The Man on Horseback/Chapter 23

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Come through! What is it?"

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

"How much, you damned rascal?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"All right. Wait."

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

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

"Where to? I must communicate with him!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Tickled to death you think so."

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

"Sure. I know."

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

"Well?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You are—positive?"

"Yep."

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

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

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

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

And the Baron had to admit that it was.