Sexton Blake and the Great War

by Mark Hodder

  A few deft touches of grease-paint here and there altered him in a way that was little short of miraculous; yet it could not strictly have been called a disguise, and would have defied detection in the strongest light.

  Tinker sat in the corner and gnawed sandwiches, and, after a quick run, the train pulled into Queenborough Station.

  Before it came to a standstill Blake said quickly:

  “You look after the baggage, and that gladstone for the cloak-room. You’ll find me somewhere on board. I want to catch every face that passes up that gangway, and to do that I must get there first. I want to see if I can spot anyone who looks as if he might be a friend of Hans, Fritz & Co. Be as quick as you can to join me.” And with that he was off like a flash.

  Unhampered by any luggage except his ulster and the automatic in the right-hand pocket, he was well ahead of all the other passengers, and long before the first of them came blundering up the gang-plank Blake was leaning over the steamer’s rail smoking a cigarette, and scanning the faces each in turn as they passed under the glare of the sizzling arc-lights overhead. As a matter of fact, there were only a couple of score or so of them all told, mostly businessmen, whose love of money was greater than their fear of lurking submarines. Tinker was amongst the last of the crowd.

  “Anything doing?” he asked Blake, as he dumped down the bags on the deck beside them and joined Blake at the rail. “I’ve stuck the other bag in the cloak-room and given the ticket into the stationmaster’s charge in case of accidents.”

  “Nothing so far,” said Blake, in an undertone; “mostly drummers of the ordinary type. Two women—obviously English—but not a soul who looks like a German.”[3]

  Warps were cast adrift, engine-room bells clanged imperatively, and the steamer slid silently away into the darkness. There was quite a big lop of sea on outside, and soon Blake and Tinker had the deck to themselves.

  “Well, we are all right so far,” said Blake, at last throwing away the end of his cigarette. “We may as well turn in and get some sleep while we can. I don’t suppose we shall get much chance the other side. By Jove, look there, they are dry-nursing us with a vengeance!”

  On either quarter there had come stealing up out of the darkness the long, lean hulls of destroyers, swirling along without lights, and visible mainly by their white bow waves.

  “They need to take care of us evidently,” said Tinker. “I’ve never had an escort of the British Navy before; makes one feel stuck-up and important, doesn’t it?”

  Signals were interchanged between the mail-boat and the destroyers, and in obedience to these the mail-boat swung onto a new course.

  They were evidently being piloted through a mine-field, for after a little while the course was abruptly changed again, and in this way they zigzagged about for a considerable time. How the destroyers managed to pick up their marks on such a pitch-black night was a sheer mystery to Tinker; yet there was never a second’s pause or hesitation. They seemed to pick their way as easily as anyone could have made their way down Regent’s Street or the Strand in the good old days when those thoroughfares were ablaze with light.

  Blake and Tinker turned in at last, and when they woke the destroyers had vanished, and the Dutch coast lay ahead of them, a thin grey line in the chill dawn.

  Blake had already made up his mind as to the most practical route, and that was to take the train to the little frontier station of Rosendaal, and try and slip across the border from there; to go up the river or take the more ordinary route he considered impossible. For the man whom they had left struggling on the station in the grasp of the ticket-collector would have been certain to wire to his confederates as soon as ever he was at liberty, and they would be watching the main routes; but it was just possible that they would overlook the more roundabout way via Rosendaal.

  At any rate, it was a chance that had to be run. As soon as the steamer was alongside the quay they made their way to the station and ate a hearty breakfast, and by the time they had finished, the train was ready to start. They secured a compartment to themselves, for there were few passengers, and the train went trundling through the lowlands of Holland.

  They were safe enough so far, the frontier was the critical point, and even Blake’s pulses beat a bit faster as they drew near.

  The train slowed down, and suddenly came to a stop just short of the station. Whistles tooted wildly, and then the train backed away a little. A fat Dutch guard came along the footboard.

  “There will be a quarter of an hour’s delay!” he called out. “All passengers are to remain in their carriages. Passengers and their luggage will be searched before crossing the frontier!”

  Blake and Tinker looked at one another blankly. They had a pretty shrewd idea of what the search would be for. Their friend of the station had evidently not overlooked the possibilities of the Rosendaal route.

  They looked out of the window, and saw that the platform was crowded with German uniforms. It was evident that the search would be a thorough one.

  Blake thought for a moment. There was no time to be lost.

  “It’s a chance, but we must risk it,” he said. “Give me the paper quickly.”

  Tinker fumbled in his shirt and pulled it out.

  Blake tore off the envelope and unfolded the paper. Then he pulled down the spring blind of the nearest window and pinned the paper to it by the corners, after which he let the blind roll up again with a snap.

  “Settle yourself down again in the corner,” he said. “Pretend to read—anything—and look as unconcerned as you can.”

  Tinker nodded, and Blake tore the envelope to shreds and let the pieces flutter out of the window, then he lit a cigarette with care, and settled himself in the opposite corner.

  He had barely done so when the train moved slowly forward again and drew up level with the platform. Instantly four or five German officials appeared at the door of each carriage. Blake shot a keen glance at those crowding round their door. There were four agents, two of them non-commissioned officers under the command of a stolid-looking lieutenant. The latter had evidently been furnished with a description of them, for the moment he caught sight of them he pointed excitedly, and called out in German:

  “There they are. Search them well!”

  The door was flung open, and Blake sprang to his feet in well-simulated surprise.

  “What’s wrong, Herr Lieutenant?” he asked, in German.

  The latter growled out a vague answer, and his men pounced on their bags, which they opened and rummaged without ceremony. Blake had already deposited the dummy envelope with the big seal there, and a sergeant snatched it up with an exclamation of triumph. The lieutenant seized it, and slit open the flap. But his face fell when he discovered only a blank sheet of paper inside.

  He turned it this way and that, and tried it upside-down for all the world like a monkey at the Zoo who had got hold of a piece of looking-glass. Finally, he replaced it in the envelope and thrust it into his tunic.

  “Search their bodies!” he ordered harshly. “Off with their coats, waistcoats, and boots!”

  “Gently, gently!” said Blake, in German. “We are quite willing to be searched if necessary, Herr Lieutenant, but we will hand you our things one by one. Here is my coat. Take care, there is an automatic in the pocket.”

  “To carry arms is forbidden.”

  “In Belgium possibly, but we are still in Holland. Here is my letter-case; it contains a fair sum in notes. With your permission I will give our value, a hundred marks, to be divided amongst your men if you will kindly ask them to get over this job as soon as possible. Here are my waistcoat and boots, and for the rest your men can search for themselves. I assure you that they will find nothing on me but some loose change.

  “As for that envelope and sheet of paper you have there, you can see for yourself, and I give you my word that it hasn’t the slightest political significance.”

  The lieutenant grunted, and the men searched both Blake and Tinker to the
skin. They searched the cushions, the floor, everything in fact but the one place they should have searched—the carriage window-blinds.

  At last they swung off in disgust, leaving the two to dress themselves and collect their scattered belongings as best they could.

  “Phew!” said Blake. “That was a near shave. I kept my eyes skinned ready to make a grab for the automatic if that fat-headed lieutenant had tried the blinds. They would have bagged us in the end, of course, but we should have had time to destroy the paper first, with luck. I suppose they’ll let us go on now. Hallo! What the deuce are they up to?”

  “Keep your places!” rang out a harsh order. “No trains can cross the frontier to-day. You will be sent back to the next station till further orders, and you will remain under guard. Anyone attempting to leave the train without permission will be shot!”

  “Cheerful animal, isn’t he?” said Tinker, grinning.

  “I wish that on the whole I’d put a bullet through him,” said Blake, as the train backed slowly out of the station to Tollen, a little one-horse place a few miles down the line.

  Here, though quite irregularly, they were searched again, by the Dutch guards this time, and they performed their duties good-naturedly enough. It was a mere farce of a search, and the corporal in charge offered them a particularly vile brand of cigar apiece. Blake lit his, with the resigned air of a stoic philosopher—Tinker, not feeling equal to the task, surreptitiously dropped his out of the window, and gave a sigh of relief.

  At the next station they were told they would be free to get out and do what they pleased—or words to that effect.

  “So far, so good—no damage done,” said Blake, and, unpinning the paper from the blind, he handed it to Tinker to hide away.

  “I don’t want to swank,” he said, “but it’s me they’re after, not you but me, mark you! They know me by description perfectly. I very much doubt if they have had more than a casual sort of catalogue of your personal beauty, and, therefore, the paper will be safer with you. If they collar me, you know exactly what to do with it. Anyway, they shall have a run for their money. By hook or by crook we’ve got to get that paper to Rue le Heron, in Antwerp, between us, and we’ve never failed yet. I reckoned on getting through by this route. It’s panned out a blank, so we must try another.

  “The first thing for us to do is to get back to Flushing. I know an old pilot skipper there whom I was able to do a good turn to once. He’ll help us if he can.”

  After a dismal two-hour wait in the little wayside station, and a cold, drizzling rain, they took a train back to Flushing, crossed the footbridge over the lock, and made their way to a small inn on the far quayside.

  Here Blake left Tinker alone whilst he conversed with the host, a burly Dutchman, in his private sanctum. The upshot of the interview was that within an hour they were both provided with typical Dutch shoregoing outfits—baggy trousers, short jackets, sabots, and all complete. Their faces were stained with walnut-juice, their hands reddened with ochre, and their luggage placed in safe keeping. All they carried with them were their automatics with spare clips, their money—changed into Dutch currency, and equally divided between them in case of emergencies, and, of course, the all-important paper sewn into Tinker’s vest.

  Just as they had finished their change of kit, Blake burst out chuckling.

  “What’s the joke?” asked Tinker gloomily

  “That fat pig of a moon-headed lieutenant—who collared the dummy paper—didn’t you hear what he said?”

  “I only understood about one word in ten,” grumbled Tinker. “You know German isn’t my strong point.”

  “Well, what he said was that he was going to take the paper to the police bureau, to have it tested for invisible ink. He’ll get a surprise when he does.”

  “Why? There wasn’t a line on it.”

  “Not a visible line, certainly; but I scrawled a word or two in milk on it, and when they come to hold it up to the fire—a dodge they are certain to try—they’ll see clearly written large and plain, ‘You condemned fools!’ Only I expressed it a little more bluntly than that, in low-down German slang, which will bite home. I should like to see that fat lieutenant’s face when he reads it! Got your automatic handy, so that you can grab it in a hurry? Good! We’d better be getting down to the quay. Old Bogo, our host, will be ready by now.”

  They went out across the flagged pavement-way to the waterside, and there found their host busy on board one of the many hogaast lying by the landing-stages. She had a single-pole mast, light spas, and her hull and leeboards were rich with Stockholm tar. Her draught was roughly two feet with her leeboards up. She was anywhere between twenty-five and thirty ton, and she could have outpointed and outsailed any ordinary racing-cutter of her own size. Ostensibly she was carrying a cargo of potatoes and other vegetables to sell in Antwerp—in reality she was carrying Tinker and Blake, who had chartered her as the easiest way of getting into Antwerp, since the railways were closed to them.

  Bogo, in the midst of splicing a badly-frayed length of main-sheet, caught sight of them, and bellowed a welcome as they came on board.

  “De tide him goot,” he explained, “and de windt, once we get clear the lock, we go like—what you say?—blazes, smoke!”

  From Flushing to Antwerp is, roughly speaking, ninety miles, and the first thirty is mostly a steeplechase across iron-hard and ever-changing sandbanks; but that is just where a boat of the hogaast type comes in. She can haul up her leeboards, and skim over stretches of water that would tear the bottom out of any deeper draught vessel.

  They made good time, carrying a fair wind with them nearly all the way, and, as Blake had calculated, it was just dark when they finally moored up alongside the fish-market quay. They said goodbye to their host, and clambered up the steep, slippery steps.

  “Wait for us till dawn,” Blake said. “If we are not back by then you’d better clear out, in case of trouble.”

  “No matter, my friend,” called the cheery Dutchman, “I my vegetable have to sell. I cannot leave till the market be open.”

  “All right, then,” said Blake, “we shall know where to find you in case of need.”

  He and Tinker turned away and walked swiftly across the open yards, amongst all sorts of litter, and so through the dock gates. Outside was a German sentry, with fixed bayonet; but seeing them dressed as ordinary Scheldt boatmen he paid no attention to them. He had seen hundreds of the same type pass within the last hour.

  Once clear of the docks and the sentry, Blake paused a moment to take his bearings by the tall spire of the cathedral, and swung away to the left.

  They wound their way through many crooked, old-fashioned streets, and finally turned sharply to the right.

  “The Rue le Heron,” said Blake, and scanned the numbers carefully, many of them half obliterated, till he came to nineteen.

  Once the Rue le Heron had been a prosperous residential quarter of the Antwerp merchants, but now it had fallen on evil days, and the big, stately houses of old-time were let out in tenements, and stuffy, ill-conditioned flats.

  Number nineteen was dated back to the seventeenth century. It was of greystone, with mullioned windows. The heavy iron-studded door had been battered in, in the early days of the siege, and now hung wide listlessly on one hinge, all awry.

  The place seemed absolutely deserted, but far away up on the third floor Blake’s keen eyes had discovered the faint glimmer of a candle through the crack of a curtain.

  “That will be our destination, I expect,” said Blake. “Anyway, we’ll go and see. Come on!”

  They made their way cautiously up the rickety stairs, for it was pitch dark inside the building, and they had to grope their way foot by foot. Someone passed them on the stairs when they were half-way up. They felt rather than saw that it was a man. He was either very reckless, or very familiar with the building, for he was coming down at breakneck speed, and would have dashed into them if they had not stood aside, close up against the
wall, to let him pass. As it was, he was blundering on without even seeing them. His breath was coming in little whistling gasps, as though he were half-scared out of his wits by something, and presently they heard him running over the flagstones in the street below.

  “Well, he was in a deuce of a hurry, anyhow,” said Tinker, in an undertone. “I suppose he couldn’t have been our man by any chance.”

  Blake shook his head.

  “Schmidt was described to me as a man well past middle age; that being so, he’d never have been able to get along at that pace—in the darkness, too. That was a much younger man altogether. He may, of course, have been one of Schmidt’s agents, an understrapper, or he may—” Blake broke off suddenly, with an exclamation.

  “Great heavens!” he cried. “He’s more likely to have been an agent for the other side! The hurry he was in, and his hard breathing struck me as vaguely suspicious at the moment. Come on, quick!”

  He struck a match, and then another. There was blood on the stairs—fresh blood, which glistened in the flickering light. He pointed to it, and dashed blindly up the stairs two at a time. A faint bar of yellow light showed ahead of them, filtering through the crack under the door. The latter stood partly ajar, and they burst in.

  Blake’s surmise proved only too true. Adolph Schmidt lay half-across the bed with two gaping wounds in his chest. He was in his shirtsleeves, having discarded his coat and waistcoat, and had apparently been busy writing when he was attacked. For the lamp stood on a table in the centre of the room, which was littered with papers. There was an overturned ink bottle, a broken pen, and a splintered chair—evidence of the brief struggle which had taken place.

  Blake took in the whole scene at a glance, and sprang for the lamp. As he did so he took a brief look at the scattered papers. They were mostly short paragraphs for the local news-sheets. He recalled the fact that Sir James had told him Schmidt ostensibly made a living by newspaper writing. It was a mere farce, a cloak beneath which to hide his real profession; but so far it had served its turn. Blake snatched up the lamp, and carried it to where the man lay half on half off the bed.