Then suddenly he cast a look down at the hay mound beside him. His nostrils quivered. His hand reached to his Luger. And there was danger and lightning fury in his dark eyes.
Dick had been peering at the stiff-boned Prussian through a screen of grass. He thought himself sufficiently well hidden. But, abruptly, von Reuter dropped his fishing rod, and leaped back. His pistol flashed out. He caught up a platoon leader’s whistle that hung around his neck, and blew it wildly.
Whril-whril-whrilloo!
What a damned noise!
Again, whril-whril-whrilloo! He backed a step warily. His blunt blue automatic covered Dick’s position.
“Here’s your damned spy, soldiers!” he shouted jubilantly. “Lying like a rat in the hay! Come on, boys! Poke him out! Drag him out! We’ve got him!”
Out from the edges of the cedar wood not many yards away, up from behind hedgerows and from innocuous-appearing hay mounds over the field, dozens of green-clad soldiers appeared instantly.
Dick heaved himself out then, and stood to meet them. They closed up in a ring all about him, with rifles leveled and fixed bayonets.
Chapter IX
The Pigeon
At twilight, Captain Tillinghast Wainwright Oakley Face, flight commander of the Royal Flying Corps and Nummer Zwei of the great secret Nachrichtenamt, was sailing his Camel back to the Fighters’ home field from Denain, when he caught sight of a slate-blue pigeon with a milk-white breast beating the air above him and ahead of him.
He was at seven thousand feet. Over the lower earth, long shadows had gathered, but the cloudless upper air was still smooth and clear. The sky had a curious silver luster, like a mirror. Across it, the slate-blue pigeon trudged on rapid wings, making undeviatingly south.
It was a carrier, released somewhere behind the German lines and heading homeward with information for the English. The business of the captain was to make the life of such birds brief. He took after it faster than a hawk. He crouched over his control stick with a cold grin on his face. His pale eyes behind their amber-colored goggles had the look of a red fox’s. So fast he overhauled the slate-blue bird that it appeared to be flapping motionless in the sky.
He hauled up his bow steeply toward it as it beat desperately. He went at it like a rocket. At twenty yards, he opened up his bow Vickers, gunning at the bird’s milk-white breast through the circle of his prop. With engine roaring, spitting fire, he shot at it head-on. It disappeared within the circle of his prop.
Sharp over he keeled. He stood his ship on her right ear and looked around to watch the bird fluttering, maimed or dead, down through the sky. He came around in a fast flipper turn, and flipped over upside down, dropping into a dive. Down through a thousand feet of whistling space he plunged on the hunt for it, but saw it no more. It might have got hung up on the wires of his undercarriage. Or, as was more probable, it had been hurled away by his propeller blast and gone whirli-gigging down at a distance in its last death throes. However he had lost sight of it, he was certain he had got it. For if he had missed, it would still be doggedly trudging on across the sky, obeying in the blind instinct of its breed.
He spun down to four thousand, then began climbing again. There was only a single slate-blue feather that had come whipping through his propeller, and now nestled softly against his breast.
In ten minutes, he was above the Fighters’ field. He cut his engine and dived down through the whining air. The wind burned against his face. His stomach came into his throat. His heart beat slow and cold. At two hundred feet, he leveled out dizzily and banked around into the wind, setting his wings for a landing.
Just then, he glanced behind him, at his ship’s tail, for some reason he did not know. Upon the skid-fin sat the slate-blue pigeon with the milk-white breast, holding its head beneath its wing. It was no apparition. It was the bird. There it sat.
He stood on his rudder bar and shrieked a wild oath. Over his shoulder, he hurled a monkey wrench. But the headless bird remained upon its perch, and the wind fluttered its slate-blue wings.
“Get off! Get away, you damned hoodoo!” the captain shrieked.
Just then, the ground hit him. His last vision was of the blue and white pigeon skimming off into the air.
He wasn’t much hurt, just dazed. No bones broken. His stomach and liver and spleen were still in their proper places. He got up from the ground where he had been hurled as quickly as a cat, and hopped around, apparently all right.
But something had happened inside of him, and he didn’t know what. It was something more than a broken rib or a ruptured kidney. The vision of that headless thing on his ship had sickened him, and he could not forget it. He knew that a man is not so clever as he ought to be, nor so cool and calculating and self-possessed, when he allows the sight of a roosting pigeon to throw him clear out of control and bring him down to wreck. He’d have to be more watchful of himself. More watchful.
O God, if that were possible! He had watched so long, so very carefully that often, as he lay sleepless in the night, his hot eyes seemed to be burning holes through the smoky darkness about him. He had watched till the nerves of his eyes were naked raw, and the very look of things was like the scouring of hot sand upon them.
Yet watchful, more watchful yet. . . .
The Fighters pulled him to his feet. He pranced around a few paces, shaking his head. He seemed all right. The ship had come down on one wing, and its engine head had crushed into the turf. But lucky Captain Fairy Face had been flung clear from the cockpit, and had landed safe as a cat.
The devil’s own luck.
“I must be more watchful, more watchful yet,” he kept muttering.
He put his arms around the shoulders of Washee Lee Long and Mud Face Mortimer, and walked carefully over to his quarters. The two Fighters were still in their flying gear, covered with oil and very tired. Little Washee trembled beneath the captain’s weight. It was probably he, rather than the captain, who should have been supported. A phosphorescent cartridge had nicked his shoulder that day, and the wound was festering.
“Fritz is raising merry hell today, I guess you know,” Mortimer said savagely. “He’s pounding the top off Hill 439 with everything he’s got. And he’s moving down about a million men. It’s like trying to keep ice in a furnace to try to keep any spotters up over Hunland today. Fritz has massed all his fighting rates from a hundred miles of front, and every time you stick your nose over, he hops on you ten to one. Something terrible and big is going to pop before we see our shadows again.”
“The Huns own the air today—that’s no lie,” Washee Long spat. “By God, they got Spider O’Brien, and there wasn’t a better boy that ever flew. They laid for him in a cloud formation at twenty thousand, and they ganged him. And damn them, I say, for a bunch of dirty, yellow, sneaking buzzards.”
“If we’d had Big Dick with us—” said Mortimer.
“Ah, Fahnestock!” said the captain. “The beggar’s flying with the blasted Huns today, I’ll lay you odds on it, eh, what?”
“You lie in your teeth,” said Washee Long. “And if you weren’t my C.O., I’d tell you so.”
The captain said no more about it. The thought came to him that he had better play another tune. It seemed hard to shake the faith of the Fighters in Big Dick Fahnestock.
He hobbled into his quarters between them, and fell down very wearily upon his cot.
“Tell that chappie, my batman what-you-call-him, tea and plenty of sugar,” he said. Mortimer pulled off his boots for him, and left him there alone.
For a long time, Captain Face lay curling his delicate feet and staring with a burning glance at the twilight that deepened out the window, until his hot eyes closed at last, and he breathed more easily, and fell into dreams of a headless bird that sat perched upon his heart with piercing claws.
* * * * *
How long the captain slept, he did not know. And, happily for him, he did not remember what his dreams had been, except that in them he had been in h
ell. He aroused at a touch on his shoulder and struggled to arise, brushing his long pale mustaches.
“Swipes?” he mumbled. “Swipes, you blasted beggar!”
Then he realized it could not be Swipes. Swipes was dead. Shot through the heart, for a fact, and dead these many long hours. Yet, for a brief instant, Captain Face, struggling out of his terrible dreams, was obsessed with the feeling that the dead batman was near him, and that many other dead men likewise were all about him.
It was Adjutant Harvey who stood beside his cot, holding a lamp to his face. The lamplight gleamed on Harvey’s buttons. His hair was gray as granite rock, and his countenance was shadowed over with a gloomy look. There were other men who had come in with Harvey, eight or ten of them. Tall men, and deathly grim. The captain beheld them dimly as his eyes opened. They stood in the shadows outside the circle of the light, saying no word.
The captain sat up in bed, blinking his hot, dry eyes. He reached for a lump of sugar on the table beside him.
“Take away that blasted light!” he snarled.
“Attention, Captain Face!” said Harvey. “Stand up, and salute!”
The captain saw that Adjutant Harvey wore a dress sword. Harvey’s left hand gripped the hilt. The captain sat slowly, curling his stockinged feet. He stared at Harvey’s hand with fascination, seeing how strong it was, and how the thick blue veins stood out on it like cords.
“Eh?” he said. “Eh, what?”
He nibbled the lump of sugar. He looked beyond, with a cold, pale glance, squinting his eyes against the light, to the ring of men who had come in with Harvey. One after the other he looked at them, blinking. Most of them were men he knew, division and brigade officers whose friendship he had cultivated. There was Colonel Wilberforce of the 141st Yeomen, a hard-swearing, red-faced old fathead, known as Old Blimey Eyes. There was a smiling man with a drowsy glance who was Brigadier-General the Viscount Worleigh, commanding officer of the three regiments of Fusileers who were holding Hill 439. There was a little round man like a rubber ball who was the very savage and merciless Harry Bing—Cold Steel Bing, Major-General of the 1st Division of the Lancashires. There was Wing Commander Peter Kelvey Price of the Fighters’ own 39th, known for no reason whatever as Petey the Cheewee Bird. And there were other men in the dismal shadows.
The captain stared around him with a pale glance. He could name the ranks and commands of all of them. He had wormed himself into their friendship. He had dined and drunk with them—drunk the King’s health and damnation to Fritz with them. He had won and lost his money at the cards with them, he’d roared out ribald songs with them, he had set their women on his knees, he was privileged to call them Blimey Eyes, and Skittles, Harry and Cheewee. They were all jolly men. He knew them well. A pack of fools.
But now their eyes were stern and dreadful on him. They stood in the shadows silently, each man carrying his sword. And there was something very terrible in their silence, so that a feeling of cold went creeping up and up over the heart of the captain.
He arose briskly and stood rubbing his hands together.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said. “I am sorry you caught me napping.”
From the darkness by the door, someone laughed in a hoarse voice at that.
“Eh?” said the captain, jerking his head back. “What?”
He pulled his mustaches and stared at the shadows. Beside the door, he saw a figure he had not seen before, a gaunt old man nearly seven feet tall, with a lean bald skull, with a purple tumor over his face and a single glittering eye. This apparition wore the tartans of the King’s Own Scots. The look of him was enough to freeze the Captain’s bones. This man was Major-General Sir Keith Cothaven of the Scots, the Prettiest Lady from Hell, as he was known.
It was Cothaven who had laughed.
The captain felt sick. He braced himself, for all the world around him was doing a dead man’s jig.
“Sir Keith!” he said in a high, shrill voice. “You have come about the court martial, eh? The case of the spy Fahnestock? I did not expect so soon—”
Two sentries with fixed bayonets slipped up to him silently. They took post on either side of him.
“Well, gentlemen, what is it?” said the captain in his piercing voice. “What can I do for you? Won’t you be seated, gentlemen? Please make yourselves at home. My batman will bring liqueurs and cigars in half a minute. Make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen. Find yourselves chairs.”
None of them answered him, though he went talking on and on, and on and on, in a high, shrill voice like a cricket’s. By and by, he fell silent, too, and wiped his forehead that was drenched with sweat like rain.
Now the Prettiest Lady stirred from the shadows. He crossed the floor in three long strides. Silently, he stared down at the shivering little captain. The lamplight glittered in his single eye—he had lost the other fighting against the Mahdi at Ordurman thirty years before. The captain could not meet the look of that terrible old man. Something like the grip of a bone-cold hand had closed about his heart.
“We have heard from K-13,” said Keith Cothaven.
“O God!”
“By carrier pigeon he transmits to us the originals of your correspondence with von Schmee.”
“O God! O God!” whimpered the little captain.
The sentries jerked him up by the elbows as he fainted forward. His countenance had gone white as a dead man’s. It would never be any other color again.
There are some who say that, at the last, he became a raving lunatic. That he laughed and screeched and prayed. That he vomited green. That he groveled on the floor and tried to kiss Cothaven’s feet. That, for a while, he imagined he was a dog, and crouched on his paws and barked. It is true that there was heard for a long time the sound of his hideous shrieking.
But what happened to him in that place and afterward will never be accurately known. The men who buried him have sealed their lips.
Chapter X
Big Dick Steps Out
At ten o’clock of that thunder-heavy night, Big Dick Fahnestock was escorted into the presence of General von Schmee. He had been caught without chance of escape in the hayfield when von Reuter blew the whistle. If K-13 had not been trapped at the same time with him, the failure was not the fault of the keen and watchful Nachrichtenamt.
His time was up, and he knew it. He was no more than a mosquito to Paul Friedrich Hermann von Schmee, something to be caught and crushed when it grew troublesome. Now the mosquito was caught. Von Schmee would slap it. It gave Dick rather a curious feeling to realize that his own life, which seemed quite considerably important to him, was actually nothing at all to this huge, black-bearded man with the gleaming eyes. No more than the life of a mosquito.
Von Schmee stood behind his desk, sticking colored pins into a large-scale map that was spread out on it. He looked at Dick and yawned.
“This American fool again?” he said. “I was under the impression he had been disposed of. What have you got out of him, Kleinhals?”
Colonel von Kleinhals spread out his palms with an empty gesture.
“He knows nothing, or pretends not to.”
Von Schmee moved another pin, marking the farther advance of one of his regiments toward Laraine Wood. There were seventy odd of those pins in the contour map that covered his wide desk top. Pins in six colors: blue for the 2nd Pomeranians, orange for the 38th Poseners, violet for the 17th Saxons, yellow and green for the 11th and 21st Silesians, and black for the Jigsaw Division from Berlin, that included the great Brandenburg Guards. Opposed to them were three red pins, marking the English positions as he had read them in the hour before the dawn that day.
“Upon the discovery of this Englishman’s hiding place by my operatives,” said von Kleinhals, “we laid a trap around him and held it for half an hour. I regret to report that K-13 made no attempt to communicate with him.”
“You should have held the trap all night,” von Schmee said. “K-13 would have come.”
�
�Unfortunately, my aide, von Reuter, blundered upon the Englishman and gave the alarm,” said Kleinhals. “There was no advantage in holding the trap any longer. We took the Englishman when he tried to kill von Reuter with his hands—by striking full force with the naked fist, after the savage and inhuman English fashion.”
Von Schmee rested his hairy knuckles on the map. His great bald head was corrugated with thought. For a moment, he stared at Dick, and the shadows of lights passed over his eyes.
“You tried to assassinate Herr Oberleutnant von Reuter, Englishman?” he said curiously.
“Call it assassination if you want,” said Dick. “I poked a couple at von Reuter’s jaw, and he slammed me back. He’s the first one of you Huns I ever met that knew how to use his mitts for anything else than scratching cooties.”
Von Schmee nodded slowly. His eyes were mere pinpoints of light now. His heavy brain was agitating itself profoundly.
“Who is K-13?” he said.
“Who trimmed your beard?” said Dick.
“Who is K-13, Englishman!”
“Don’t wallop your desk so hard,” said Dick. “You’ll bust a blood vessel, and you’ll be squirting all over the place.”
“Who was the pretended peasant girl that aided you to escape last night?”
“Old Kleinhals here,” said Dick. “Didn’t you guess it? He buttoned that red bush of his up behind his ears and stuck a pillow into the seat of his pants to give himself a pair of hips. You can figure he was a pretty sight. You’d hardly have recognized him.”
“You do not know who K-13 is, Englishman?” said von Schmee with a keen look.
Dick didn’t answer him.
The corrugated wrinkles smoothed out on von Schmee’s head. His little eyes twinkled. He rubbed his hands together. Thoughtfully, he nodded.
“His silence is an answer, Kleinhals,” he said with satisfaction. “Send in to me at once the member of your command who is known as Sergeant Wolf, orderly to Lieutenant von Reuter. As for this fool, we have no further need of him. Have him shot.”
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