The Man on Horseback/Chapter 39

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.