieutenant von Blitzewitz saluted, clicked his heels and entered the car, which purred away while the Colonel turned to the Westerner.

His little blue eyes blazed with fury. His fists were clenched, he was about to strike Tom, who was helpless in the grip of half-a-dozen officers. But he controlled himself.

Only his words came, venomous, triumphant, quick, like machine-gun bullets:

"Got you. Right in the act. About to communicate with the enemy of the Fatherland, eh?"

Tom's wits had a trick, learned at roundup and, too, if the truth be told, at poker, of acting quickly and tellingly when he was in a tight corner, with the odds against him.

"Who's the enemy?" he inquired gently.

"You tried to enter the British Embassy!"

"Well? And since when are England and Germany at war?" came Tom's jeering rejoinder.

Wedekind choked down his reply.

"In with him!" he bellowed at the officers who were holding Tom.

They obeyed, and the Colonel entered after them, having given the driver Tom's address. The machine clanked away.

But all the way home Tom fought savagely, joyously. He was convinced that his captors had positive instructions not to kill him, and so he took advantage of the situation. At every opportunity his fists flew out, finding their mark, and it was a torn, bleeding, perspiring, cursing group of Prussians that finally entered the apartment on the Kurfürstendamm.

There the officers surrounded him with drawn sabers while the Colonel faced him, speaking quickly, hectically.

"You will be tried for the death of Baron von Götz-Wrede." He smiled cynically. "A bad enough offense that. No mercy will be shown you. And so—ah—I shall be considerate enough not to press all the minor charges against you: The breaking of your parole, resistance to arrest, striking your superior officer—" he touched rather gingerly his right eye that was framed in prismatic green and heliotrope where the horse wrangler's fist had come into contact with it. "I give you fifteen minutes to pack your trunk.

"Hauptmann von Quitzow! Leutnant von Bayerlein!" He turned to the two officers. "You will watch the prisoner while he packs. Krauss!" to the valet who had appeared on the threshold, "help Lieutenant Graves. Quick! Fifteen minutes! No more!"

"Zu Befehl, Herr Oberst!"

The two officers marched the Westerner into his bedroom, Krauss following, where Tom rapidly threw the necessary articles into his trunk.

Krauss helped loyally.

"Sorry, old fellow," whispered Tom as, both bending over the trunk, his head touched that of the valet. "Didn't mean to hit you so hard."

Krauss muttered an indistinct, tearful reply, and Tom put his hand in his pocket, came out with a hundred mark banknote, and pressed it surreptitiously into the other's hand.

A minute later he straightened up.

"All ready, gentlemen," he said. "Lead on. By the way"—to von Quitzow, whom he knew fairly well from riding drill—"what's going to happen?"

Von Quitzow shook his head sadly. He was a tall, very fat, red-faced Junker from East Prussia who, a musician by nature, had only entered the army because his father had forced him. He was a good enough officer, who took his duties seriously, but, underlying it, was a streak of hot, heavy, rather boyish sentimentality that came to the surface at odd moments.

Now he shook Tom's hand.

"Our orders are to get you to Spandau, to the fortification—Festung, you know—military prison. I am sorry, Graves. I wish I could …"

"I get you all right, sonny!" came Tom's cheerful reply. "Zu Befehl! That's what's biting you, eh? Never mind. It'll all come out in the wash."

And he went into the other room, saluted the Colonel, walked down-stairs and, two Uhlans with drawn sabers right and left, entered the waiting taxicab with out showing further fight.

But his thoughts were feverishly at work.

For there was Bertha.

It was up to him to see her safely out of Germany!

CHAPTER XXXVI

SPANDAU

The gray, frowning walls of Spandau fortress swallowed Tom. Cut off he was from the world out side, in a small, neatly furnished room with bathroom attached, the windows doubly barred with steel, the doors, too, of steel and patrolled day and night by armed sentries. The food was good and plentiful, the treatment courteous but severe. Each day he was allowed three hours for exercise on the Kasernenhof, the barrack yard.

"I regret it," General Unruh, who commanded the officers prison wing of the fortress, explained to him. "As a rule, the officers here are allowed complete lib erty. Are put on parole. But I understand that you broke parole in Berlin. Tut mir leid!"

Tom resigned himself to the inevitable. With his clear, simple mind he thought the situation over from the start to the probable finish.

The court-martial would come soon, and he had decided to play there a certain card. He would speak out, straight out. He would tell everything that had happened, exactly, without omitting a single detail, not only as to the duel, but also as to Bertha Wedekind and the reason why he had broken parole. For he had begun to realize that, at the very best, he was in for a term of years in Festung. Thus he would be unable to do what Martin Wedekind had asked him to—to see Bertha home to Spokane personally.

He would therefore do the next best thing. He would raise such a row that the Germans simply would not dare double cross.

Yes! He would give it to them, straight from the shoulder, regardless of what might happen to him.

Of course he knew that court-martials were held in secret session, but something of the evidence given there was certain to leak out, into the outside world, the press, the ear of some sharp American newspaper correspondent, perhaps Trumbull, and the American Government would automatically be forced to act so as to protect Bertha.

There was no doubt of it, and so Tom awaited the summons for court-martial with impatience. He was anxious about Bertha, terribly anxious. He was allowed neither mail nor newspapers. He had no idea what was going on in the outside world, and he fretted.

There were times when he regretted the lost hopes, the lost promises of his young, vigorous manhood, when he cursed the mine in the Hoodoos—the Yankee Doodle Glory which was at the bottom of all his troubles. But he controlled himself with a will. He could not afford to break down, for there was the girl he loved, the girl he must get out of the German Eagle's clutches—and so he waited, waited, for the court-martial summons.

At times he asked General Unruh, who shrugged his shoulders.

"Lieutenant Graves," he said, smiling with his lips, "never in all my long experience as fortress prison commander have I seen anybody as anxious to stand trial as you. You must be very certain that you are going to get off scot-free!"

"Well—but when will they try me?"

"Can't say, I'm sure. You will have to compose yourself in patience."

And Tom did.

Very few visitors were allowed near him, and these only in the presence of the General or some other high-ranking officer. The little Ensign came. Too, von Quitzow, and one or two others. They muttered banalities and went on their way. No—they said, one and all—they had not seen a sign of Miss Wedekind. The Ensign understood that she was down with severe illness; nobody was allowed near her.

And Tom waited, week after week, for the court-martial summons that did not come. He had an idea that they were trying to break his nerve, and he gritted his teeth and forced himself to be quiet.

Outside, late winter changed suddenly into early spring. Green leaves of crocus and tulip peeped out overnight in the cement-framed grass plot next to General Unruh's quarters. The song birds returned from the South. The trees were clad in the delicate tracery of the new foliage. Even the drab, square Julius Tower that was said to house Prussia's mysterious golden war chest, was touched and softened by lacy sprays of color where ivy and vine crept up from the sandy Brandenburg soil.

Thus May passed with soft winds and the virginal pink of hawthorn blossoms, and June came, with the first crass heat of summer, with the sunset sky of summer that was like a great, tropical moth, crimson and orange, its wings barred with black when a thunder storm boomed overland all the way from the chilly, foggy Baltic.

And still he waited, with no word from Bertha, no summons to the court-martial that should decide his fate and hers.

Every evening he paced up and down the cement walk in front of the prison wing, between armed soldiers. The rest of the day he spent at his window, looking out over the fortifications that dipped into the ground like gopher holes, suddenly, threateningly, where a sunken gun emplacement frowned its unseen challenge, farther on, to the east, flattened out into an immense, gray, dusty drill ground; and as the days passed into the cycle of weeks, this drill ground was used more and more. Nervous and swarming it was, like a beehive.

Not only were the artillery men busy with the limbers and the steel thills of their gray-and-blue field guns, but also with sappers and cavalry and infantry.

Wherever Tom looked, miniature battles were in progress.

All one morning a dozen heaped batteries practiced drum fire with blank shells until Tom thought his ears would burst under the roar and slam and clank of the continuous salvos, wailing as the shells left the barrels and rushed on, madly crashing as they thumped down to their targets. The same at night, varied by star shells, flashing and vanishing in an intolerable orange haze, leaping and flickering up, then down, then along the ground in a gamut of flame. And again the deafening sequence of shells, overlapping, stretching into one unceasing roar, throbbing to the firmament like a gigantic drum, with triangular sheets of white, brilliant light flaring to the zenith, and countless projectiles rushing through the air with a noise as the tearing of silk.

Or a sudden, terrible silence—more terrible than the inferno of sounds that had preceded it and a young officer's voice, high, shrill, foolish, frightfully inadequate:

"Battery! Over there!"

A non-commissioned officer's echoing voice:

"Zu Befehl, Herr Leutnant!"

And once more the latter's order: "Barrage! Ten rounds gun fire! Fire—fire!"—and the crash, the roar, the whining and wailing of tortured steel smiting tortured earth.

The drum fire over, platoons of infantry or dismounted cavalry would be put through their paces. During his months in the army Tom had taken part in maneuvers and military reviews and was more or less familiar with the surface of ordinary tactics. But the drill which he watched day after day from his window was new to him.

At times, indeed, the old traditional Prussian formation, the attack by massed phalanx, grenadiers charging, shoulder to shoulder, relying on brawn and weight to crush the enemy's opposition regardless of the cost in blood to their own men, was followed. But at other times the lines were deployed, in a thin loop, very much—Tom thought—as Western range riders spread, fan-like, when cattle stampede.

Scouts these, the nerves of the army. Then another barrage, plopping and splashing unexpectedly in a screen of fire that melted from scarlet and gold to livid purple, and specially picked troops—he heard General Unruh call them Stosstruppen, shock troops—were sent forward, without rifle or bayonet, armed instead with trench knife and hand grenade, fused for instant action.

Over and over again they would be hurled forth. Drill was incessant, discipline even more merciless than usual. Men who fell from exhaustion were kicked and cuffed and belted by the non-coms while the officers turned their heads, pretending not to see.

No newspaper correspondents, no photographers, no civilians of any sort were allowed near the parade ground; and the troops that were trained did not remain the same. They changed every few days. On a Monday it would be the Maikäfer Grenadiers, forty-eight hours later the First Mecklenburg Regiment of Foot, again East Prussian fusiliers, until it seemed that the whole North Germany army corps were passing through the Spandau mill.

Formerly Tom would have smiled. But not now.

Formerly he would have said to himself that the German army was only the glitter, the vanity, the imagination of the nation concretely realized in color and pomp, very much like a cowboy who swaggers into town, his chaps dyed a violent vermilion. But now he saw the army as a working body, a pitiless, never-resting machine, and at times his thoughts swerved away from the figures, drilling out there in the heat and dust, and winged to the German homes; the homes where these men must have been born and bred. Puppets they were, puppets of an armed, rasping, insolent, ruling caste. But they had women and children; mothers and sisters and sweethearts.

And what were these women thinking? What were they doing? Were they entirely inarticulate, like Siwash squaws? And what, then, of civilization, and progress, and culture, and Christianity?

Thus Tom pondered—Tom, who was simple no more. He asked himself what it was all about, and he was afraid of finding the answer.

Still the days passed, with no news from Bertha, no summons to court-martial, until one Saturday morning the General came to his room and told him that a visitor was there to see him.

"Mrs. Wedekind. Colonel Wedekind's mother."

A minute later the General left, and the sentry ushered Mrs. Wedekind in. It was fortunate for Tom that the officer on watch that day, the officer ordered to listen to the conversation between the prisoner and his callers and to make a detailed report of it to the proper authorities, was the Junker, von Quitzow, who had been forced into the Uhlan tunic by his father and who had never really quite forgotten his native good-humor and sentimentality—"damned civilian sentimentality" Tom one day had heard the Colonel characterize it.

Mrs. Wedekind was close to the Biblical span of years. White haired she was, and wrinkled. But in her youth she had loved, very deeply, she had had her beautiful summer, and when her husband had died in his prime, her heart, instead of becoming blunted, had mellowed, had become receptive. She drew people to her, instinctively. Added to this was a great, slightly malicious, natural shrewdness, a wonderful charm of manner, a knowledge of man's vulnerable spots.

This knowledge, this charm and shrewdness, she used now on Captain von Quitzow.

She flashed a rapid look from her canny old eyes at Tom. But she shook hands first with the Junker.

"Ah, guten Morgen, mein liebster Herr Hauptmann! It has been such a long time since I have seen you, since I had the pleasure of listening to your charming music. Why, my dear, they call you the Richard Wagner of the Uhlans! They do, positively. When will you come and play for me? Or—am I too old, perhaps, for a dashing young Captain like yourself?"

Dashing! Tom hid a smile. That was the one thing which von Quitzow was not, but he took the bait, blushed, mumbled something, and bowed deep over Mrs. Wedekind's right hand while she, at the same fraction of a moment, passed a tiny envelope to Tom. He slipped it up his sleeve.

Then came a banal conversation, lasting several minutes, at the end of which Mrs. Wedekind rose, shook hands with both men and went to the door.

"Thanks for having come," said Tom. "You don't know when my court-martial's going to come off, do you?"

Mrs. Wedekind looked straight at him.

"Lieutenant Graves," she replied, "I have no idea. But at times I imagine that the Prussian army just now is too—ah—busy to waste precious days on such an altogether charming and altogether worthless young American like yourself!" And she swept out with an old-fashioned curtsy, followed by the still blushing von Quitzow, who had not caught the peculiar inflection of her parting speech.

Tom had. But he had no time to think about it right then. For there was the envelope which she had given him.

He tore it open, took out a slip of paper, read.

There were just a few lines, from Bertha.

"I am waiting, waiting!" she wrote. "Waiting for you! Come to me, dear. I need you. I want you. Every night I pray for you. Bertha."

That was all. But Tom kissed the letter. He felt a hot tear running down his cheek, and he was not ashamed of it.

Late that evening, and again the next morning, Mrs. Wedekind's words came back to him … "The army just now is too busy to waste precious days on you!"

Directly bordering on the military prison was the mess barrack of the gunner officers. Heretofore, every night, the great banqueting hall had been silent and dark. The officers had been busy day and night, had snatched food on the run, to return, often past midnight, to their quarters and sleep the dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion. But to-night the room was festively lit. Around nine o'clock officers entered the building, and, an hour later, a banquet was in full swing.

The windows had been thrown wide open, and very distinctly Tom could hear the popping of champagne corks, voices, laughter, the clinking of glass, once in a while the band thumping and scraping and braying a martial rhythm—playing the old favorites of the German army: "Maria Teresa, geh' nicht in den Krieg!" "Der alte Derflinger" "Lützows wilde, verwegene Jagd!" and many others.

Then there was a silence and, after a minute, somebody giving a toast. Tom heard a few words:

"The army is ready, meine Herren Offiziere! Ready to conquer …"

Then somebody closed the windows of the banquet hall and Tom heard no more except vague, indistinct sounds. But he was nervous. He paced up and down.

War?

He shook his head.

He was no more the provincial American, isolated in the valor of his ignorance. During the last months he had read the newspapers, the foreign news, the editorials. He knew that the German nation was nervous, fretful, on tenter-hooks, that a change had come over it.

But … War?

War, bloodshed, without rhyme or reason?

And there was no reason. He had followed the news of the world. No, no! War would not come. Could, must not come! It was out of the question.

Yet again the next morning, Sunday, when Tom, escorted by von Quitzow, went to hear service in the Garnisonskirche, the cantonment church, Mrs. Wedekind's strange words came back to him … And, too, other words: Vyvyan's, Martin Wedekind's, the Emperor's, the little professor's.

The church was crowded with officers. Doctor Stöckl, the Kaiser's favorite, was in the pulpit.

He had taken the sixteenth chapter of Revelations for his text:

"And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth. …"

Later on:

"The sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great River Euphrates, and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the Kings of the East might be prepared. …"

The clergyman looked up.

"The Kings of the East, brethren," he went on, "the Kings of the East! Our Emperor! The Emperor of Austria-Hungary! The Sultan of Turkey! The three Kings out of the East. …"

Tom stopped his ears. He was not a religious man, but he had the fine, instinctive antipathy of the man of the open range against blasphemy.

The clergyman droned on. Tom could hear his voice as from a great distance, vague, wiped over. He could not make out the words.

But he saw the faces of the officers.

They seemed utterly fascinated, utterly enwrapt.

CHAPTER XXXVII

VIEW-HALLOO

June swung to its end with a great, brassy avalanche of heat, the sudden heat of North Prussia that, reflected by the Brandenburg sand dunes as by a glacier, dried up the trees and grasses and caused the very birds to open their beaks and gasp for air.

Cooped up in his room the greater part of the day, Tom felt the heat badly. All his life he had taken a great deal of physical exercise, mostly on horseback, and the confinement, in spite of the daily evening stroll, began to tell on him. Physically, not mentally, for he knew that he must bear up.

Impatient he was when, as the days passed, there was no more news from Bertha except an occasional word from Ensign von Königsmark that he had seen her drive down Unter den Linden, in a carriage, hedged in on either side by her uncle and her aunt.

Nor was he summoned to court-martial. Forgotten he seemed by the whole world.

Outside, on the dusty Spandau drill ground, the troops were still at their eternal training, running, leaping, charging, shooting, sweating, the officers cursing the non-coms, the latter passing on the compliment, plus kicks, to the privates. The work was feverish, incessant.

Even Captain von Quitzow, who was now altogether stationed at Spandau, heavy, sentimental though he was, caught something of the hectic spirit that swirled about him in unhealthy, braggart waves, and one day, as he was talking to Tom, his enthusiasm got the best of his discretion.

"You will see, Lieutenant Graves," he said, pointing out of the window where the sun rays danced on innumerable bayonets, "when all is ready we will blow them to hell—poof!—just like that!" making a clumsy, brutal gesture with his great, red, hairy fist.

"Whom? The French? What have they done to you?"

"Say—Us! You are one of us!"

"Wait until after the court-martial," laughed Tom. "But you haven't answered. Whom are you threatening with that dainty little paw of yours?"

"Anybody! Everybody!"

"Meaning?"

"Anybody who envies us our riches, our culture, our civilization, our trade, our progress, our achievement! All those foreign nations who hate us, who try to put stumbling-blocks into the path of our natural development!" He had learned the words somewhere, like a parrot, and he believed in their wisdom, their justice and truth, implicitly, with all his top-heavy Teuton soul. "Everybody wants to hurt us Germans!" he added, half plaintively, half defiantly.

"Ah—cut it out! Nobody wants to hurt you. You are only hurting yourselves. The world at large is too busy looking after its own affairs, von Quitzow."

"Well—perhaps. But just the same—we are ready"—and again he quoted from some unknown authority—"with every gill of red fighting blood, with every bolt and nut and wheel of war machinery, with every howitzer and caisson, with every Zeppelin and airplane, with every haversack and sabretache! With every last ounce of strength and discipline and efficiency and patriotism! We will hurl it all, all into the finishing fight!"

Tom laughed.

"Cut out the Fourth of July dope," he said, "it's got whiskers," but, secretly, his uneasiness increased.

Towards the end of that week, watching from his window as usual, he was surprised to see a generous sprinkling of strange uniforms amongst those of the Germans.

There were some tall, very slight men, with peaked, coquettish caps, short, tight white tunics braided profusely with gold, and high lacquered riding-boots. Others in tailed, bottle-green jackets with leather shorts and leggings, and bow-legged cavalrymen in black with bright orange plastrons. Still others were olive complexioned men, very silent, with beady eyes, high cheek bones, and a long, swaggering stride. They were mostly dressed in black. Black, too, was the frogging and the fur on their tunics, black their tall, fur caps. Still others were short men, extremely broad and heavy, gnarled looking like peasants, in light blue uniforms with a great deal of vermilion and silver.

"Austrians," explained von Quitzow when Tom appealed to him, "also Turks and Bulgarians."

"Why," smiled the Westerner, "if you're so all-fired set on fighting all the world, what's the big idea of putting all these foreign ginks wise to your military preparations?"

The Captain raised a didactic hand.

"They are our friends, our brothers-in-arms. Their sovereigns are the friends of His All-Gracious Majesty the Kaiser."

"Seems to be hard up for friends," mumbled the irrepressible Tom.

Thus Tom composed his soul in peace, until one day (and afterwards he could never quite explain why he did it; perhaps it was a calling, calling back to the range life, the free life, the zest and sweep and tang of the open; perhaps it was an overpowering desire to see Bertha, to speak to her, to make sure that she was all right; perhaps it was the suggestion of the saddled horse which had stopped directly beneath his window)—until one day his patience snapped, suddenly, jarringly.

It had been another day of maneuvering, charges and counter-charges, the phutt-phutt of machine guns, the deeper notes of great guns and trench mortars warming up to the task.

A regiment of cavalry had been thrown into the iron game. They came on, straight, lances at the carry, thundering across the heat-baked drill ground. They rode mostly new mounts, not yet broken to the roll and sob of the guns, and many reared, bucked, plunged, threw their riders and danced on, fretting, foaming, mad, in all directions.

There was one horse in particular—a great, black half-hunter with broad back and streaming tail. A stout General was riding it, spurring and whipping it on brutally. Tom was watching from the window of his room with his keen eyes.

He was anxious—more for the horse, than for the man. He clenched his fists.

"Stop, you fool!" he said under his breath. "Leave those spurs be! That isn't the way …"

Then there was a cry, followed by shouts, yells, hectic words of warning. The half-hunter, maddened to frenzy, took the bit between its teeth, sailed along like a ship under canvas, cleared at a magnificent jump a shiny, blue-gray gun barrel, and threw its rider, head foremost, amongst the caissons.

More cries. Then a voice:

"Lieber Himmel! Der Prinz!"

And Tom knew. The rider was Prinz Ludwig Karl of Hohenzollern, cousin to the Emperor, and he was not surprised at the excitement which followed.

A staff officer blew a whistle. A trumpet called. Everybody ran to the spot where the Prince lay prostrate. The war game was forgotten. Even the sentry outside Tom's room rushed out and away.

Tom, half turning, saw him run down the hall as fast as he could. The next moment, turning back to the window, he saw directly beneath it the Prince's horse standing there, trembling in every limb, great brown eyes half-glazed with fright and pain, saddle slipped a little to one side.

And Tom thought and acted in a fraction of a second.

Out of the room! Down the hall! Past the outer sentry, who saw nothing but a flash of blue and crimson uniform!

Quickly his hands busied themselves with the saddle girth. The saddle came off—and Tom was up and away!

Nobody paid any attention to him. They were crowding around the Prince, and Tom, on horseback, was the Tom he had been on his native range—master of himself, the animal, the dust and stones that flew away to right and left as the horse, feeling the rider's softly strong hand, hearing his caressing voice, leaped on with a great gathering of speed—on to Berlin!

All afternoon and evening Tom rode. It was around midnight when he turned into the outer suburbs, and it was then that a realization of his desperate position came to him.

The Web!

He remembered Vyvyan's words.

And what did the Web want of him—stretching, knitting, crushing, looping …?

His property, his mine, the Yankee Doodle Glory, for whatever mysterious reasons?

Why, they had that. They had cheated him out of it. The meshes of the Web were about it, tightly, crushingly, like the slimy, merciless arms of a giant octopus.

And what else did the Web want?

Tom gave a bitter laugh. He knew. No use trying to fool himself.

His life!

That was the stake!

Well—he'd fight for it!

They had tried to get him by every means in their power. They had not even stopped short of murder, for there was that duel—the Baron's shot before the umpire's word to fire. He had fooled them and, by God! he'd fool them again.

But how? What could he do? To whom could he turn?

If before he had been in danger of his life, he was doubly so now. For now he was an outlaw. He had committed the worst crime on the Prussian military calendar. Everybody's hand would be against his.

And—who could help him?

Bertha? Old Mrs. wedekind?

No! That wasn't his sort of a game. He could not compromise women, endanger them.

Vyvyan? Was away.

The man with the silver ring? That, too, was hopeless. By this time the Spandau authorities would know of his get-away, and the British Embassy, judging from his former experience, was the very place they would watch most carefully.

Poole? The man would faint of fright, would not lift his little finger to help him.

He had not a cent in. his pockets, nothing but the uniform. Not even his saber, which had been taken away from him at the time of his arrest. And an officer without his sword was an object of suspicion. He might be able to get into communication with McCaffrey. The barkeeper was sure to lend him clothes and money. Here was his chance to get out of Germany.

And then he thought of Bertha. Without her he could not leave the country. Could not. Would not!

What then?

The first thing to do would be to get rid of his horse. So he turned west, back to the beginning of the Spandau road, dismounted, and slapped the animal smartly across the withers. Silently he prayed that the horse might be a "homer," the sort that, allowed to travel free, makes straight for the accustomed stable, not to forget the accustomed oats.

"Thank God!" he whispered, as the horse whinnied softly, and was off to the west, towards Spandau, at an easy, graceful canter.

On foot Tom returned to the suburbs, crossed them, reached the Westend.

Then the courage of despair came to him. Also memories.

Back home, in the West, when he had been a boy, there had been a famous Bad Man, Silvertongue Charley by name. Charley had not killed very often. His argument had usually been more mild, yet more subtle, more persuasive, and (Tom laughed suddenly) somehow it would be appreciated in Germany, for here they fought with the same weapon—as in the case of Martin and Bertha Wedekind.

He walked on, turned into the Dahlmann Strasse, and rang the night bell of the Colonel's apartment.

The door was opened, he walked upstairs, and the sleepy Bursche let him in.

"I want to speak to the Colonel, at once. Most important," he snarled.

"Zu Befehl, Herr Leutnant!"

The Bursche left, and Tom looked rapidly about him. He needed a weapon.

There was the Colonel's writing-desk. He tried drawer after drawer until finally he found what he wanted—a heavy cavalry revolver. He made sure that it was loaded.

The next moment the Colonel came in, dressed in pajamas and slippers.

His first word was a curse, a terrible threat:

"What'd you mean, Lieutenant Graves? Himmeldonnerwetter! Who let you out of Festung? Who …"

"Shut up!" drawled Tom, and up came his gun to emphasize the command. "No, no!" as the Colonel was about to bluster again, "this time I hold the winning ace—and I'm going to rake in the pot. I tell you what you are going to do. You are going to dress, under my supervision. You are going to give me all the money in the house, call Bertha, very gently, without waking up the rest of the household, and then you are going to accompany both of us downstairs, enter a taxicab, drive with us to the station. There Bertha is going to buy the tickets. A private compartment, for the frontier, see?"

"But …"

"Didn't I tell you to shut up, you bastard?" Tom took a firmer hold on his gun. "I'm going to be right close to you straight through. We'll walk arm in arm, ride arm in arm, and, by God! eat arm in arm—and you'll always feel this little bit of steel pressing into your ribs. Nobody'll know. That big silver-gray uniform cape of mine—and yours—will hide that part all right, all right. And—no fooling—my finger itches. I've got a peculiar disease called Trigger-fingeritis where I was raised. Get me, don't you? Now lead on! First we'll go to your room and have you dressed for the slaughter."

Tom's argument was persuasive. Silently, without saying a word, without making an unnecessary gesture, the Colonel preceded him to his dressing-room, arm in arm with him, on the way, obeying the pressure of the revolver, telling the Bursche to go back to bed, and put on his uniform.

"Now we'll call Bertha," Tom went on. "Where is her room?"

"Over there." The Colonel pointed.

"All right." Tom pressed the revolver into the small of the other's back. "Call her. Be careful what you say. If this is somebody else's room, God help you!"

"Bertha, Bertha," whispered the Colonel, and then, a little louder: "Oh, Bertha!"

"Yes, Uncle?" came a sleepy voice.

"Come here a moment."

There was a rustle of clothes and a few seconds later Bertha appeared, in a loose dressing-robe, her hair a curly, unruly, shimmering mass.

She was still half asleep.

"What is the matter?" Then, seeing Tom: "Why—Tom …?"

"No time to explain," replied the Westerner. "You've got to get into your clothes quickly. Throw some things into a bag. We're going to take a little trip …"

"A little trip?"

"Yes. To the French frontier. The three of us. They kidnapped you, those darned Dutchmen, held you as a hostage, eh? Well, two can play at the same game, by Ginger, and …"

Very suddenly the Colonel twisted and turned, was about to shout for help, and Tom brought up his gun.

"No, you don't!" he said in a low, minatory voice. "Look out. This thing's going to go off sure!"

And then, just as he was about to fire: "Oh, my God!"

For the Colonel, agile in spite of his weight, had rapidly shifted his position, had picked up Bertha, was holding her against his breast, like a shield.

Wedekind laughed.

"Shoot, why don't you?"

"I— God da—"

"Don't swear in the presence of a lady," sneered the German. "The winning card? Have you? I am afraid you have been a little too previous." He raised his voice to a shout: "Franz! Franz!" he called the Bursche. "Come in here—no, wait—bring the janitor with you and a couple of other stout fellows. Bring some ropes, too, while you're about it. We've got a wild American in here."

And, five minutes later, when Tom was stretched on the leather couch in the Colonel's study, tied, helpless, the German said:

"I don't think you'll be so very wild in the future. You're going to be as quiet as a mouse. For you're going to be dead. This thing is going to be finished in a hurry. Court-martial to-morrow. And a firing squad the day after. Good night! Sweet dreams!"

And Tom did sleep, like the simple, fearless man he was. He had done his best, had tried to do his best, for the girl he loved, for Martin Wedekind, for Vyvyan, for himself.

He had failed. The odds had been too great.

He, alone, had fought the Web.

And the Web had won.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

THE COLONEL'S PROPOSAL

There was no doubt of the verdict from the moment Tom entered the large, gray court-room of the Kriegsgericht, armed guards on either side and an officer with drawn saber walking ahead, straight through the Captain Prosecutor's indictment, the hearing of the witnesses all telling the same tale, his refusal to avail himself of the services of a Kriegsgerichtädvokat, a military lawyer, his refusal even to answer a single one of the questions put to him by the Captain Prosecutor and the three Generals who acted as judges, to the moment when the presiding judge, General von Kanitz, rose, put on his helmet, and announced with a clear voice that defendant was guilty of insubordination, killing a brother officer in a duel, breaking out of Festung, insulting a superior officer, threatening him with death, and trying to kidnap him.

The punishment, according to the Prussian Military Law Code, paragraph 578, reënforced by paragraphs 789 and 452, and doubly reënforced by paragraphs 66 1, 107 and 322, was—Death!

The times being what they were, the enemy beyond the frontier preparing for war, the General went on, defendant must show cause at once for reopening the case or setting aside the judgment or registering an appeal.

Defendant shook his head.

Furthermore, continued the General, defendant had the right to beg His All-Gracious Majesty the Kaiser for a reprieve …

"Quite useless!" cut in the Captain Prosecutor.

"Order, order!" cried the General.

And then Tom, for the first time since he had entered the court-room, opened his lips. He spoke—in good, plain American:

"I agree with the Prosecutor," he said. "You just bet your boots I do. Why," looking straight at the presiding judge, "you damned sanctimonious humbugs with your talk of reprieve—forget it! Cut it out! You've railroaded me!"

Officers rushed up to him, threatening, waving sabers, ordering him to be silent, but he went right on, raising his voice clear above the turmoil:

"Yep! You've cooked up the whole thing, you saber-rattling, cowardly coyotes! I'm not fool enough to kick against the impossible—I'd have less chance than a hog on ice!"

And he turned on his heels, and marched out between the armed guards.

All that afternoon, half through the night, he paced up and down the stone-flagged floor of his cell.

Death—in the morning!

A firing squad! The end of his life, his youth, his ambition, his love!

The final gift of the Hoodoos rightly named, he thought.

There was nothing vainglorious, nothing romantic about Tom Graves. But he said to himself that he would die like a man. He'd be true to his traditions, his ancestors, his country—true to his love.

Finally he fell asleep, and it was the rattle of the keys in the steel door that startled him into wakefulness.

Haggard rays of sunlight were filtering in through the window high up on the wall—well—he shrugged his shoulders—soon there would be darkness. The light was over.

"All right. I'm all ready for the last act," he said as the door opened.

Then he drew back in surprise. He had expected armed sentries commanded by a Captain. But only two men came in: Colonel Wedekind, accompanied by Ensign Baron von Königsmark who, note-book and pencil ready to hand, was evidently acting as the former's secretary.

"What's up?" asked Tom. "Going to court-martial me all over again? You can only murder me once, you know."

Then he gave a cry of utter amazement. For the Colonel smiled. He shook Tom's hand.

"Guten Morgen, Herr Leutnant!" he said affably.

And, before Tom knew what to say, the German went on:

"Well, did the confinement and the court-martial cool your hot blood a little?"

"Cut out the heavy sarcasm," replied Tom. "It isn't your line."

"Sarcasm? Not a bit of it. Only—" he smiled, "I do believe that loneliness, confinement, and a good scare is the best medicine in the world for an impatient young cavalier like you. And now—" he motioned to the Ensign, who at once got busy with notebook and pencil, taking down the words, "Lieutenant Graves!"

"Well?" asked Tom, who knew less than ever what to make of the other's ingratiating manner. "What's up? Can it be that you've conscience troubles and that you're sorry for that bit of—oh—Montana justice you pulled off yesterday in the court-martial? Hang your prisoner first, and try him afterwards?"

"No, no," Wedekind went on in the same affable, half-playful manner. "I have a proposition to make to you, and I wish you would think about it very seriously. In fact, I am sure you will not say no."

"Don't you count your chickens before they're hatched—every darned, fluffy one of 'em," drawled the Westerner.

"Ah!" smiled the Colonel. "I see that you have kept your old jesting mood, even in the face of death. Charming, perfectly charming, my dear sir!"

"Well?"

Something caused Tom to look at the Ensign. His head was bent over the note-book, his pencil busily scratching. But there was something in the boy's attitude, in the vivid blush that mantled his forehead, which convinced Tom that he was uneasy. Perhaps he was ashamed of the Colonel's suave, hypocritical manner. Perhaps he knew that the latter had set some artfully prepared trap, had knotted another noose in the Web.

All right. He would be careful, decided Tom, and he looked inquiringly at Wedekind, who continued:

"I am speaking in the name of the army, the Government, the Emperor himself. We are willing to—na, sagen wir 'mal—squash all these disagreeable court-martial proceedings against you. We are even willing to accept your resignation from the army with honor, and to pay you liberally, more than liberally, for the Yankee Doodle Glory."

"Gosh! What's the use of paying for a thing after you've swiped it?" interrupted Tom sarcastically, but the other went on unheeding:

"We will even pay you an extra bonus and confer upon you the Order Pour Le Mérite of the second class. For one condition!"

"Shoot it!"

"We need your help."

"Well? Go on. Don't be so mysterious!"

"Oh, there's nothing mysterious about it. All we want of you is to have you transfer, in your name, to American flag and registry a certain line of fast freighters running between Tacoma and Hamburg … though," he corrected himself, "perhaps the port of destination won't always be Hamburg. It may change to some other port."

Tom looked up. He remembered Martin Wedekind's letter. The thing puzzled him. He could not imagine why it should be so hard to find somebody in the United States, most likely a German-American, who would be willing to play cat's-paw for the German Government, and he said something of the sort.

"Why pick on me?" he asked. "The woods are full of people ready to earn a dishonest penny."

The Colonel winked at him in a manner that said, more plainly than words, that Tom knew more than he tried to make believe.

"Lieutenant Graves," he replied, "I'll put my cards on the table, face up. The British Government does not want these ships to get to their destination. They are suspicious, thanks to your friend Vyvyan. But the very fact that you are Vyvyan's friend will disarm their suspicions, and we will make assurance doubly sure by changing the ships' names, by making one or two other small changes. In fact, we have already done so."

"Oh? Pretty sure I would accept, eh?"

The Colonel smiled.

"My dear sir, remember the firing squad. Of course I am sure!"

Tom was thinking rapidly. Suddenly he smiled to himself. He considered that more than one can play at the ancient game of double cross.

"Colonel," he said, "I have half a mind to close on that deal …"

"Delighted, delighted, my dear sir!" Wedekind rose. He was pleasurably excited. Fervently he shook Tom's hands. "Why, it's splendid. Ganz famos! Of course we will all be sorry to see you leave Germany. But it will be for your own best interests. Why—everybody likes you here. Only this morning Baron von Götz-Wrede told me that you …"

The words were out. He could not choke them back.

There was a pall of utter silence, broken by Tom's incredulous:

"Von G6tz-Wrede? I thought he was dead!"

"Let me explain, my dear sir," the Colonel cut in, clumsily. "The Baron …"

"A frame-up, eh?" continued Tom, icily. "A dirty, stinking trick to get me, eh?"

"No, no! Please let me explain. I will …"

"Lieutenant Graves is right!"

It was the little Ensign speaking. All during the interview he had felt in his inner conscience the pitiless Prussian discipline fighting against a fierce desire to blurt out the truth whatever the consequences.

And he did so now, with a sort of hot, angry boyishness:

"I am sorry, Colonel," he said. "I am afraid I am not a very good officer, perhaps not even a very good Prussian. I am one of those terribly unsatisfactory people whose soul and brain are half the time at odds. I can't help it." He turned to the Westerner. "Yes. You are right. The whole thing was a trap!"

Tom was staring straight at the Colonel.

"What have you got to say for yourself?" he asked thickly; and he was absolutely unprepared for the man's serene, merry, joyous arrogance.

"Nothing, my dear sir. The cat's out of the bag. I admit it. I. did it acting under orders, for the sake of the Fatherland. But"—with a gesture, as if brushing aside a regrettable, but wholly negligible fact—"it doesn't matter. It doesn't change the main question under discussion. You accept my proposal?"

"Yesterday you were all for a firing squad!"

"Yes, yes—but—something has happened, conditions have changed. You accept?"

Tom looked at him with something like admiration for the man's colossal, brutal, sprawling insolence. His own wits were at fever heat. Only one thing mattered—to regain his own liberty, his very life, to help Bertha get out of the country and, if possible, to frustrate the German designs, whatever they were, in connection with the line of ships, with the mine.

"All right," he said, "the joke's on me."

"That's the spirit," from the Colonel. "And my little proposition?"

"It's O. K. for me … On one condition!"

Wedekind wagged a coquettish finger.

"I know your condition, my dear sir, and I regret I cannot comply with it. You want to take my niece back to America with you. Impossible! I do not mean—well—to seem to doubt you. But I am in the habit of playing safe. As long as Bertha is in Germany, I have a lever on your emotions, my dear sir. You will be afraid to—pardon me—try to deceive us. No, no! I know your condition!"

The Colonel had been right in his guess. But Tom had not been a poker expert for nothing. Before this, about to play a pat hand, he had suddenly changed his mind and bought cards after watching the other man's draw.

That's what he did now.

"You're wrong, Colonel," he said. "I am fond of your niece. I don't deny it. But her returning to America with me wasn't the condition I want to make. You see, I do not want to return to America myself."

"What? You …"

"Sure. Don't you understand?" Tom's voice came strong and clear and sincere. "I like Germany. I am mad about the army, the uniform, the chance to see a bit of a bully old scrap. I guess, horses apart, I haven't been much good as an officer in the past. But I'll try my darnedest in the future, Colonel. Give me another chance. Let me stick to Germany and the Uhlans! That's my condition!"

Tom had succeeded beyond his hopes. The Colonel shook his hands again and again, pump-handle fashion.

"Grossartig! Kolossal!" he bellowed. "I shall speak of it to His All-Gracious Majesty. The Fatherland needs men such as you. Why"—with a severe side glance at the little Ensign—"you can set an example in patriotism to many a native-born Prussian." He clicked his heels and saluted. "I thank you in the name of the Uhlans, in the name of the army, the name of the Emperor. And now—let's go back to business—your condition is accepted."

He drew some papers from his pocket. Tom read through them. They were an official bill of sale of six ten-thousand-ton ships, the Walla Walla, Seattle, Carson City, Salt Lake City, Santa Rosa and Denver, all built in American yards, from the Hamburg-American Line to one Tom Graves, a citizen of the United States, Another paper agreed to the transfer of these same ships to American registry.

Tom looked up, pen in hand. He remember Poole's repeated protests that he had lost his citizenship by donning the blue and crimson of the Uhlans. He said something of the kind.

"Sure that's all right? It says here that I am an American citizen/

The Colonel smiled.

"Our army has many experts," he said. "They are not all experts with the sword. Some are …"

"Experts with the pen. I get you. Experts at forgery. Well—here goes!" and the Westerner signed both papers with a firm hand, at the same time reading again the names of the ships. He did not mean to forget them.

Once more the Colonel shook hands.

"You will be released at once," he said. "Back with your old regiment."

"Any chance of seeing Bertha?"

"To be sure. You may call. But—you understand …"

"You bet. I won't be allowed to see her alone. That's all right."

Tom smiled when he was again by himself.

He had accomplished one thing. He was a free man once more, with a free man's chance the chance—to take Bertha away from Germany, home to America.

Only one thing puzzled him.

How would he be able to communicate to Lord Vyvyan the names of certain ships that had recently changed names, flags, and ownership?

Why there was the little silver ring with the letters B.E.D.

CHAPTER XXXIX

B. E. D.

That afternoon, it was the second of July, a little over five weeks before the Germans tore up the Scrap of Paper and plunged the world into a cauldron of blood, Tom Graves was free once more.

At the door he was met by Baron von Götz-Wrede, whose right wrist had healed and whose left was still in a sling, and who acted as if nothing out of the way had happened, as if the whole episode, from the original insult to his faked-up death, had been nothing but an amiable idiosyncrasy—on the Westerner's part, well understood. He told Tom that all officers private residence permits had been canceled.

"You'll have to live at barracks with the rest of us, old fellow. The army is frightfully busy, putting a polish on itself."

"I know."

The other had spoken the truth, and Tom was aware of it. It was not because he was under suspicion that he had to move his traps to a bare ten-by-twelve square of cement, varnished wood, and iron cot in the Uhlan barracks. For all the other officers lived there too, from the Colonel down to the youngest Ensign just gazetted from the Lichterfelde Cadets School. Drill was continuous, pitiless, as he had watched it from his window at Spandau. Long, dusty rides in the morning. Knock off at noon for a bite, followed by lance and saber drill. Then special instruction in various subjects, examinations in French, map making, and kindred topics. More drill until supper time, and nearly every night, after taps, a final lecture by picked, spectacled Staff officers on the technique and tactics of war.

There was little time even for talk. Yet, underlying the silent, steady, harsh grinding, Tom caught the faint note of terrible, bitter excitement, the stinking, sulphurous smoke of a hidden combustion soon to leap into crimson and orange flame, a suppressed sucking and roaring and belching like an underground furnace driven by some gigantic, artificial draught. The very air of the barrack yard seemed surcharged with an elemental, brutal activity that was intense, inexhaustible, tragic.

Hectic whispers rose at times from groups of officers—whispers that were yearning, again pleading, again, with ferocious suddenness, stabbing to a savage, insupportable note, like the expectant, hysterical cries of worshipers at a bloody shrine about to behold the pomp of some dreadful, mysterious ceremonial. Eager to see it. Yet afraid.

They were like so many machines, these Prussian officers about him, like piece goods turned out of a racial sweat-shop. Yet, somehow, very subtly, they preserved their individuality, though trying to hide it, as if ashamed. It was in their faces, their expressions, as they listened to the Staff officers instructions.

Colonel Wedekind would look straight ahead, his square, ruddy face composed into angular lines, like those of a vicious Roman Emperor with a touch of Manchu. Baron von Götz-Wrede seemed nervous, yet insolent, forever curling his dark mustache with the tips of his fingers as if to see that it was still there, as if the martial sweep of it was necessary to his well-being, his soul, his courage. Captain von Quitzow appeared logy, suffused with a heavy, sensuous brutality clumsily overlaid by a glazed, sugary pattern of sentimentality, while others, typical Junkers these, listened to the lessons of war without any heated curiosity, like men who were familiar with every word that was being said, yet with distinct sympathy for the seriousness and the efforts of the instructor. Still others seemed to pass through a mental and psychical struggle, a battling with inherent reluctance to do that which was demanded of them, but with the inevitable result that finally the reluctance faded out of them and gave way to redoubled energy, redoubled effort to listen, learn, obey. One young Lieutenant seemed overwrought, on the edge of a nervous breakdown, listening with bated breath, looking at his war teachers with bright, almost too searching, almost too intelligent eyes, while the little Ensign, Baron von Königsmark, showed a pale, childish face, rather glorious and stately in spite of its pitiful youth, wearing a glow, an enthusiastic glow, that came from the soul, the lips compressed, the clear, blue eyes ablaze. Magnificent he seemed, with an air of power, of majesty that was akin to beauty.

Tom watched them—and he paid them the compliment of believing that at least some of them were watching him. So he, too, cultivated a special facial expression for use during hours of military instruction. And it was something distinctly American:—

The Poker Face.

He listened without a muscle or a nerve twitching, not even when, in a snarling, matter-of-fact Prussian voice, one of the instructors propounded and proved the point that treachery was sound military tactics, adding:

"The idea of war is to win, to beat the enemy, whatever the methods, the ways. It is perfectly proper, when in a tight corner, to use the white flag of surrender as a shield beneath which to return to the attack. It is perfectly proper to hold up your hands, to shout Kamerad,' then to turn on the foe when he enters the trenches to disarm the soldiers. War is not a sport, meine Herren Offiziere. War is a grim business. The rules of sport do not apply to it. Win! That's what the War Lord demands of you. Nothing else!"

Leave from the unceasing grind of duty was seldom given, and Tom was circumspect when he had an hour or two for himself. His old range breeding stood him in good stead, his instinct, his second sight of the man used to the noises and furtive trails of the open prairie. Thus he knew that, whenever he was away from barracks, he was being shadowed.

Not that it troubled him. For he had nothing to conceal. Occasionally he called on Bertha, who was never alone, nor with her grandmother, but always with her aunt, a big, hook-nosed, high-colored grenadier of a woman who, had she been English, would have been a horsy, racing, sporting spinster, but who, being a German, subdued her restless, independent intelligence to further her husband's career. She had received certain instructions from the latter in regard to Tom and Bertha, and she obeyed them to the letter, to the very spirit of the letter.

Thus, her English being far from holeproof, she would draw up one heavy, black, majestic eyebrow and tap the floor with her capable feet when Tom switched to his native language.

"Wir sind in Deutschland, Herr Leutnant," would be her invariable comment, and Tom grinned and obeyed.

There was, therefore, nothing except banalities he could talk to the girl, and he hoped that his eyes would tell her the message that was in his soul.

It did not take him long to discover a way by which he might let Lord Vyvyan know the German intentions as to the line of freighters which, with his name as a dummy, had been transferred to American registry after a change of names—"and of other small details," as the Colonel had said. And, later on, thinking about the chain of events, it would strike him as strange, as portentous, as fitting of the new era, that it was a bit of casual, loose American slang, of that typically transatlantic slang which will ever remain an unfathomable secret to the uninitiated, that saved the situation, that, in the final reckoning, perhaps saved the whole world from the iron heel, the soulless efficiency, the blood-stained brutality of Kaiserism, and Prussianism, and Junkerism—from the Trinity of Crime.

It came about in this way.

Tom understood the impossibility, since he was shadowed, of going to the British Embassy and finding there the man who had the duplicate of Vyvyan's ring. His incoming and outgoing mail, too, was sure to be thoroughly scrutinized and examined.

But—there was McCaffrey. There was the blessed slang of the New World.

One day (and he made a point of telling Baron von Götz-Wrede about it) he ordered a saddle from London, enclosing in his letter Bank of England notes which, again in the Baron's presence, he had purchased at the Deutsche Bank.

The Baron saw him slip the notes in the letter and mail it, but he did not notice that Tom palmed two of the crisp, white pound sterling certificates.

That night, in his room, Tom wrote a few words, dealing with the names of certain ships, Walla Walla, Seattle, Carson City, Salt Lake City, Santa Rosa, and Denver, on a slip of paper a little smaller than the English bank-notes, marked across it in red ink: "For B. E. D.," and pasted the two sterling notes together with the slip of paper between, in such a manner that a tiny edge of it showed above the margin of the notes.

This done, he asked for leave, was granted it, and went over to the "Gross Berlin American Bar," where he bought many rounds of drink for the English and American jockeys and trainers who frequented the place, paying for them at the end of each round.

Finally he bought one more, put his hand in his pocket, and laughed.

"Sorry, Mac," he said, "I'm bust."

"All right. I'll chalk it up, Graves."

"Not on your life. Wait—I have some English money. Take it?"

"Sure," said the barkeeper, and Tom brought out the double Bank of England note.

He looked at it critically. Then he looked at McCaffrey, long, quizzically, with a faint wink in his left eye, faintly, interrogatively returned by his Coney Island compatriot.

"Mac," he drawled, in home slang, "pipe this case note. It's as phoney as a salted mine."

He tossed it across the bar, with another wink, and McCaffrey picked it up and examined it.

"Sure," he said, "it's phoney all right, all right. I don't want it, young feller."

"Nor I. I make you a present of it. Stick somebody else with it. Say—I tell you what to do. Try and palm it off on one of the guys from the British Embassy. That would be a hell of a joke"—and he winked again.

"You bet." McCaffrey pocketed the note. "I'll do that little thing for you." He turned to the people lined up against the bar. "What'll you have, gents? This one is on the house!"

Tom returned to barracks.

He had risked a long shot. But, somehow, he felt sure that it would hit the target.

CHAPTER XL

WAR!

It came suddenly, over night, crashing like an iron fist into the teeth of the world, the Western world, France, England, Belgium, the United States; the stupid, decent, happy, purblind world that had caviled and jested and thrown the mud of doubt when the chosen amongst its peoples had spoken words of warning, that had branded the seers as liars, the prophets as panicky fools; that had refused to believe what it had feared to believe; that, poisoned with the deliberate propaganda of forty years, refused to believe even now, even after the steely, inexorable fact of War hurled across its frontiers, crashing, roaring, maiming, torturing, killing.

It started with a tense, dramatic whisper that changed, in twenty-four hours, to a savage, clarion call of triumph, as the gray-green hordes trampled the fair fields of Belgium and blackened the crime in the German soul with the blacker crime of the German fist.

It came unrelenting, disdainful, bestial, smashing the standards of the gray, swinging centuries, smashing the God-made, man-made standards of civilization and honesty and decency.

On it came in the rolling boundlessness of crazy ambition, bruiting afar the thunder word of a mad nation, led by a mad Kaiser, reëchoing it from the east to the west of Europe, and beyond, from the heights of Quebec to the matted jungles of Central Africa.

It wakened the fog-bound cities of the North with the sweep of it.

It chilled the golden-souled cities of the West with the steel of it.

It rolled over the sad marshes of the East like a sheet of smouldering fire, yellow, burning, inexorable.

It thundered against the hope of all the world and killed that hope—with the laughter of Satan, the Cursed, laughing into nothingness God's cosmic code.

War!

The war of a snake's fang and a tiger's claw!

The war of poison and rape and murder and disease!

German War!

It struck Berlin like a typhoon.

The night before there had been whisperings—yes!—also nervousness, fear, tense, shuddering expectancy.

Crowds paraded the streets, looking up anxiously at the flickering lights—cressets of evil—that shone behind the windows of the Imperial Schloss, the War Office, the Foreign Ministry, the Chancellor's Palace.

"War? Out of the question! Ausgeschlossen! Ganz unmöglich!"

Then, in the morning, the fact of it, crimson-stained, irrevocable!

In ten minutes the news had swept over Berlin; dipping eastward from the Emperor's Schloss to the wholesale district that clutters around the Alexander Platz and speeding up innumerable hands busy with needle and thread and gray-green uniform cloth; swinging beyond the drab, dusty flats of Treptow and causing burly foremen in overalls to curse the beery slowness of their workmen, who were riveting bolts into gun caissons or trimming airplane wings into aluminum frames.

North it surged, to Moabit, with the message to countless factories:

"Get ready! Get ready! The minutes spell victory! They spell the Fate of the Nation!"

And trip-hammers thudded; bit-braces zummed; derrick-cranes hoisted away; dynamos throbbed; piling-gins shook and drummed; gudgeons slid into shafts; gas engines hissed and stuttered; pliers bit and wrenched and cut.

West traveled the news, echoing in the villas of merchants and bankers and brokers, sending them frantically to the long-distance telephones, there to rush orders to their correspondents on the stock exchanges of Frankfort and Munich and Vienna:

"Buy German Consols!"

"Buy Prussian State Railways!"

"Sell French Government Bonds!"

"Sell Russian Petroleum!"

"Sell Belgian Industrials!"

Remembering the secret orders received weeks ago from the Ministry of Commerce for just such an emergency; then cabling across to New York and Chicago with similar orders, supplemented later in the day by other, stranger ones:

"Buy Bethlehem Steel!"

"Buy Remington Arms!"

"Buy U. S. Steel Commons!"

Still on rushed the news, to Spandau, Magdeburg, Kopenick, Frankfort-on-the-Oder and many more of that spider web of small towns that cluster about Berlin, causing the division freight superintendents and the division passenger superintendents of the Imperial German Railways to meet in sudden conclaves, not to figure and debate (all that had been done weeks, months, years ago) but to revise certain figures, to dovetail them with the new orders that shot from the Berlin Railway Ministry with the speed and precision of bullets:

"Freight train Number Two Spandau-Mannheim—switch to track 59, 9, O.P.!"

"Ninety-three car loads of coal southeast from Munich—no!—northeast—to Breslau! Track to Bohemian frontier!"

"Vienna clamors for coal, for cars, for tenders! For men!" And the comment, though not sent along the wires: "Damn these Austrians! Slow, soft! Just that much dead weight!"

Thus the news, rushing on, on. The Jaganath}} of War was in motion. Crunchingly, pitilessly, its wheels moved.

By noon, Berlin had re-made the map of Europe over beer and coffee and champagne. The British ultimatum had not yet been ticked on its way, thus talk ran free and brave.

Degenerate France, impotent Belgium, barbarous, top-heavy Russia were disposed of with the gesture of a hand, the twisting of an arrogant, or Jesuitical word.

"Wir sind die Herren Nation—we are the nation of masters! Resistance? Shucks! Ours the strong hand, theirs the scraggly throat … And we squeeze, squeeze!"

During those first hours the war had not yet assumed a personal aspect, had not yet bitten with its ragged, slimy fangs into the life, the home, the comfort, the happiness of the individual German. It was simply a glorious, shining adventure, a cumulated, latter-day memory of all the great men who had clouted German history to the final apex: Herman the Cheruscan, Friedrich Barbarossa, Prince Blücher, Moltke, Bismarck!

A stern duty, this war. A thundering, eternal right. But one that would be seen to by the army already mobilized—they were swinging down the streets like an immense gray-green snake with innumerable, bobbing heads—a million and a half men. Only the peace strength of conscripts, with perhaps an additional thirty or forty reserve divisions—just to stay in the background in case of emergencies.

Second line reserve? Third line? The men of the Landwehr in the prime of their years? The logy, bearded, retired burgesses of the Landsturm?

Nonsense!

This was a little saber rattling escapade for the beardless youth of Germany. For, of course, the whole thing would be a military promenade, breakfast in Brussels, lunch in Paris, back in Berlin for a late dinner and theater. The fighting would be over in a few weeks, meanwhile life at home would run in the same smooth channels.

"Yes. A military promenade, meine Herren Commilitonen," said the red-faced chairman of the Borussia fraternity of students who had met as usual over their morning Schoppen at the Pschorr Restaurant. "We will take Paris and Calais. France will cede us the rest of Lorraine. Belgium will submit peacefully. Russia? Pooh! Afterwards we will speak a few words to those damned English and Americans. Gentlemen! I drink to His All-Gracious Majesty, the War Lord!"

"Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!" came the alcoholic chorus and steins were drained, then brought down on the wooden table with a crash.

The students smiled at each other. They had settled that little war.

"An experiment in racial biology," Professor Sachs said to his class at the university, "and the old German sword will prove that the experiment is right. It will wipe out forever that cursed and unnatural, that most ungodly heresy called Democracy, that ominous, new superstition of the Western peoples, those diseased, cowardly degenerates. War! A fact! A moral fact! A German fact! In its final consequences, a great, civilizing, beautiful fact! For the value or the non- value of an action can only be inferred from its consequences, and we shall dictate these consequences in Paris, as we did in Seventy, with a sword dipped in blood!"

"It will give a knockout blow to foreign competition," whispered chosen, well-primed speakers among the socialistic workmen. "It will raise our wage standard. It will help us to invade new markets. Beer will be cheaper, also wool. Meat will be more plentiful."

"The very thing," laughed the professional Anti-semites. "For over a hundred years has Germany groaned under the heel of Jewish usurers—the Bleichröders and Warschauers and Mendelsohns and Oppenheims! This war will change all that. Under the cloak of national necessity we will dip our fingers into their swollen pockets. We will confiscate their millions—and that will help the East-Elbian Junkers, the flower of the land, the salt of the earth!"

"It's damned good business," opined the bankers and merchants. "Remember that last Brazilian Government order for locomotives? The Yankees got that. And that railway from Pekin to Shensi? The Chinese Government accepted a British tender. War will change all that. We shall insist on a clause in the final peace terms which will …"

"But neither England nor America are in this war," came the voice of doubt.

"Of course not. They're afraid of us, diese verfluchten, hypokritischen Schweinehunde. And just because they are afraid, we Germans shall dictate to them whatever we please …"

"Yes. Quite right. Just wait till our troops have entered Paris!"

Paris!

That was the slogan, the guerdon, the grail.

"Nach Paris—on to Paris!"

They clenched their hairy fists. They smacked their sagging lips. They exchanged lecherous, meaning winks.

Why, there were women in Paris. French women. They had read about them. They had seen pictures.

Too, there were art treasures, cellars filled with vintage wines, the best of food, everything worth while in life.

Loot!

Why, it was theirs! Paris was an oyster to be opened at the mere kick of their booted, spurred toes!

"Nach Paris!"

Crudely the boast was chalked on every troop train that snorted away from the Lehrter Railway Depot bound for the Northwest, for Belgium. For the road lay there. It was easy. The Belgians would not be such fools as to resist.

The Belgian treaty? Rot! A scrap of paper!

The Belgians honor? Rot again! They would pay for that selfsame honor with minted gold—gold which France would repay to the Imperial Treasury a thousandfold!

Thus:

"Nach Paris!"

The cry was echoed through the streets, flung to the skies, caught, flung high again like a glittering, tinselly ball.

People cheered. They shouted. They laughed. They drank toasts to the army, the nation, the emperor, the Crown Prince, themselves.

Supermen, we! Beyond the Good and the Evil! We—the masters! We—with God! And so:

"Hurrah! Hurrah!" and again: "Hurrah!"

But around two in the afternoon a subtle change began to creep into the emotional atmosphere of the German capital. People still laughed and cheered and toasted. They still boasted and bragged insanely. They still drove their national megalomania with the knotted whip of lust and hatred.

But their triumphant joy seemed a little forced. The spontaneity had faded out of it.

Men, strangers, stopped each other on the street, faces just a little pale, eyes just a little haggard, hands just a little shaky. They produced blue bits of paste board—the summons to the Bezirkskommando, the inspection headquarters of the military districts where they resided.

"They're calling the second reserves to the colors. Another fifty divisions. I wonder why."

"Oh, just to make doubly sure. That's our German way. Anyway, we're past thirty-three, you and I, we won't have to fight. The war will be over in a month, before they'll have time to muster us in."

"I don't know about that. There are rumors …"

"Don't believe them. Foreign propaganda. English lies!"

"Still … Listen!" as a newspaper boy ran past, shouting his wares. "Here, boy! The Berliner Zeitung!"

"What is it?"

"What does that head-line say?"

"Wait. Don't crowd so."

"Yes—go on—read—"

"The Belgians …"

"Surrender? Submit?"

"No, no! Gott im Himmel! They resist! They fight!"

"Damned fools! We'll eat 'em up!"

"But England—Sir Edward Grey sent an ultimatum—yesterday …"

"Bluff! The English won't fight. India would rebel, Ireland, Canada, South Africa …"

Yet, for all their brave boastings, they were beginning to get nervous. The war was becoming a personal issue as, hour after hour, more reservists were called to the colors, by letter and telegram and telephone and newspaper advertisements and big placards pasted on the walls and those advertising columns, typical of Berlin, called Litvas-säulen.

In each city ward the office of the district military inspector was packed with an anxious mob shouting questions:

"When? When, Herr Oberst!"

"At once! Second and third reserves called out! Go to the barracks of your old regiments. You will find everything ready there, your uniforms, your rifles, your side arms. All numbered. Alles klappt! That is the Prussian way!"

Then the chorus, once more enthusiastic, terrible in its overwhelming, unreasoning, racial conceit:

"Yes. That is the Prussian way!" And the crowd, arm in arm, marching out on the sun-bathed streets, swinging along in the old, rectangular goose step they had learned years ago when they were with the colors, and singing at the top of their lungs:

"Lebt whol, Ihr Mädels und Ihr Frauen,
Und schafft Euch einen Andren an …"

And on they rolled to the barracks, each man to the cupboard which was painted with his number. They passed reservists, already in uniform, on their way, on foot, on horseback, and then every one would laugh and wave hands and handkerchiefs to those, the vanguard, who rode away triumphantly in the sunshine, women and children paralleling the marching columns on the sidewalks, crying, laughing, singing, shouting, throwing flowers and cigarettes.

The Uhlans of the Guard, too, were receiving their quota of reservists and Tom, who was on duty, watched them arrive, waited till they had donned their uniforms, then picked out horses and saddles for them. He, Captain von Quitzow, and young von Königsmark, promoted two days earlier to a second lieutenancy, were the only officers left at barracks. All the field officers, Colonel Heinrich Wedekind included, had been ordered to Metz an hour earlier to confer with the commanding General of the cavalry brigade of the First Army Corps; the squadron leaders had been transferred to do some quick drilling with new mounted troops that were being levied for the Eastern border, and the subalterns were busy at depot head quarters. Tom realized that, for once, he was not being watched. They had forgotten about him in the general turmoil, but for the time-being he could not get away. There were too many things to do, and he helped loyally—not out of loyalty for that Germany which he hated, but for von Quitzow, who was fussed, nervous, wavering between tears and terrible fits of Berserker rage, and for von Königsmark, who was pale and serious, but unable to cope with the situation.

So Tom did his best, and it was four o'clock in the afternoon before the full quota of reservists had been mustered in and assigned to their squadrons.

"I'm going to snatch a bite," he said to von Quitzow, rushed out, and went to the nearest telephone booth.

He called up the Colonel's house. Of course he knew that Wedekind had left for Metz; and he chuckled when the servant told him across the wires that his wife had accompanied him.

"Bully! he said to himself, jumped into a taxi-cab and, twenty minutes later, rang the bell of the Colonel's apartment. He asked for old Mrs. Wedekind and she came to him, pale, wrinkled, more feeble than he had ever seen her before, but with the same little malicious twinkle in her shrewd old eyes.

Through the open door she indicated her son's work room that looked as if a cyclone had struck it, scraps of paper on the floor, books upset, drawers pulled out, disarranged in the haste of departure.

"When the cat is away …"

"The mice begin to play," Tom finished the proverb. "Yes."

He was silent. He looked at her thin, trembling hands, at her fringe of white hair beneath the spidery lace cap. For a moment he felt strangely, almost cruelly young. Then he looked into her eyes. He saw that the little malicious twinkle had given way to an expression of sympathy, of love even, and at once the difference in age between him and her seemed to vanish.

"Mrs. Wedekind," he said, "I have come here to ask you to …" he faltered, was silent. He did not know how to put his request into words; and she gave a short, bitter laugh.

"You have come here," she said, "because you are young and in love—and, therefore, selfish, terribly, terribly selfish!"

"Please—please …"

"No use denying it, my boy. And why should you? Love is glorious, love is selfish. It is the way of love. I—I know …"

Suddenly, as Tom looked, she seemed to grow very old. Her eyes became dim. Her words came mumbling:

"They—my son, the army, Prussia, the Emperor—they think that force dominates the world. But they are wrong. It is love which dominates, love which rules. And …"

Once more her words were clear and distinct:

"You want my help, don't you? To help you and Bertha to get out of Germany, out of the Eagle's clutches?"

"Yes," murmured Tom, "I want you to …"

"Do not tell me," she interrupted. "I could not listen to you. It would be treason. I am a German. But"—she put her wrinkled old hand on Tom's arm—"it may interest you to hear that I have decided to join my son at Metz and that Bertha is going with me. You, too, are going there, with your regiment. Metz is but a few miles from the French frontier. Bertha and I leave to-night. To-morrow night, at eleven o'clock, I shall go with her to pray in the old Marienkirche—near the fortifications. It may be that I shall lose Bertha there. You see, I am old and short-sighted."

She rose.

"To-morrow night," she repeated, "near the Church of St. Mary, at eleven! Good-by, Mr. Graves!"

He bent over her thin, scented old hand. He stammered his thanks, but she cut them short.

"No, no, no!" she said, just a little petulantly. "I told you that you are in love, and that people who love are selfish, brutally selfish."

And then the Westerner in Torn rose to the occasion.

"That's where you are wrong, dead wrong!" he cried. "I—by Gosh!—I'll show you. I'll take you with me to France, to America, if I manage to make my get-away. I'll take both you and Bertha!"

She broke into a peal of laughter.

"Thank you. You are a dear boy, Tom … May I call you Tom? But …"

Abruptly her merriment ceased. She was terribly, stonily serious as she went on:

"I do not want to leave Germany."

"What?" asked Tom with naïve wonder.

"Don't you see? It is not only because I am too old, but also because—why, Tom, I am a German."

"But I've heard you say …"

"Many things—against Prussia and the Kaiser and the Junkers. True things. But, for all that, I love the Fatherland—right or wrong!" She drew herself up. "And the Fatherland is at war." She threw open the window. "Listen!"

From the street, a great, zumming chorus rose, swelling, bloating, ever increasing, singing the old German battle hymn with a hundred thousand throats:

"Lieb' Vaterland, magst ruhig sein …
Fest steht, und treu, die Wacht, die Wacht am Rhein"—

Then, with dramatic suddenness, the song broke off. There was utter, terrible silence—hushed, strained, as of a thousand unspoken questions.

Somebody, an officer of the Cuirassiers, came running around the corner. He was waving a newspaper. Tom looked from the window, Mrs. Wedekind by his side. The crowd had turned like one man and was staring at the officer.

"What—what has happened?" Mrs. Wedekind's voice trembled.

And then the answer, from the street, as the Cuirassier shouted it at the silent, questioning mob:

"England! England has declared war!"—and, at once, a chorus of cries, of shouts, of hysterical yells:

"England! The traitor nation!"

"To hell with England!"

"Gott strafe England!"

And, clear above the roar, a single, high-pitched voice stabbing out:

"On to the British Embassy! Kill the English! Kill them!"

The shout was taken up. The crowd, the Cuirassier leading, rolled on like a maelstrom, and Tom grabbed cape and uhlanka and saber.

A moment earlier, he had felt prey to a certain doubt, a certain fear. Now he saw a chance.

"Good-by!" He kissed Mrs. Wedekind's hand. "To-morrow night at eleven, in Metz, near St. Mary's Church!"

And he was out of the room, down the stairs, into the street, running to catch up with the mob that was still shouting hysterically:

"Kill the English! Kill them! On to the British Embassy!"

CHAPTER XLI

THE MOB SPEAKS

What had puzzled Tom, what he had wondered about and, finally, tentatively solved while looking from the window at the maddened German mob, was this:

Thousands of motor-cars of all sorts had been commandeered during the last few days and rushed to the frontier towns, including Metz—taxicabs, roadsters, heavy touring machines, massive trucks, racers, and armored cars. Given his uniform, his rank in the army, it would not be difficult, arrived at Metz, to do a little commandeering himself, to pick out a fast racer and then—whizz!—across the border. But the trouble was that, try as he might, his mind had never been able to grasp even the rudiments of machinery, the most ordinary mechanical details. He knew as much about automobiles as a baby in arms.

He was, in that respect at least, an atavistic throwback to an earlier, simpler age—a man on horseback.

Horses he knew, from withers to fetlock.

"Give me a horse," he used to say, "a clever, fast mare and an ugly bit of country, and I'll ride rings around your stinking, clanking motor-cars! Not on level ground, of course. But on hilly, treacherous ground, where the rider's brains count—and the horses!"—and he had learned, at War School, that the sweep of land from Metz to the West was just that sort—broken, hilly, ugly.

Horses, then. One for Bertha, one for himself. And how could he get them?

All the fast horses, for days past, had been picked and entrained for the Northwest, the Belgian frontier, where three divisions of cavalry were supposed to make a flanking sweep through the rolling Belgian fields under General von Manteuffel. Too, the Russian border had absorbed thousands and thousands of picked animals as a mounted counterweight against the expected Cossack onrush. On the Metz-Verdun sector the War Lord was pinning his faith on incessant bombardment, followed up by countless waves of infantrymen. Of course, there was some cavalry there, too. But no picked, fast horses.

All that Tom had gathered during the last few days when the officers of the Uhlans had talked about it excitedly, had complained rather bitterly that their regiment, the best in the Guards, had been robbed of its finest mounts and was being sent to Metz, where there would be no chance for a dashing, clashing charge.

He would get to Metz all right. He would take the midnight train, the same by which he supposed Mrs. Wedekind and Bertha would travel. He would have to, since a later train would not get him there in time, and since he doubted that old Mrs. Wedekind would have more than one chance to bring Bertha to him. He imagined in fact that she would proceed to St. Mary's Church directly from the depot, before the Colonel knew that the two women had left Berlin.

There was yet another danger. That morning he had received orders to leave Berlin for Metz, together with Captain von Quitzow, on the next day. Further more, the latter was expecting him back at barracks to-night.

Well—he would have to run that risk. He would rush back to his room in barracks, evade the Captain and von Königsmark, tell his soldier servant, his Bursche, some cock-and-bull story, and make the midnight train all right.

But—he needed help once he reached Metz, help to get him the right sort of horseflesh.

Tom had been doing a good deal of thinking during the last months. The sudden coming of war had not altogether surprised him. He had listened to the mumbling, sinister voice of the undercurrent, he had thought over the many things that had happened to him since he had made his stake in the Hoodoos. He was now quite convinced that, what he had suspected, was true:

Vyvyan, inane, drawling Vyvyan, was a British Secret Service man. So were many of the other Englishmen whom he had met in Berlin, chiefly some of the little, wizened jockeys and trainers who foregathered at the "Gross Berlin American Bar."

These jockeys, through their original calling, were familiar with the horses of the German racing stables as a Boston dowager is with the passenger list of the Mayflower. Metz was a rich, prosperous town. Some wealthy man was sure to have a racing establishment there—and to that racing establishment, to the best two horses in it, he would have to win—and for that end he needed advice, help. For everything depended on the horses he and Bertha would ride.

But—whom should he ask?

It was the hysterical yell of the Berlin mob: "On to the British Embassy!" which gave him the cue, and he thought again of the strange words that Vyvyan had said to him many months earlier:

"If ever you should get into trouble, if by that time I should have left Berlin, you must go to the British Embassy. Once inside you must find, somehow, the man who has the duplicate of my ring. Him you can trust. And nobody else."

Before this he had tried to get into the Embassy to find the mysterious stranger with the ring—that time when Bertha had told him that she was being held in Berlin against her will. He had failed then; and, since, he had been watched, shadowed.

But now he had a chance, with that crazed, yelling, blood-thirsty mob, rolling on relentlessly toward the same goal.

"On to the British Embassy!"

The shout was taken up like the response in some Satanic litany.

Steadily the mob gathered strength, impetus, brutal, tearing sweep. From all sides men joined it, even women and children, shaking fists and sticks and umbrellas, picking up bricks and stones.

A mob! A raging mob with but one thought, one mania:

"Kill the English!"

The cry rose like some horrible incantation of lust and cruelty. Tom pushed into the thick of them, using fist and elbow and foot, until he had reached the front rank. He yelled and shouted and cursed with the best of them:

"The English!"

"Kill them!"

"Gott strafe England!"

"On to the Embassy! Tear it stone from stone! Give it to the flames!"

During that crazy rush down the streets of Berlin, Tom learned something about mob psychology. Too, about that accursed, insidious poison called Hatred.

He was not a German. He disliked everything German, had done so ever since the blindness of ignorance had been taken from his eyes and he had seen the real heart of the Teuton Beast. Yet, momentarily, he felt with this mob.

His mouth felt dry. His eyes bulged. Colossal, half -sensuous excitement quivered down his body, from head to toe, touching his spine with softly cruel hands, electrifying him. It was an incredible, trembling, unclean elation.

His fingers clenched. He shouted with the others, in a horrible, insane fervor of lust:

"Kill the English!"

But, after a second that seemed an eternity, he regained control of himself, and when finally the mob had reached the corner of the Wilhelm Strasse and rolled down toward the British Embassy, he was perfectly cool.

Heretofore, instead of stemming the human avalanche, instead of beating them back with their sabers and pistol butts that were usually so ready, the police, as if acting under orders, had only helped to swell the mob, had joined in the mad, killing chorus. Then they must have received counter-orders. Perhaps the shame of it had even pierced the thick skin of the German rulers. For, within a stone's throw of the Embassy platoons of blue-coats, on foot and mounted, hurled themselves against the oncoming horde.

"Back! Back!"

"Zurüch!"

"Hey there—look out—" as the flat of a saber swished down on head or arm.

But they had acted too late. Already some of the crowd had broken through to the Embassy, had torn down the British escutcheon, trampling it, spitting on it. Stones and bricks and sticks were hurled. Windows broke with a crash.

A woman cried hysterically.

Again the police advanced, this time using their sabers to good effect. The mob was hurled back, but not before a few of them had succeeded in battering down the doors to get inside the Embassy … to be immediately thrown out by athletic Englishmen, attachés and flunkeys battling loyally side by side.

All the invaders were flung out on the street except one—a man in a Uhlan uniform, who, sorely beset by a young Englishman on the left and another on the right, suddenly shouted in unmistakable American:

"Say! Cut it out! I'm not a punching-bag—nor am I a Dutchman!"

"I should say you aren't!" came the noways cordial rejoinder. "You're a disgrace to your country, to America"—a statement accompanied by another severe cuff—"and"—a blow—"what the devil do you mean by …

"Cut it out!" Tom yelled again, defending himself as best he could. "I am looking for—for"—and, side-stepping a particularly vicious right to his jaw, he blurted out: "I am looking for the guy with the B.E.D. ring!"

There was silence—broken the next second by a drawling, familiar voice:

"Hello, hello, hello!"

Tom turned. There, in the doorway, stood Vyvyan, and the Westerner, relieved, amazed, gave a stammering, gasping exclamation:

"Well I'll be …"

"Right-oh!" Vyvyan turned to the young attachés, who had again laid hold of Tom. "It's all right, dear chaps! This gentleman's a friend of mine. He's the chap who sent McCaffrey to us with the warning about the steamship line—the changed names and rigging and all that sort of rot. Remember?"

"Yes."

"To be sure," wonderingly.

"Very well. Then don't biff him any more." He turned to Tom. "Come along up to my room."

Arrived there, to the Westerner's first question, Vyvyan replied that he had never left Germany. That time when he had been sent away as persona non grata, he had turned straight round on the Holland frontier and had come back to Berlin.

"I have been here ever since, doing my little bit."

"So you got my message about the transfer of those ships to American registry?"

"Right-oh. Thanks awfully. We spoiled that little German game. Tell you all about it some other time. And now—what can I do for you?"

The Westerner explained, and Vyvyan inclined his honey-colored head.

"Certainly I'll help you. I'll get you some sort of motor-car."

"No, no. You didn't get me, Vyvyan. I don't know a darned thing about machinery. Between you and me, I'm afraid of it. A horse—that's what I've got to have—two horses. One for Bertha, and one for me."

Vyvyan smiled.

"You won't have to drive," he said.

"Won't I though?"

"Of course not. I shall sit at the wheel."

"You?"

"Yes. I am coming with you."

"Why?"

And Vyvyan explained that the German Government had put a train at the disposition of the British Ambassador to leave for Holland that same night.

"But our German friends have labeled everybody who is supposed to be with the Embassy staff. And, my word, I am not supposed to be here! If they catch me, they'll line me up against a neat white wall as sure's pop. Old Titmouse, the Ambassador, y'know, is trembling about that jolly little contingency even now. Of course the borders into neutral countries will be watched very close—for spies. But the French border, the battle front? There's the chance. And now you come, like my jolly old guardian angel, and solve the whole question. Yes. I'll go with you and Miss Bertha. We'll do the regular Prussian thing and commandeer the first speedy looking car we see in Metz."

"But—how are you going to get out of the embassy?"

"Nothing to it. I have as many uniforms as the Emperor himself. Wait."

Vyvyan left, and returned five minutes later in the complete regimentals of a Uhlan of the Guard. He saluted.

"Herr Kamerad!" he snarled, and drew his arm through Tom's.

"But"—stammered the latter, pointing at the window—"the policemen there—the people. They will suspect!"

"Tom!" laughed the Englishman, "there are times when I think seriously of settling in America and earning an honest living by playing poker with the natives. Why, when it comes to bluff, I have you tied to the mast. Watch me!"—and, arm in arm with his friend, he left the Embassy and swaggered up to the Captain of Police in charge of the blue-coat cordon.

"My man," snarled the Englishman in his very best Prussian, "I just brought word to the Ambassador from His All-Gracious Majesty. See to it that nobody leaves the building without permit. Also"—he shook his finger—"see to it that no more mobs attack the Embassy. Understand?"

"Zu Befehl, Herr Hauptmann!"

The Police Captain saluted, while Vyvyan and Tom turned down the street. They parted at the Pariser Platz.

"Meet me at the depot to-night," said the English man. "I'll get the tickets."

Tom looked after him. He shook his head.

"You're right," he mumbled. "You ought to go to America. But you'll never get me to play poker with you! No, sir!"

CHAPTER XLII

TOWARDS THE FRONTIER

It was fairly late in the afternoon and a thunderstorm was booming from the north, trailing a cloak of sable clouds heavy with rain across the face of the town, whirling down the streets with a whipping wedge of hailstones that rattled against the window-panes like machine gun bullets. Lightning zigzagged in fantastic spikes of brilliant white and electric blue. Thunder sobbed dully, hopelessly, like the death gurgle of a shattered world.

Even so, ever-increasing crowds paraded the streets, spilling from houses and cafés and beer gardens out to the sidewalks and thence to the pavements.

Tom had taken a taxicab back to barracks, and his driver tooted his horn continuously. At sight of the beloved uniform, the shining uhlanka, the silver gray cape, the crowd would give way, often with cheers and hurrahs.

Many were drunk, the Westerner noticed. But, too, he noticed that many others, perfectly sober from an alcoholic view-point, people who, to judge from their sunken eyes, their drawn lips, had hardly partaken of food in the gigantic excitement that had swirled through the German capital like fog in the brain of a blind world, behaved even more extravagantly than the beer-soaked hooligans from the North-side slums.

They sang and cursed and cheered and yelled.

First had been the fear that England might fight by the side of France and Russia, a fear promptly argued out of existence by stale statistics and staler national psychology. Then, like a thunder clap, had come the fact: England had sent an ultimatum, followed by a declaration of war. Already the vanguard of Britain's army was crossing the channel to come to the help of France's left flank, to protect Calais, to battle, later on, gloriously at the Marne. Already the navy, Britain's floating walls, was drawing a choking net across Germany's commercial throat.

Thus nervous reaction had come to the crowd like the release of an immense steel spring. In that mad moment Germany welcomed the entry of yet more enemies into the battle arena.

"Eine Welt in Waffen!" quoted a little underfed, pimply high school boy from a text-book. "A world in arms against us!"

And, at once, a university professor, in black broadcloth, steel spectacles, ragged mustache, dirty shirt and frayed cuffs, made an impromptu speech on the same subject. He started academically, but wound up with incoherent roars, just opening his huge mouth, showing his decayed teeth and yelling mad, pathetic invectives at France and England, the crowd shouting back its approval.

Another time, as his taxicab was caught in the human eddy that rolled across the Janowitzer Bridge, Tom was shocked by the sight of a middle-aged woman, well dressed in heliotrope taffeta, neat shoes, white kid gloves, and a little black Viennese toque. Had he seen her back home, in Spokane, he would have said that she was the wife of some prosperous mining man, of good family, soundly respectable, rather conservative, most likely a member of various progressive civic organizations and clubs, and the mother of a large, happy family. In Berlin she was typical of the higher business or professional class, belonging to the soundest burgess society; and here she stood, at the curb, her neat little hat awry, her veil torn, waving a newspaper in her hand, and shouting a foaming, babbling stream of curses and obscenities against France and England and Russia and all the rest of the world.

Yet more scenes as Tom's cab progressed up the street:

A mad, nauseating hodge-podge of emotions, of shouts and yells and indecencies, a very miscarriage of patriotism, and always sprinkled and larded with God, Duty, Kaiser, Hearth, Home, Hurrah! And then more curses, more belching forth of savage blood-lust!

A cult of hatred! A cult of brutality! A cult of obscenities labeled Love of Country! And Tom thought it less terrible than pitiable. He found it in his big, simple heart to pity these people, top-heavy with worship of self and iron force, weak-kneed with meaningless, sugary sentimentality, rotten with false standards and bad beer.

Never in all his life had Tom loved his own land as during that drive. Faults? Of course America had faults. There was no nation this side of millennium free from them. A nation needs faults, like the shadows in a flame, to emphasize its brightness.

But the faults of America were those of youth, added to those of an ancient, badly digested, Mayflower Puritanism, faults at times sharpened and brought into clashing contrast by the continuous immigration and assimilation of tens of thousands of foreigners. Historical, geographical faults rather than national, or racial!

But—Germany? New Germany?

Why … There was that respectable middle-aged woman, there was the pimply schoolboy, the spectacled professor … And all mouthing mean obscenities, polluting the very God in whom they professed to believe.

Yes! America, too, had faults, but (Tom smiled as he coined the phrase) they were such damned decent faults!—while these … He shivered a little.

"Hurry up!" he said to the driver, as the crowd thinned, farther north where, in the drab, reeking tenements that clustered around the barracks, the martial enthusiasm decreased proportionately with the misery of the people who lived there.

Tom did not know how excited he was, and it was this very ignorance of his own emotions which helped him to dovetail minutely each tiny detail of his plans, to switch promptly when circumstances necessitated it, from the moment the machine stopped in front of the barracks.

A dozen or so men in dingy, peaked sweaters were standing at the curb, looking up at the great building.

"Our turn to-morrow," said one rather hopelessly, with a malevolent glance at Tom's uniform; and a woman of the streets, blowzy, enormous, vulgar, spat. A policeman ordered her brutally on her way.

Tom paid the driver, was about to dismiss him, then, rapidly reconsidering, asked him to come back in ten minutes and wait.

Inside the barracks the reservists, tired out with the strenuous drill of the last twelve hours, had thrown themselves down wherever they could to snatch a few hours of sleep before the morning when the long, gray troop trains would carry them to the frontier. Some were writing messages of farewell to friends and families, two or three were sitting in corners by themselves, staring at the floor with unseeing eyes.

One was choking down hysterical sobs. Tom patted him on the shoulder.

"Don't give in!" he whispered reassuringly, and passed on, down the long corridor that ran parallel to the gymnasium, leaving to his left the under-officers mess, whence came broken bits of song and talk.

There was no light in Captain von Quitzow's room nor in that of von Königsmark, and Tom breathed more freely. It would be easier than he thought to make his get-away.

But, when he opened the door to his own room, he stopped on the threshold, thunderstruck. For there, evidently waiting for him, sat von Quitzow. For a moment the Westerner was frightened, nervous. He even thought in a flash of the chance of attacking the other, knocking him unconscious, if need be of killing him. But the German's first words reassured him:

"I am so glad you have come. So very glad!" The big Junker wiped his steaming red face with his handkerchief. "Von Königsmark asked me for leave. He wants to say good-by to his mother, and I let him go. Those reserve officers have all turned in—soft, civilian cattle—tired out after half a day's work—and," he added plaintively, "I'm all alone."

"What's wrong?" laughed Tom. "Seeing the ghosts of former wars?"

"No. Only …" Again he wiped his face. He looked at Tom, his soul, his whole self involved, confused, his sense of duty and discipline battling against the soft streak in his nature. "You see," he went on, "there's a little girl. We play duets together, she the piano, and I the violin. Ach! You should hear us play that Grieg concerto, so beautiful, so sweet! And she lives quite a ways out in the Westend, and …

Tom's mind worked quickly.

"I get you. Want to have a last shot at that Grieg whatever-you-call-it, and perhaps give her pouting lips a farewell smack, eh? And here you are, in charge of the barracks, orders and all that …"

"Yes, yes!" replied the other breathlessly.

"All right. Forget the orders. Forget Colonel Wedekind. He'll never find out. I'll look after things. Go on and hug your girl. No, no," as von Quitzow stammered objections and thanks all in the same breath, "it's perfectly O. K.! Run along and play. You needn't come back till the wee, sma' hours. I won't give you away."

A great, naïve smile overspread the Junker's round face.

"Thanks!" he bellowed, buckled on his saber, and ran out of the room.

"Item Number One!" Tom checked it off on his fingers. "And now, what next? To be sure! We'll try the same sugar pap on my servant."

He rang the bell and his Bursche, a squat, yellow-haired Mecklenburg lad, appeared, clicking his heels.

"Hans," said Tom, "I won't need you any more to-night. You have leave all night leave. Go on and kiss your Gretchen!"

Came another bellow of Teutonic thanks:

"Vielen, vielen Dank, Herr Leutnant!"

"Same to you and many of 'em!" murmured the Westerner after the servant had left, checked off the second item as satisfactorily disposed of, and turned to the third.

He thought for several minutes, then he took a piece of paper, scribbled furiously, went out to the street and spoke to the taxicab driver, who had returned.

"Shoot along to the next telegraph station and send off this message, as fast as you can. Served your three years in the army?"

"Yes, Herr Leutnant!"

"All right. Then you know how to obey."

"Yes, Herr Leutnant!"

"Very well. Listen. Take this message, have it telegraphed as I said, but don't you dare look at the contents. Militärgeheimniss—military secret—you understand? Too, you tell the chap at the telegraph office he's to forget every word of the message as soon as he has ticked it off. Tell him to keep no record of it if he values his skin. It's in code, but there are dozens of spies about. My man," continued Tom, quoting shamelessly from one of Colonel Wedekind's favorite slogans, "I rely upon you, the army does, the Emperor!"

"Zu Befehl, Herr Leutnant!" came the enthusiastic reply, and the driver purred away while Tom called after him to return in half an hour.

He grinned mischievously.

"I, the army, the Emperor! Bully old high sign, that. Wait till I get back home to Spokane and put my brother Elks wise to it!"

In his room once more he went rapidly through his belongings, slipped whatever official papers he had, such as his commission, his transfer to war school, and his appointment as regimental remount officer, in his despatch bag, and changed into a serviceable field uniform of grayish green. He put on uhlanka and cape, girded himself with saber and a brace of heavy-caliber cavalry pistols; then, after a moment's deliberation, smiling softly to himself, he packed a leather case with his Mexican spurs, his range quirt, an additional long, sweeping full-dress uniform cape of silver gray lined with crimson, and an extra pair of riding-boots and uhlanka.

Fifteen minutes later a messenger brought a telegram—the telegram which Tom had sent off with the help of the driver, not to forget Colonel Wedekind's Prussian shibboleth.

He tore it open and read.

It was addressed to Lieutenant Graves, Uhlans of the Guard, Berlin, was signed with the Colonel's name, and ordered the recipient to take the next train for Metz and report there.

Tom laughed.

"Fine and dandy!"

In the upper left-hand corner of the telegram was the date and the place whence it had been ticked—Berlin.

"That won't do!" decided the Westerner, and tore off the corner.

Then he went to von Quitzow's room, put the message on the latter's table, and scribbled a few words telling the Junker not to worry. He was sorry that he had to go. Orders! The other would understand. But everything was all right in barracks, and, if von Quitzow kept his mouth shut, nobody need ever know that for one night the Uhlan barracks had been left without an officer in charge.

By this time it was past ten, and the taxicab had returned. Tom picked up leather case and despatch bag and crossed the endless corridors of the huge, gray building. All the lights were out in the quarters of the reserve officers. The dormitories and the under-officers mess were as still as a grave.

Tom blew a mocking kiss in the direction of the great Imperial Standard of Germany that draped its braggart folds above the door of the adjutant's office.

"I'se gwine to leave yo', honey,
Su' I is!" …

he hummed, remembering an old minstrel song, went down the stairs, entered the cab, and told the driver to go to the depot. He reached there at eleven, ate a comfortable meal at the station restaurant, and strolled out on the platform looking for his friend.

A moment later he found him, nonchalantly sprawled on a bench in the waiting-room, reading a late newspaper. The man seemed utterly fearless, utterly sure of himself, and Tom, too, realized that there was little danger. The German war machine was efficient, but, as nearly always in the case of too much efficiency, it was utterly unprepared to cope with an emergency not contained in the proper statistics and text-books. Later on, the fact of it was destined to be demonstrated on a large scale when forty years unceasing, ultra-efficient preparation broke down, at the very gates of Paris, before—not cannons and rifles, for in that the Germans had an overwhelming advantage, but before the calm faith in the souls of the individual French, Belgian and British soldiers that the world must remain sound.

To-night, the same apparatus of efficiency broke down before the poker sense, in a way the sense of humor, of two Anglo-Saxons.

"Guten Abend, Herr Kamerad!" snarled the Englishman, and the American returned the salute and sat down by his side. Together, without speaking, they looked out on the platform.

It was crowded with officers of all ranks and all regiments, Prussians, Bavarians, Badensers, Saxons, and a sprinkling of Austrians and Hungarians. Some of them were in their cups and exchanging drunken boasts; others had endless conversations with women of all classes—their wives and sisters and mothers, but also their mistresses, and even with women of the underworld, rank, vicious, unmistakable. The coming of war had finally shattered the fiber of their moral life, their moral perceptions, their moral prejudices. For once, being potential heroes, looked up to by all classes, even the grumbling Liberals and the discontented Radicals, as defenders of the Fatherland and conquerors of Belgium, Britain, France, and the world in general, they felt free to do exactly what and how they pleased.

And they did.

To-night the uniform was an excuse for license, where formerly it had been only one for arrogance and stiff, rectangular class consciousness.

A white-haired General was walking arm in arm with a notorious soubrette of the Metropol Theatre.

Two infantry lieutenants, beardless, rosy-cheeked, pitifully young, just gazetted, took turns in kissing a middle-aged, overdressed cocotte of the Tauentzien quarter.

And there were other similar scenes, the decent women, the mothers and sisters and wives, seeming not to see, or not to mind.

"Nasty, lascivious beast—this Prussian war machine," murmured Vyvyan. "Gad! I shiver when I think of the women of France and Belgium!"

"Wow there!" whispered Tom, gripping the other's arm, "steady! Steady, old hoss!"

But his own lips quivered as he saw Mrs. Wedekind and Bertha move slowly through the throng towards the waiting train.

"Let's go!" said Vyvyan. "I've bought the tickets and greased several official hands. I've a coupé reserved for us. That's one thing you can do in Germany, war or peace: Trinkgeld—tips! Goes nearly as far as ‘Zu Befehl!’"

They entered a first-class compartment, marked "Reservirt," and, a few minutes later, came the station master's shrill whistle of departure, and his cadenced call:

"All aboard for Magdeburg—Gotha—Meiningen—Frankfort—Darmstadt—Metz! Metz! All aboard for Metz and the frontier!"

A belch of acrid smoke. A clank and rattle. The officers and the few civilians rushed to their carriages. A chorus of farewells, last messages, last boasts:

"Back in two months, Mütterchen!"

"Don't you worry, sweetheart. I'll bring you something nice from France!"

"Tell Karl and Franz to work at their school lessons, or—Donnerwetter noch 'mal—when I get back …"

"Auf Wiedersehen, Schatz!"

"What d'you want, Minna? A Belgian General? All right. I'll send him by parcel post!"

"You mind your P's and Q's while I'm away, Emma, d'you hear?"

"Good-by! Good-by!"

And a final, bragging altogether shout of:

"Nach Paris! Nach Paris! Mit Gott für Kônig und Vaterland!" while the train clanked out into the night, towards Metz, the frontier, France. …

CHAPTER XLIII

METZ

Hardly was the train out of the Berlin depot when Tom Graves turned to his friend and asked the one question that had been puzzling him for so many weeks:

"Vyvyan," he said, "what is the secret of the Yankee Doodle Glory? The secret why I …"

"Why you were caught in the German Web and jolly near crushed? You and Bertha and Martin Wedekind and your old partner Truex and God knows how many others? Why both you and Truex received that cable from Johannes Hirschfeld & Cie, offering an exorbitant price for control of the mine? Why Baron von Götz-Wrede came to Spokane, making you a similar offer? Why, half jokingly, he made you promise to visit him in Berlin? Why Bertha was called there by a faked telegram to act as bait for your innocence? Why Truex was kidnapped and Eberhardt Lehneke found? Why, failing in this, they made you a German citizen by asking you to join the army? Why you had to sign the paper that gave control to the German Government? Why they chucked Gamble and put their own engineers in charge? Why they subsidized a steamship line to Hamburg from Tacoma? Why, when you seemed obstreperous and less innocent than at first they had imagined, they tried to murder you in a shameful duel? Why, after I had caused the Hongkong authorities to refuse clearance papers to the first ship of the line, bound from Tacoma to Germany, they tried to transfer the line to American registry, first through Wedekind by holding his daughter as a hostage, then, Wedekind refusing to be bullied, through you?"

"Yes!" laughed Tom. "All these several and many Why's! Also—why did you get that sudden wireless appointment to Berlin when the wireless was bust? Why did they have you recalled as persona non grata? Why did you make me promise not to give up the mine? Why …"

"Oh! You did catch on to one or two things, what?" It was the Englishman's turn to laugh. "Well—the answer to all these Why's is the unknown metal in the Yankee Doodle Glory!"

"That stuff that scared Truex, affected the sense of hearing of the workers, puzzled Newson Garrett …"

"And did not puzzle the German chemist—wasn't Conrad Sturtzel his name?—in New York! Right-oh, old dear. You have it!"

"Except," said Tom, "what the fool metal is supposed to be good for. They ran, tried to run, that line of steamers to ship the ore, didn't they?"

"Go to the head of the class!"

"But …"

"The answer is—Great Britain, Sea Power!"

Lord Vyvyan went on to say that Germany, preparing for war, had always lulled itself into the blissful belief that Great Britain would repeat the blunder of Eighteen Hundred and Seventy, would sit tight on its money bags, and watch, nervously, selfishly, with protests, but without telling deeds, the dismemberment of France. France crushed, new iron and coal fields annexed, Germany would then have consolidated her power, prepared another forty years, and swooped down upon England.

"But," cut in Tom, "the British navy? Your merchant marine? Your rich colonies ready to help you?"

"Exactly!" Vyvyan inclined his head. "That's just what puzzled the German war clique. They have a great army—an army that has fought. Too, they have a navy. But it is an untried affair, their navy, without traditions, without practical training. While our very life, our very blood, our very secret thoughts, are bound up with the sea, the navy, the merchant marine."

"Sure," grinned Tom, with a malicious little wink, "I know … Rule, Britannia, rule the waves …' I heard tanked remittancemen sing it out West, on the Killicott …"

"They sang the truth," came Vyvyan's sober, unsmiling comment, "and Germany knew that it was the truth. Of course they have submarines. They'll use them mercilessly, I know, and they'll do a frightful lot of damage, they'll spill oceans of innocent blood. But they'll jolly well fail when it comes to the last chapter. For we are a race of sailors. And then that Sturtzel chap in New York or whatever is his filthy name, got that ore sample from Newson Garrett, and the German Secret Service got properly busy. For the unknown ingredient is …"

"What?" asked Tom, breathlessly.

"I'm no bally good at chemistry and all that sort of scientific drivel. But, as near as I can make it out, it's some stuff which, prepared, used a certain way, causes sound waves to multiply a hundredfold in as many fathoms of water as you jolly well please. A submarine fitted out with whatever devilish ingenuity the German engineers jolted together with that ingredient of the Yankee Doodle Glory, could lay doggo on the bottom of the ocean, listen for hundreds of miles to the sound of the propellers of merchant and warships, wait for the psychological moment, pop up, shoot a torpedo, and pop down again. Such submarines would spell death to British sea power. All rather clumsily expressed. But, I's pose you get it?"

"Sure." Tom scratched his red head. "All's as clear as pea soup. Only—where exactly do you sit in this game? How did you get wise to all this dope?"

"I'm in the British Secret Service"—he took out the little silver ring and pointed at the three letters: B. E. D. "British Ethnological Department," he gave the innocuous translation, and then, to Tom's further questions, he replied that the trouble with England, and incidentally with America, was that men like himself were held at a discount at home.

"It's different in Germany. A German Secret Service man has all the help he wants, all the money, every last bit of assistance the War or Foreign Ministries can possibly give him. With us"—he laughed bitterly—"we are lone wolves, we hunt alone, and when we are caught, God help us! Our Government won't! Those smug chaps back in London will shrug their shoulders, promptly deny our existence, and pass on to the next County cricket match. So, you see, old chap, I played a lone hand. Of course we have some money, contributed by patriotic individuals, but nothing to compare with what our German confrères can draw on. That's why, once I found out about the secret ingredient in the Yankee Doodle Glory, I didn't make you an offer for it, as the Baron did." He interrupted himself. "Wait. I'm doing myself an injustice. There was still another reason. A wretched racial short-coming …"

"You mean—that time when you whispered to yourself that you couldn't accept a block of stock in the Yankee Doodle Glory? That it wouldn't be playing the game?"

"Yes," replied the Englishman. "To keep the Yankee Doodle away from German hands, that's one thing. But to acquire it for England, under false pretenses, to even acquire a small interest in it? Why, man, don't you see? You and I are of the same stock, the same blood. But—there was that silly old josser of a King George the Third, and there were also Washington and Franklin. Well—our two rations are friends, at peace forever, I hope. But suppose something should happen, suppose the German element in your country, attaching to it other, dissatisfied, elements should attain power, perhaps the Presidency, get the majority in Congress. Suppose …"

"War between England and America?"

"Yes. A far-fetched possibility. Perhaps, God grant, an absolute impossibility. But—who can tell? This war, too, was unexpected. All the world will be drawn into it. America, too, who knows! Then, if I owned that mine, if I had piled up tons of the unknown ingredient, your land and mine at each other's throats, why—can't you see the temptation?"

"Yes," said Tom gravely.

"That's why I side-stepped it. I did not want the mine. I did not want to acquire it under rotten, false pretenses, and then use it against your land—after you might have sold it in good faith. I fancy I'm not a very efficient Secret Service man," he added whimsically.

Silently Tom Graves shook his hand. Silently they sat, facing each other, while the train hooted through the gray night, skirting the flat meadows of the Havel, passing Potsdam that was a splotch of sad black punctured with malign, flickering, yellow lights, on to Magdeburg, the first stop.

Morning came with the latter town, and with morning, as the train rolled away southwest to the Weser, the rolling, pleasant fields, the neat white highways, the very oak forests that stabbed, wedge-shaped, into the distance, seemed alive with soldiers on foot and on horseback or bumping woodenly on rumbling gun carriages. On they swarmed to the west in endless lines of trucks and lorries, or on railway lines paralleling the main road with every form of carriage pressed into war service, from the newest affair turned out of the Stettin yards to historical bits of rusty iron rescued from the Breslau scrap heap, from the luxurious wagon-lits of the Southern Express to drab, rickety cattle cars that, up to twenty-four hours before the war, had carried thousand of tons of live Russian geese and Serbian pigs to feed Germany's crunching maw.

The Metz train, carrying a number of high-ranking officers, had the right of way, and the soldiers turned and cheered as they saw, painted on every car, the flashing initials that proved the train to be in the service of the General Staff.

At every station there were troops, crowds, flags, bands. There was hustle and bustle. Singing, laughter, shouting. Words of command. Curses.

Booted, spurred officers piled into the train, half-a-dozen of them into Tom's and Vyvyan's compartment. Two were staff officers, conscious of their importance, the other four young subalterns of a crack Saxon Hussar regiment, a little the worse for liquor and inclined to be boisterous.

There was an exchange of salutes, and inquiries about the latest news from the capital.

"Any more declarations of war?"

"Is it true that England has mobilized all the Central African gorillas and put them into kilts?" And ringing laughter, and more questions, rather more serious.

But they hardly listened to Vyvyan's replies, though the latter, in his rôle as "Berliner" officer, succeeded in being every bit as drawling and inane as he had been in his native language when the Westerner had first met him aboard the Augsburg. Their questions were really only meant rhetorically—boasting, arrogant questions that were supposed to answer themselves—all about German preparedness, German greatness, German invincibility, German triumph. All about the German Herren Nation—the Fate-chosen Race of Masters, of Supermen!

For that day, with the scent of blood in their nostrils, the ruling caste of Prussia was keyed to its highest, shrillest note.

Tom clenched his fist. Savage they seemed to him, but, too, childish and, somehow, whining, as if not quite sure of themselves in spite of their brave, clanking words.

There was a little infantry lieutenant sitting across from him—wizened, silly, a vacant, fatuous smile curling his thick, cherry-red, sensuous lips. He was speaking about himself, as a chosen specimen of the race of Supermen.

A wave of nauseating disgust swept over the American. Pleading a headache, he closed his eyes. At his left, the two General Staff officers were conversing in a sibilant, dramatic undertone.

"That Thionville plan is a bluff," said the one. "I tell you it's going to be …"

"Verdun? Has the Crown Prince …"

Tom closed his eyes yet more tightly. Presently he commenced snoring. An hour later, night already brushing low, the train pulled into Metz.

The depot was in a turmoil. Other trains were rattling in from all directions, from Stuttgart and Coburg and Dresden and Munich, all carrying officers and high civilian officials, the latter the vanguard of that army of governors and judges and tax collectors whom efficient Germany had already appointed to rule the lands to be conquered and stolen.

Vyvyan and Tom passed rapidly down the platform and out to the street. They saw Mrs. Wedekind and Bertha enter a cab.

"I shall try and see what I can do about commandeering a motor-car. Once I have it, I can't hang around town with it. No joy-riding in time of war. I must take it somewhere. Let me see—" he paused, thought, then asked: "You know Metz?"

"No."

"Listen, then." Vyvyan gave a string of rapid directions, winding up with: "You can't miss the Archbishop's palace. From there you turn straight west, out to the fortifications. You've got to bluff there."

"You bet." Tom smiled. "You know a whole lot about this town, don't you?"

"Rather. Did a bit of work here once. Beyond the outer ring of fortifications is an old fort. A sort of curiosity. They don't use it any more except for summer picnics. It's called the Hohenzollernwarte. Just the other side of it you'll find a thick clump of beech trees. I'll meet you there with whatever car I manage to commandeer."

"We got to hurry."

"Of course," said the Englishman, a little impatiently. "That's no news."

"Sure. But … Say, 'member when I fell asleep on the train?"

"Rather. You snored damnably."

"Well, it was a fake snore. I was listening. Yes, sir, I stole your thunder, my Secret Service friend! I was listening to those two staff officers."

Vyvyan looked up excited.

"What did they say?"

"They said that the proposed attack from Thionville against Verdun is only a feint, a bluff. The real attack is going to be launched direct from Metz. They say they're going to catch the French with their boots off!"

"They will not!"

"You said something there, young fellow. You just bet they will not—if you get the motor-car, and can drive as I can ride!"

And they shook hands and parted, the Englishman turning north, the American, despatch case and leather bag swinging from his left arm, saber truculently bumping against the ground, turning south, towards the Marienkirche—and Bertha.

CHAPTER XLIV

THE BLUFF

Tom Graves, walking down the ancient, curling streets of Metz, noticed a subtle difference between the atmosphere of war as it was here and as it had been in Berlin. There, straight through all the pomp and clank and vainglorious, childish boasting, had been a fantastic, extravagant, enigmatical streak. A streak of unreality. For Berlin, heart of the Empire, is, by the same token, at a safe distance from the frontier, while Metz focused sharply, shudderingly into the radius of actual hostilities. Thus voices were more hushed here; there was just the least little bit less bragging, and people went rapidly, directly on their way, giving odd, nervous starts when an airplane zummed overhead like a monstrous, steel-ribbed insect.

Tom found the ancient church of St. Mary fronting the street with a centuries-old cemetery, its narrow, baroque contours flanked by two uneven steeples, peaking up to the star-frosted night sky line like thin shafts of rigging.

Through the half-open doors came deep chanting, a sharp scent of incense, flickering fingers of light. Worshipers came and went, some returning from the altar, where they had burned candles to the Virgin for their sons about to go forth into battle, others arriving early to sob out their souls in the midnight Mass. There was a sprinkling of private soldiers and officers, Catholics from Bavaria in light-blue or bottle-green regimentals, and a few Austrians, curiously ill at ease. Nobody paid any attention to Tom.

Arrived at the corner where the sacristy, newly built, jutted triangularly, he saw Mrs. Wedekind on her granddaughter's arm. She made a hopeless, flat gesture of finality with her mittened hand, then disappeared in a throng of peasant women in shorts skirts and clumsy, winged bonnets, Lorrainers all, talking in a mixture of French and German, some crying as if their hearts would break.

A moment later Tom was by Bertha's side.

"Walk slow," he whispered, tucking her arm in his; and she understood without asking him the reason.

For the streets were filled with soldiers, privates and non-coms and officers, strolling about with women and girls of all classes, all talking in tense, hectic undertones—like a last flaring of passion, a last calling out of a man's senses to a woman's, before the morrow, the battle, death.

Tom, clean to the marrow, sensitive, felt the silent surging of emotions. It embarrassed him. The more so as there was something he had to tell Bertha, something of which he had thought when, back in the Uhlan barracks, he had packed his leather case.

And he did not know how to put it into words.

She noticed his silence and finally she asked him what was the matter.

"Bertha," he whispered, "you know I love you better than all the world …"

"Tell me about your love after we're safely across the frontier," came her mischievous reply.

"You just bet I will. But … Say … Forgive me for what I'm going to tell you, and for the love o' Mike don't misunderstand me!"—and he told her in a hushed, halting whisper what was on his mind

"Don't you see, honey?" he wound up. "It's the only way. Why—it's—the thing, the one thing they wouldn't suspect. It was so in Berlin, these last few days, and—look!" pointing at the amorous couples, some disappearing down dark alleys, others turning suddenly, after rapid whispers, into houses. "It's—safe!"

She gave a little choked laugh.

"Tom, dear," she said, apropos of nothing it seemed to him, "I know German—gentlemen. I talked to lots, and lots talked to me, and I am so very, very glad that you are …"

"What?"

"Just Tom! Just plain, clean, square, American Tom! Come," as he was going to branch into further explanations. "I know exactly. There's the place for us—over yonder!" indicating a small, drab, mean hotel not far from the Archbishop's palace.

Bravely she preceded him into the dirty lobby. Bravely she overlooked the frowzy desk clerk's leering words of greeting, not even turning her head when Tom asked for a room and was given the key.

"Is there a back entrance?" the Westerner asked the clerk. "You see …" he halted, stammering, and the clerk continued the sentence for him:

"I understand, Herr Leutnant. A jealous, elderly husband, nicht wahr?"

"Yes, yes. Where is the back entrance—exit, rather—in case …"

"To the left from your room, down the corridor, stairs leading into the side street. Thank you, Herr Leutnant!" as Tom planked down a ten-mark piece, adding another for tip. "Shall I show you the way?"

"Never mind," replied the American, walking up an uncarpeted, dusty flight of stairs to the room.

There he gave Bertha another string of whispered instructions—and his leather bag.

"I'll wait here," he said.

"But—my hair? I got some manicure scissors in my hand-bag. I'll cut it off!"

"Don't you dare. If you do I'll never propose to you again—except, perhaps, three times. You pile that mane of yours up as high as you can. The rest'll be O.K. They'll think you some little shrimp of an Ensign just gazetted."

"Tom!" she exclaimed indignantly, but he pushed her inside the room and waited in the corridor.

A few minutes later she came to him, looking for all the world what Tom had said she would, like a pitifully young Cadet just commissioned, because of the stress of war. She had put on the extra regimentals which Tom had taken along, and the silver-gray cape hid her from her neck to her feet, completely covering her dress. Her tiny shoes were drowning in Tom's riding-boots, the uhlanka was tilted at a rakish, perilous angle across her smooth forehead.

"Hullo, Puss in Boots!" laughed Tom; then, gravely: "Be careful. Don't swing your feet or those fool boots'll drop off. Here, take my arm!" leading her down the back stairs and into the side street which, luckily, was pitch black and deserted.

Luck continued with them. They met few people, and these mostly frightened, nervous Lorraine civilians, torn between fear of their German masters and the undying hope that soon again the gay soldiers of France would come marching and singing across the frontier. Due west they proceeded, as Vyvyan had told Tom, within sight of the fortifications, where they were stopped by an armed sentry.

Tom pulled out his regimental papers and waved them beneath the soldier's snub nose.

"Was fällt Ihnen denn ein?" he snarled in his best, most explosive German. "Here—look at the seal. Look at His All-Gracious Majesty's signature, you mutton head! Off with you! Rechts um! Kehrt!" And the sentry was so flustered that he forgot completely to ask for the password.

The whole scene was typical of the entire German system. Not only of the exaggerated discipline, accompanied by brutalities, which frightens what little original common sense they may be blessed with out of the heads of the privates, but also illustrative of another fact. For the Germans were so pleased with their own spies, many of them fearless, daring men, and with the results obtained that, through sheer, contemptuous, sneering cocksureness, they frequently overlooked the possibility that the Allied nations, too, might have clever Secret Service men in their employ.

Later, this was changed. Later, came the spy hunts from one end of Germany to the other, came acid skin tests on the frontier.

But this was the second day of war. The machine was still too cocksure, as said above, too stiff, too creaking, and Tom, side by side with Bertha, tripping in her enormous cavalry boots, stepped away from the sentry and out into the night.

They reached the Hohenzollernwarte a few minutes later. Vyvyan was there, peering into the dark, and in the yet darker shadow of a clump of beech trees Tom saw the dim outline of a rakish, low-slung racing car.

The Englishman laughed when he saw Bertha.

"My word," he said, "you're the best-looking little Uhlan I've ever seen. You'll pass muster all right in front of any snooping outpost."

He helped Bertha into the tonneau and jumped into the driver's seat.

"Come on, Tom!" Then: "My God! What are you … What is … Quick! Quick!"

For, simultaneous with his first word to the Westerner, with the latter about to step into the car, with his own hand already busy with the starter, there had been a thunder of hooves, cries, the rattle of sabers; and, the moon just then breaking through the clouds with a broad, pitiless, diamond-white ray, he saw three figures on horseback charge down upon them.

Uhlans, they were. One was an officer waving a sword. The next second he recognized him: Colonel Heinrich Wedekind, his face distorted with rage and triumph. The other two were privates, their long lances leveled, the little flags on them fluttering in the wind.

One of the two privates was a few feet in the lead. His horse was the fastest. He spurred it on, the lance point flickering like the eye of some malevolent beast of prey.

It had all happened in less time than it takes to tell.

"Quick!" he cried again to Tom.

But it was too late. The Uhlan loomed up a few feet from the automobile. His lance came down, as if searching for blood with its steely point, and, at that exact moment, Tom sang out:

"Go on! Don't wait for me! Remember Bertha!"

Vyvyan obeyed instinctively. He shot the car forward with a great crash, a leaping bound.

Tom had thought, figured, measured, and acted at the same fraction of a second.

Just as the mounted man was closing in, as his lance was about to come down on the occupants of the car, the Westerner had ducked, swerved to the right, jumped from the ground like a cat, and caught the frenzied, galloping horse around the neck. He swung himself up. The double weight acted on the horse like a brake. The Uhlan cursed. But his long lance was useless in a body-to-body fight, and before he could reach into his boot for his carbine, Tom had drawn his revolver and shot him through the head.

The man fell sideways out of the saddle and to the ground, twirling grotesquely, and, in the twinkling of the moment, Tom tore the lance from the dying man's grasp, shifted it to his left hand, let the reins drop loose, relying on the pressure of his knees, and turned to meet the shock of the Colonel and the other private, revolver in his right.

He shot once, and missed. The others, trained cavalrymen, changed their tactics. They deployed to right and left, shooting as they galloped past the American, one bullet going clear through Tom's uhlanka—he felt it singeing his hair—the other missing him by an inch.

They brought their horses to a stop, turned, and again deployed right and left. But this time Tom was ready for them. He remembered his old training. His former craft came back to him: the craft of the round-up!

As they came on, this time drawing in a little closer to either side so as to make more sure of their aim, very suddenly he turned his horse, swerved in the saddle, and bent low. His left hand, armed with the lance, shot out. It caught the Colonel in the throat, killing him instantly, while the revolver in his right spoke twice, each shot hitting the mark. The private fell out of the saddle, onto the ground. He lay there, curled up, like a sleeping dog.

It was then, with the three men dead at his hands, that a great, sad reaction came upon the American. It was War! Now, for the first time, he completely realized the grim tragedy of it. The killing of men! The spilling of blood!

His lips worked. He felt nausea rising in his throat.

But he controlled himself.

He turned his horse to the west. Over there lay Verdun, and he knew the road, had studied it in War College. There had been a special course.

Less familiar he was with the northern road that dipped into the direct Verdun approach twenty miles beyond: the Thionville road where the feint attack of the Germans was meant to give the Metz army corps a chance to catch the French defenders napping.

Well, he would have to trust Vyvyan to do that part. Vyvyan and Bertha—they had the motor-car, while he was a man on horseback …

A man on horseback—once more! Like out West, home, on the range! Riding through the night, with the stars and the moon to guide him!

And he rode!

He rode as he had never ridden before!

CHAPTER XLV

OVER THE BORDER

The Jaganath of war was moving its wheels, sharply, pitilessly. On it rolled towards the frontier (there was now none except a line of blood where men had died) and crossing it near Gravelotte, pausing perhaps for the breathless fraction of a second to ponder on that other battle that, there, forty-four years earlier, had seen the flower of the French cavalry slaughtered by the overwhelming cannons of the Teuton invader.

Tom rode in the wake of the scouting parties, guided by the stars—"just like back home," he thought, "when I used to go after rimmed cattle."

The ground was uneven, broken by clumps of trees, then, beyond Gravelotte, rising in layer upon layer of ragged rock, again dipping into valleys and bottom farms that had been deserted by the peasants.

"Sorry, old girl," he said to the mare, as he spurred her down a sharp hillside, "don't mean to hurt your feelings, but you got to do it! Wow there!"—and, forcing the horse to squat on its hind quarters like a dog, he made it slide through the loose sand and gravel in a sitting posture, pulling the mare sharply to her feet and jerking her to a gallop, without waiting for breath, as soon as level ground was reached again.

He grinned to himself. "Well," he said in the general direction of the evening star, "I've seen a lot of those motion picture weekly reviews. But, believe me, that Dago cavalry has nothing on me!"

On he galloped, finding water for himself and his mount at many little streams. Every half hour or so he stopped for a short rest. For—to quote his range philosophy—he didn't believe in waiting till the horse was worn. He said that horses were cussed animals at best, and the only way to ride them was to give them a few minutes rest before they had a chance to know that they were tired.

Once a narrow wedge of light shot from behind a heap of stones, and his mare plunged violently, switching her flat, docked tail, and looking nervously sideways to escape the glare of the light.

The cause of it, even as Tom was drawing a bead to shoot at the flash, was revealed a second later when a Bavarian infantryman, electric pocket lamp in his hand, stepped out and saluted. He had recognized the Uhlan uniform, and it did not even need Tom's snarling "Despatch rider!" to cause him to lower his rifle to the carry and step back again into the shade of the stones, switching off his lamp.

Occasionally, riding as hard as horse and leather would let him, he met long, ghostly lines of foot soldiers plodding stolidly through the star-flecked night, field kitchens on wheels, and motor caravans of the Imperial Service Corps.

But he was hardly noticed: just an officer of Uhlans, dashing into the night, like so many hundreds of others.

There were no trenches, no miles upon miles of barbed wires in those early war days to stop his progress, and he rode, rode!

Down a hill, sliding! Up a hill, bent over the mare's neck, pulling her up almost bodily, forcing her to climb like a cat! Taking a fallen tree at a long, lean jump! Swerving to escape the shock of a battery that came suddenly looking out of the dark! Slipping down the gravel bank of a broad stream, spurring the animal to breast the swirling water, till his hands were raw with the pulling of the reins, his knees numbed with the gripping of the saddle.

Suddenly he laughed.

A saddle! A silly, light, postage stamp saddle!

And he dismounted, he loosened the girth, he chucked the saddle into a clump of bushes.

He patted the horse's glistening, sweat-studded neck.

"Now we'll do some real riding!" he said, and he vaulted up, his legs dangling like an Indian's, his flesh thrilling to the touch of the horse's flesh.

And he rode! On!

Faint from the distance, the direction of Verdun, boomed a steady, dramatic roar, the big guns slashing into the war game. A splotch of whirling white shell stabbed the opaque black of the heavens. And on he rode, at a short gallop, as, the hills coiling higher, the ground became broken with splintering, treacherous stones. He could not see them. He felt them. Sensed them. He was bred to the free range, the open.

As he drew nearer the supposed lines of the French, the thought came to him that the French outposts might not like his uniform, that they might shoot on sight.

"Holy Moses!" he soliloquized. "Cheerful little prospect. But," he laughed grimly, "better to die by a French bullet than be strangled to death by the German Web! Git up there, old girl," as the mare shied at a puddle glistening in the moonlight.

Another short rest. And again he sent the horse to a long, stretching gallop, on and on and on!

The lines of an old poem came back to him. He had been made by his father to learn it by heart. Had hated it, as boys will. Yet had never forgotten it.

Now here, in a foreign land, riding through the night, away from the Germans, on to the French, the truth of the poet's words struck him with an almost physical blow:

"Up from the South at break of day,
Bringing to Winchester fresh dismay,
The affrighted air with a shudder bore,
Like a herald in haste, to the chieftain's door,
The terrible grumble and rumble and roar
Telling the battle was on once more,
And Sheridan twenty miles away."

"Twenty miles away," murmured Tom. "But, by Ginger, we'll make it. Git up there!"

As he rode on he met with no more German outposts or marching columns, since the skeleton divisions that were making the feint attack from Thionville had deployed to the north while the Metz divisions that were expected to smite the French lines in front of Verdun with a sudden, massed, unexpected blow, were still far in the rear.

Yet, occasionally, there was the sharp, thin flash and staccato report of a rifle, hurriedly fired and immediately echoed by other flashes and reports, showing that scouting parties of the opposing armies must have come into contact with each other.

Once the terrible hysteria of overstrained nerves, of overtaxed waiting and expectancy must have struck one of the Metz brigades, for quite suddenly, from the east one of their field batteries belched into action, shooting at nothing in particular. A great gun gave answer in the distance. There was a melancholy wailing of falling shells. Tom's horse plunged, swerved, nearly fell, but his hands reached out, soothing, strong.

"Nothing to be afraid of," he said. "It's all right, old girl. Now, then—look out for that tree," as, the moon hidden by an inky cloud bank, a huge, gnarled oak sprang from the darkness, then was swallowed again in the darkness as, obeying Tom's hand, the mare sidewheeled.

"Bully for you," commended Tom. "A little less nervousness, and I'd turn you into a range pony."

And he rode on, getting the utmost speed from his horse, for another thought had come to him. Suppose something happened to Vyvyan and the girl? Even so, there still was France, and, though he was unfamiliar with the Thionville approach, he might get direct to the Verdun lines and give warning—in case Vyvyan failed.

Suddenly, though he rode for his life, all personal considerations of safety whirled away and disappeared like rubbish in the meeting of winds.

Only one thing mattered:

The French! Verdun!

There was something maniacal, something grimly fanatic about the thought, the steely resolution, and, in that hour, as he rode through the night, the soul of the simple, straight, square Westerner rose to the height of greatness.

On!

The horse panted, breathed heavily, staccato. But something of the man's unconquerable spirit seemed to flow into the animal consciousness. It was tired. Tired to dropping. Its muscles pained. Its lungs, tortured, extended, then suddenly contracted, quivered as the motion of the legs pumped the air through.

But the mare stretched her magnificent, long body. She was a thoroughbred—like the man who rode her.

Again a burst of sound, to the north this time, thundering to a portentous, smashing, roaring climax, and just for a moment Tom felt something clutch at his heart with clay-cold fingers.

Fear? Yes!

He owned up to it like the brave man he was, and, just because he owned up to it, an immediate reaction came to him as the shots plopped far out into the night, finding their target far away; and he said to himself that there was no danger.

Yet, a few minutes later, the whistle, the shrieking, the crack and clank, enveloped him with an intolerable sense of loneliness, of insecurity, of stark powerlessness. For a second, that was like an eternity, nothing seemed to matter except the plomp of the shells.

It seemed the end of the world! A world dying in a sea of hatred and lust and blood!

But, whatever the fantastic thoughts in his subconscious self, his conscious self was cool, collected. It communicated the warning of treacherous ground, of slippery timber fall, of turbulent little wayside stream, of crumbling rock slides, to his brain, the nerve center, and the nerve center sent the messages on to eye and hand and leg … And he rode, like a Centaur—on, on, away from the Web!

Then silence, but for the thud of the horse's feet—silence again torn by the rumble of distant guns.

Another mile, and the sun rose slowly, with haggard, indifferent, chilly rays, immediately shrouded by a thick slab of mist.

Here and there a tree stood out, spectral, lanky, like a sentinel of ill omen. The rumble and grumble of the guns drew steadily nearer. Too, the short, throaty, vicious bark of mortars with a wailing, high-pitched screech at the end, and the deep, fully rounded note of howitzers. Above the mist sobbed the engine of an airplane, doubtless painted with the black and white cross of Prussia. It was absolutely invisible. Yet, somehow, Tom could visualize it—like some evil spirit, infinitely brutal, infinitely subtle.

The mare gave a little, pitiful whinny. It was as if she meant to say to the rider:

"I can't. I can't. You have ridden the heart out of me, and the strength, the life!"

Her knees gave way, but Tom pulled her up with his soft, strong hands. The animal's labored, sibilant breathing sounded terribly distinct, terribly portentous.

"Steady!" he murmured, "steady, you beauty," as, nearly throwing him, the mare danced sideways, frightened at an enormous sheet of dazzling, whitish blue light that jumped up to the zenith, then dropped to the tortured earth with a million yellow, racing flames.

From a low, hog-back hill rose a curled plume of thick, inky smoke with a heart of sulphurous gold. The next second, an artillery salvo belched up, stopped abruptly, was followed by an immense burst of sound waves like a giant beating a huge drum. The western sky swallowed the mist in an intolerable, peacock blue, nicked with vivid purple.

Tom shaded his eyes with his hands. With his sharp eyes, far away, he could see a flag—very small it seemed, very foolish. But …

Yes! He could not make out the colors. But the stripes ran vertically, not horizontally. It was the flag of France!

"Yip—yip—yip!" his voice peaked to a quivering, long-drawn Indian yell.

Then, to his horse:

"Come on! Come on, you beauty! We're there! We've made it!"

The mare plunged forward. In front of him, across the rim of a cup-shaped valley, Tom saw a number of small figures.

The French! Doubtless an outpost, or a scouting party. They came up on level ground. They stood erect, bent forward purposefully. One, most likely the leader, waved his arms.

Again Tom yelled. A great joy surged in his heart—and then, quite suddenly, it seemed as if a giant hand was plucking him from the saddle and hurling him through the air. Then it seemed to him as if he sank into a cushion of air.

For a fleeting moment, though he could not utter a sound, he saw quite clearly. He saw his horse, a few feet away, rolling on its back, waving its legs as in a pitiful appeal for mercy …

The whole world seemed to totter crazily. The morning sun, blazing through the mist, heaved like the bow of a ship, then swung to and fro in a mad, golden pendulum.

He felt a dull jar.

Consciousness faded out.

When Tom came to, he found himself in a large tent. There was something moist and cool on his forehead. For a moment he lay still. Then he opened his eyes, and he saw that he was stretched out on a hospital cot and that, sitting by his side, was Bertha.

She leaned over without a word and kissed his lips,

"What—happened …?"

"I'll tell you," came the voice of Vyvyan. He was standing near the other side of the cot. "You fell in with a French outpost. So did Miss Wedekind and I. But we had enough sense to tie our handkerchiefs—fortunately I had three—together and wave it like a white flag. You forgot that jolly little particular. They saw you coming on, the French outpost, just as if you were the whole bloomin' Teuton army lusting for blood and boodle. They saw your Prussian uniform, very naturally thought you one of the Gott Mit Uns, and one of them fired … No!" as Tom began gingerly feeling his arms and legs. "He didn't hit you. Hit your mare, though, square in the chest, and you did a remarkable and not altogether graceful somersault. Fell on your jolly old head."

"I guess so. It throbs terribly."

Then, suddenly remembering, he went on in a tense, anxious voice:

"About the German plans—the attack from Metz …"

"Everything's as right as rain, old chap. Bertha and I got here in plenty of time. I had a talk with the French commander after I convinced him that we were not particularly bold Prussian spies—by the way, you and I are both due for the War Cross—and the General did a lot of rapid figuring and switching and ordering. My word, the Prussians will get the merry dooce when they get within reach of the guns. All right," as Tom was about to speak again, "I am off. I's pose there are a few things you'll have to talk over with your—oh—nurse;" and he left.

There came a long silence, broken by Bertha's:

"We're safe, Tom. Thanks to you. As soon as we're home, you and I …"

She blushed, and as he did not speak, she went on with a little laugh: "Why, Tom, aren't you going to propose to me?"

He sat up and took her in his arms.

"Sure I will. But—"

"There's no but. Not this time, Tom!"

"There may be."

"Why?"

"Well, sweetheart, formerly, when I proposed to you I used to say: I love you. Let's get married.'"

"That'll be plenty this time, too."

"Oh, no, it won't, for this time I am going to say: Dearest, I first saw you, I first loved you, back home in America, out on the Killicott, when I was a plain American horse wrangler and rode the range. I—well—got sort of engaged to you when I was a German for the time-being, dressed in the blue and crimson of the Uhlans of the Guard. And now, honey, will you marry—a soldier of France? That's, if they'll have me?"

And her reply was sturdily, uncompromisingly Western American:

"You just bet I'll marry you, Tom. You just bet I'll be the wife of a soldier of France. And you just bet those Frenchmen will be tickled to death to get you. If they aren't—I shall talk to them!"

Then she kissed him.

THE END

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article  Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.