The Firefly of France Part 3

It seemed rather a coincidence my meeting her again.

"I shouldn't mind talking to you on this trip," I reflected, mollified.

"The mischief of it is you'll notice me about as much as you notice the ship's stokers. You're not the sort to sc.r.a.pe acquaintance, or else I miss my shot!"

I did not miss it. So much was instantly proved. As I pa.s.sed her, on the mere chance that she might elect to acknowledge our encounter, I let my gaze impersonally meet hers. She started slightly. Evidently she remembered. But she turned toward the nearest door without a bow.

The dark, too-well-groomed man was emerging as she advanced. Instead of moving back, he blocked her path, looking--was it appraisingly, expectantly?--into her eyes. There was a pause while she waited rather haughtily for pa.s.sage; then he effaced himself, and she disappeared.

Striking a match viciously, I lit a cigarette and strolled forward.

Either the fellow had fancied that he knew her or he had behaved in a confoundedly impertinent way. The latter hypothesis seemed, on the whole, the more likely, and I felt a lively desire to drop him over the rail.

"But I don't know what a girl of your looks expects, I'm sure," I grumbled, "setting off on your travels with no chaperon and no companion and no maid! Where are your father and mother? Where are your brothers?

Where's the old friend of the family who dined with you last night? If chaps who have no right to walk the same earth with you get insolent, who is going to teach them their place, and who is going to take care of you if a U-boat pops out of the sea? Oh, well, never mind. It isn't any of my business. But just the same if you need my services, I think I'll tackle the job."

Time was pa.s.sing; night had fallen. Consulting my watch, I found that it was seven o'clock. I had been aboard more than two hours. An afternoon sailing, quotha! At this rate we would be lucky if we got off by dawn.

The dinner gong, a welcome diversion, summoned us below to lights and warmth. At one table the young Italian entertained his relatives, and at another the captain, a short, swart-faced, taciturn being, had grouped his officers and various officials of the steamship company at a farewell feast. The little sharp-faced pa.s.senger was throned elsewhere in lonely splendor, but when I selected a fourth table, he jumped up, crossed over and installed himself as my vis-a-vis. Pa.s.sing me the salt, which I did not require, he supplied with it some personal data of which I felt no greater need. His name was McGuntrie, he announced; he was sales agent for the famous Phillipson Rifles and was being dispatched to secure a gigantic contract on the other side.

"And if inside six months you don't see three hundred thousand Italian soldiers carrying Phillipson's best," he informed me, "I'll take a back seat and let young Jim Furman, who thinks I'm a has-been and he's the one white hope, begin to draw my pay. You can't beat those rifles. When the boys get to carrying them, old Francis Joseph's ghost'll weep. Pity, ain't it, we didn't get on board by noon?" he digressed sociably. "I could've found something to do ash.o.r.e the four hours I've been twiddling my thumbs here, and I guess you could too. Hardest, though, on our friends the newspaper boys. Did you know they were out there waiting to take a flashlight film? Fact. They do it nowadays every time a big liner leaves. Then if we sink, all they have to do is run it, with 'Doomed Ship Leaving New York Harbor' underneath."

To his shocked surprise I laughed at the information. My appet.i.te was unimpaired as I pursued my meal. Trains in which others ride may telescope and steamers may take one's acquaintances to watery graves, but to normal people the chance of any catastrophe overtaking them personally must always seem gratifyingly far-fetched and vague.

"Think it's funny, do you?" my new friend reproached me. "Well, I don't; and neither did the folks who had cabins taken and who threw them up last week when they heard how the _San Pietro_ went down on this same route. We're five plumb idiots--that's what we are--five crazy lunatics!

I'd never have come a step, not with wild horses dragging me if it hadn't been for Jim Furman being pretty near popeyed, looking for a chance to cut me out and sail. We've got fifteen hundred reservists downstairs, and a cargo of contraband. What do you know about that as a prize for a submarine?"

"Well," I said vaingloriously. "I can swim."

My eyes were wandering, for the girl in the fur coat had entered, with the dark, watchful-eyed man--was it pure coincidence?--close behind. The steward ushered her to a table; the man followed at her heels. I dare say I glared. I know my muscles stiffened. The fellow was going to speak to her. What in blazes did he mean by stalking her in this way?

"Excuse me," he was saying, "but haven't we met before?"

The girl straightened into rigidness, looking him over. Her manner was haughty, her ruddy head poised stiffly, as she answered in a cold tone:

"No."

He was watching her keenly.

"My name's John Van Blarcom," he persisted.

Again she gave him that sweeping glance.

"You are mistaken," she said indifferently. "I have not seen you before."

He nodded curtly.

"My mistake," he admitted. "I thought I knew you," and turning from her, he sat down at the one table still unoccupied.

"So his name's Van Blarcom," whispered my ubiquitous neighbor. "And the Italian chap over there is Pietro Ricci. The steward told me so. And the captain's name is Cecchi; get it? And I know your name, too, Mr. Bayne,"

he added with a grin. "The steward didn't know what was taking you over, but I guess I've got your number all right. Say, ain't you a flying man or else one of the American-Ambulance boys?"

I mustered the feeble parry that I had stopped being a boy of any sort some time ago. Then lest he wring from me my age, birthplace, and the amount of my income tax, I made an end of my meal.

On deck again I wondered at my irritation, my sense of restlessness.

The little salesman was not responsible, though he had fretted me like a buzzing fly. It was rather that I had taken an intense dislike to the man calling himself Van Blarcom; that the girl, despite her haughtiness, had somehow given me an impression of uneasiness--of fear almost--as she saw him approach and heard him speak; and above all, that I should have liked to flay alive the person or persons who had let her sail unaccompanied for a zone which at this moment was the danger point of the seas.

My matter-of-fact, conservatively ordered life had been given a crazy twist at the St. Ives. As an aftermath of that episode I was probably scenting mysteries where there were none. Nevertheless, I wondered--though I called myself a fool for it--if any more queer things would happen before this ship on which we five bold voyagers were confined should reach the other side.

They did.

CHAPTER IV

"EXTRA"

Toward nine o'clock to my relief it became obvious that the _Re d'Italia_ was really going to sail at last. The first and second whistles, sounding raucously, sent the company officials and the family of the young officer of reserves ash.o.r.e. The plank was lowered; between the ship and the looming pier a thread of black water appeared and grew; a flash and an explosion indicated that the possibly doomed liner had been filmed according to schedule. "_Evviva l'Italia_!" yelled the returning braves in the steerage--a very decent set of fellows, it struck me, to leave so cheerfully their vocations of teamster, waiter, fruit vender, and the like, and go, unforced, to wear the gray-green coats of Italy, the short feathers of the mountain climbers, the bersagliere's bunch of plumes, and to stand against their hereditary foes the Austrians, up in the snowy Alps.

The details of departure were an old tale to me. As we swung farther and farther out, I turned to a newspaper, a twentieth extra probably, which I had heard a newsboy crying along the dock a little earlier, and had bribed a steward to secure. Moon and stars were lacking to-night, but the deck lights were good reading-lamps. Moving up the rail to one of them, I investigated the world's affairs.

From the first sheet the usual staring headlines leaped at me. There were the inevitable peace rumor, the double denial, the eternal bulletin of a trench taken here, a hill recaptured there. A sensational rumor was exploited to the effect that Franz von Blenheim, one of the star secret agents of the German Empire, was at present incognito at Washington, having spent the past month in putting his finger in the Mexican pie much to our disadvantage. On the last column of the page was the photograph of a distinguished-looking young man in uniform, with an announcement that promised some interest, I thought.

"War Scandal Bursts in France," "Scion of Oldest n.o.blesse Implicated,"

"Duke Mysteriously Missing," I read in the diminishing degrees of the scare-head type. Then came the picture, with a mien attractively debonair, a pleasantly smiling mouth, and a sympathetic pair of eyes, and in due course, the tale. I clutched at the flapping ends of the paper and read on:

Of all the scandals to which the present war has given birth, none has stirred France more profoundly than that implicating Jean-Herve-Marie-Olivier, Count of Druyes, Marquis of Beuil and Santenay, and Duke of Raincy-la-Tour. This young n.o.bleman, head of a family that has played its part in French history since the days of the Northmen and the crusaders, bears in his veins the bluest blood of the old regime, and numbers among his ancestors no fewer than seven marshals and five constables of France.

A noted figure not only by his birth, his wealth, and his various historic chateaux, but also by his sporting proclivities, his daring automobile racing, his marvelous fencing, and his spectacular hunting trips, the Duke of Raincy-la-Tour has long been in addition an amateur aviator of considerable fame, and it was to the French Flying Corps that he was attached when hostilities began. Here he distinguished himself from the first by his coolness, his extraordinary resource, and his utter contempt for danger, and became one of the idols of the French army and a proverb for success and audacity, besides attaining to the rank of lieutenant, gaining, after his famous night flight across Mulhausen for bomb-dropping purposes, the affectionate sobriquet of the Firefly of France, and winning in rapid succession the military Medal, the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, and the Cross of War with palms.

According to rumor, the duke was lately intrusted with a mission of exceptional peril, involving a flight into hostile territory and the capture of certain photographs of defenses much needed for the plans of the supreme command. With his wonted brilliancy, he is said to have accomplished the errand and to have returned in safety as far as the French lines. Here, however, we enter the realm of conjecture. The duke has disappeared; the plans he bore have never reached the generalissimo; and rumor persistently declares that at some point upon his return journey he was intercepted by German agents and induced by bribes or coercion to deliver up his spoils. By one version he was later captured and summarily executed by the French; while his friends, denying this, pin their hopes to his death at the hands of the enemy, as offering the best outcome of the unsavory event.

The family of the Duke of Raincy-la-Tour has been noted in the past for its p.r.o.nouncedly Royalist tendencies, the att.i.tude of his father and grandfather toward the republic having been hostile in the extreme.

It is believed that this fact may have its significance in the present episode. The occurrence is of special interest to the United States in view of the recent (Continued on Page Three)

Before proceeding, I glanced at the pictured face. The Duke of Raincy-la-tour looked back at me with cool, clear eyes, smiling half aloofly, a little scornfully, as in the presence of danger the true Frenchman is apt to smile.

"I don't think, Jean-Herve-Marie-Olivier," I reflected, "that you ever talked to the Germans except with bombs. They probably got you, poor chap, and you're lying buried somewhere while the gossips make a holiday of the fact that you don't come home. Confound 'current rumors' anyhow, and yellow papers too!"

"I beg your pardon," said a low contralto voice.

The girl in the fur coat was standing at my shoulder. I turned, lifting my cap, wondering what under heaven she could want. I was not much pleased to tell the truth; a G.o.ddess shouldn't step from her pedestal to chat with strangers. Then suddenly I recognized a distinct oddness in her air.

"Would you lend me your paper," she was asking, "for just a moment? I haven't seen one since morning; the evening editions were not out when I came on board."

Her manner was proud, spirited, gracious; she even smiled; but she was frightened. I could read it in her slight pallor, in the quickening of her breath.

My extra! What was there in the day's news that could upset her? I was nonplussed, but of course I at once extended the sheet.