Page:Vance--The false faces.djvu/38

22 "Simply," Crane explained, "I take the firing to mean the execution of our nootral friends from Norway."

The Swiss shuddered. "It is most terrible!"

"Well, I don't know about that. They done their damnedest to fix it for us to drown somewhere out there in the nice, cold English Channel. I'm just as satisfied it's them, instead, with their backs to a stone wall in the warm sunlight, getting their needin's. That's only justice. Eh, Monsieur Duchemin?"

"It is war," said Lanyard with a shrug.

"And war is … No: Sherman was all wrong. Hell's got perfectly good grounds for a libel suit against William Tecumseh for what he up and said about it and war, all in the same breath."

Lanyard smiled faintly, but Dressler pondered this obscure reference with patent distress. Crane champed his cigar reflectively.

"What's more to our purpose," he said presently: "I shouldn't be surprised if this meant the wind-up of our rest-cure here. That's the third mine-layer they've collected this week—two subs, and now this benevolent nootral. Am I right, Monsieur Duchemin?"

"Who knows?" Lanyard replied with a smile. "Even now the mine-sweeping flotilla is coming home, as you see; which means, the neighbouring waters have been cleared. It is altogether a possibility that we may be permitted to depart this night."

Even so the event: as that day's sun declined amid a portentous welter of crimson and purple and gold, the moorings were cast off and the Assyrian warped out into mid-channel and anchored there for the night.