The Dark Star Part 87

The whole place was ankle deep in shattered gla.s.s and broken bottles, and the place reeked with smoke and the odour of wine and spirits.

Neeland forced his way forward into the cafe, looked around for Sengoun, and saw him almost immediately.

The young Russian, flushed, infuriated, his collar gone and his coat in tatters, was struggling with some men who held both his arms but did not offer to strike him.

Behind him, crowded back into a corner near the cashier's steel-grilled desk, stood Ilse Dumont, calm, disdainful, confronted by Brandes, whose swollen, greenish eyes, injected with blood, glared redly at her. Stull had hold of him and was trying to drag him away:

"For G.o.d's sake, Eddie, shut your mouth," he pleaded in English. "You can't do _that_ to her, whatever she done to you!"

But Brandes, disengaging himself with a jerk, pushed his way past Sengoun to where Ilse stood.

"I've got the goods on _you_!" he said in a ferocious voice that neither Stull nor Curfoot recognised. "You know what you did to me, don't you! You took my wife from me! Yes, my _wife_! She _was_ my wife! She _is_ my wife!--For all you did, you lying, treacherous s.l.u.t!--For all you've done to break me, double-cross me, ruin me, drive me out of every place I went! And now I've got you! I've sold you out! Get that? And you know what they'll do to you, don't you?

Well, you'll see when----"

Curfoot and Stull threw themselves against him, but Brandes, his round face pasty with fury, struggled back again to confront Ilse Dumont.

"Ruined me!" he repeated. "Took away from me the only thing G.o.d ever gave me for my own! Took my wife!"

"You dog!" said Ilse Dumont very slowly. "You dirty dog!"

A frightful spasm crossed Brandes' features, and Stull s.n.a.t.c.hed at the pistol he had whipped out. There was a struggle; Brandes wrenched the weapon free; but Neeland tore his way past Curfoot and struck Brandes in the face with the b.u.t.t of his heavy revolver.

Instantly the group parted right and left; Sengoun suddenly twisted out of the clutches of the men who held him, sprang upon Curfoot, and jerked the pistol from his fist. At the same moment the entire front of the cafe gave way and the mob crashed inward with a roar amid the deafening din of shattered metal and the clash of splintering gla.s.s.

Through the dust and falling shower of debris, Brandes fired at Ilse Dumont, reeled about in the whirl of the inrushing throng engulfing him, still firing blindly at the woman who had been his wife.

Neeland put a bullet into his pistol arm, and it fell. But Brandes stretched it out again with a supreme effort, pointing at Ilse Dumont with jewelled and b.l.o.o.d.y fingers:

"That woman is a German spy! A spy!" he screamed. "You d.a.m.n French mutts, do you understand what I say! Oh, my G.o.d! Will someone who speaks French tell them! Will somebody tell them she's a spy! _La femme! Cette femme!_" he shrieked. "_Elle est espion! Esp----!_" He fired again, with his left hand. Then Sengoun shot him through the head; and at the same moment somebody stabbed Curfoot in the neck; and the lank American gambler turned and cried out to Stull in a voice half strangled with pain and fury:

"Look out, Ben. There are apaches in this mob! That one in the striped jersey knifed me----"

"_Tiens, v'la pour toi, sale mec de malheur!_" muttered a voice at his elbow, and a blow from a slung-shot crushed the base of his skull.

As Curfoot crumpled up, Stull caught him; but the tall gambler's dead weight bore Stull to his knees among the fierce apaches.

And there, fighting in silence to the end, his chalky face of a sick clown meeting undaunted the overwhelming odds against him, Stull was set upon by the apaches and stabbed and stabbed until his clothing was a heap of ribbons and the watch and packet of French bank-notes which the a.s.sa.s.sins tore from his body were dripping with his blood.

Sengoun and Neeland, their evening clothes in tatters, hatless, dishevelled, began shooting their way out of the h.e.l.l of murder and destruction raging around them.

Behind them crept Ilse Dumont and the Russian girl: dust and smoke obscured the place where the mob raged from floor to floor in a frenzy of destruction, tearing out fixtures, telephones, window-sashes, smashing tables, bar fixtures, mirrors, ripping the curtains from the windows and the very carpets from the floor in their overwhelming rage against this German cafe.

That apaches had entered with them the mob cared nothing; the red l.u.s.t of destruction blinded them to everything except their terrible necessity for the annihilation of this place.

If they saw murder done, and robbery--if they heard shots in the tumult and saw pistol flashes through the dust and grey light of daybreak, they never turned from their raging work.

Out of the frightful turmoil stormed Neeland and Sengoun, their pistols spitting flame, the two women clinging to their ragged sleeves. Twice the apaches barred their way with bared knives, crouching for a rush; but Sengoun fired into them and Neeland's bullets dropped the ruffian in the striped jersey where he stood over Stull's twitching body; and the sinister creatures leaped back from the levelled weapons, turned, and ran.

Through the gaping doorway sprang Sengoun, his empty pistol menacing the crowd that choked the shadowy street; Neeland flung away his pistol and turned his revolver on those in the cafe behind him, as Ilse Dumont and the Russian girl crept through and out into the street.

The crowd was cheering and shouting:

"Down with the Germans! To the Bra.s.serie Schwarz!"

An immense wave of people surged suddenly across the rue Vilna, headed toward the German cafes on the Boulevard; and then, for the first time, Neeland caught sight of policemen standing in little groups, coolly watching the destruction of the Cafe des Bulgars.

Either they were too few to cope with the mob, or they were indifferent as to what was being done to a German cafe, but one thing was plain; the police had not the faintest idea that murder had been rampant in the place. For, when suddenly a dead body was thrown from the door out on the sidewalk, their police whistles shrilled through the street, and they started for the mob, resolutely, pushing, striking with white-gloved fists, shouting for right of way.

Other police came running, showing that they had been perfectly aware that German cafes were being attacked and wrecked. A mounted inspector forced his horse along the swarming sidewalk, crying:

"_Allons! Circulez! C'est defendu de s'attrouper dans la rue! Mais fichez-moi le camp, nom de Dieu! Les Allemands ne sont pas encore dans la place!_"

Along the street and on the Boulevard mobs were forming and already storming three other German cafes; a squadron of Republican Guard cavalry arrived at a trot, their helmets glittering in the increasing daylight, driving before them a mob which had begun to attack a cafe on the corner.

A captain, superbly mounted, rode ahead of the advancing line of horses, warning the throng back into the rue Vilna, up which the mob now recoiled, sullenly protesting.

Neeland and Sengoun and the two women were forced back with the crowd as a double rank of steel-helmeted hors.e.m.e.n advanced, sweeping everybody into the rue Vilna.

Up the street, through the vague morning light, they retired between ranks of closed and silent houses, past narrow, evil-looking streets and stony alleys still dark with the shadows of the night.

Into one of these Neeland started with Ilse Dumont, but Sengoun drew him back with a sharp exclamation of warning. At the same time the crowd all around them became aware of what was going on in the maze of dusky lanes and alleys past which they were being driven by the cavalry; and the people broke and scattered like rabbits, darting through the cavalry, dodging, scuttling under the very legs of the horses.

The troop, thrown into disorder, tried to check the panic-stricken flight; a brigadier, spurring forward to learn the cause of the hysterical stampede, drew bridle sharply, then whipped his pistol out of the saddle-holster, and galloped into an _impa.s.se_.

The troop captain, pushing his horse, caught sight of Sengoun and Neeland in the remains of their evening dress; and he glanced curiously at them, and at the two young women clad in the rags of evening gowns.

"_Nom de Dieu!_" he cried. "What are such people as you doing here? Go back! This is no quarter for honest folk!"

"What are those police doing in the alleys?" demanded Sengoun; but the captain cantered his horse up the street, pistol lifted; and they saw him fire from his saddle at a man who darted out of an alley and who started to run across the street.

The captain missed every shot, but a trooper, whose horse had come up on the sidewalk beside Neeland, fired twice more after the running man, and dropped him at the second shot.

"A good business, too," he said calmly, winking at Neeland. "You _bourgeois_ ought to be glad that we're ordered to clean up Paris for you. And now is the time to do it," he added, reloading his weapon.

Sengoun said in a low voice to Neeland:

"They're ridding the city of apaches. It's plain enough that they have orders to kill them where they find them! Look!" he added, pointing to the dead wall across the street; "It's here at last, and Paris is cleaning house and getting ready for it! This is war, Neeland--war at last!"

Neeland looked across the street where, under a gas lamp on a rusty iron bracket, was pasted the order for general mobilisation. And on the sidewalk at the base of the wall lay a man, face downward, his dusty shoes crossed under the wide flaring trousers, the greasy _casquet_ still crowding out his lop ears; his hand clenched beside a stiletto which lay on the stone flagging beside him.

"An apache," said Sengoun coolly. "That's right, too. It's the way we do in Russia when we clean house for war----"

His face reddened and lighted joyously.

"Thank G.o.d for my thousand lances!" he said, lifting his eyes to the yellowing sky between the houses in the narrow street. "Thank G.o.d!

Thank G.o.d!"

Now, across the intersections of streets and alleys beyond where they stood, policemen and Garde cavalry were shooting into doorways, bas.e.m.e.nts, and up the sombre, dusky lanes, the dry crack of their service revolvers re-echoing noisily through the street.