The Man on Horseback/Chapter 16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I—I …" He was silent.

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

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

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

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

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

"You mean Truex?"

"Yes."

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

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

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

"Oh—the Colonel's brother?"

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

"Oh—Truex has a sister?"

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

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

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

Krauss bowed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom straightened up.

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

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

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

"What—whatever are you going to do?"

"Ride her as God made her!"

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

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

Berlin was out in all its summer Sunday morning glory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Look out, Graves! For God's sake …"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He looked at her.

"Why, Bertha! Dear!" he stammered.

A moment later, she regained consciousness.

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

The German officer looked at Tom admiringly.

"Gad!" he said. "You can ride!"