The Last Shot Part 10

"Yes, he might fight." The colonel looked hard at Stransky's rigid profile, with its tight lips and chin as firm as if cut out of stone.

"You never know who will fight in the pinch, they say. But that's speculation. It's the example that I have to deal with."

"He is not of the insidious, plotting type. He spoke his mind openly,"

suggested Lanstron. "If you give him the limit of the law, why, he becomes a martyr to persecution. I should say that his remarks might pa.s.s for barrack-room ga.s.sing."

"Very well," said the colonel, taking the shortest way out of the difficulty. "We will excuse the first offence."

"Yes, sir!" said the sergeant mechanically as he released his grip of the offender. "We had two anarchists in my company in Africa," he observed in loyal agreement with orders. "They fought like devils. The only trouble was to keep them from shooting innocent natives for sport."

Stransky's collar was still crumpled on the nape of his neck. He remained stock-still, staring down the bridge of his nose. For a full minute he did not vouchsafe so much as a glance upward over the change in his fortunes. Then he looked around at Lanstron gloweringly.

"I know who you are!" he said. "You were born to the purple. You have had education, opportunity, position--everything that you and your kind want to keep for your kind. You are smarter than the others. You would hang a man with spider-webs instead of hemp. But I won't fight for you!

No, I won't!"

He threw back his head with a determination in his defiance so intense that it had a certain kind of dignity that freed it of theatrical affectation.

"Yes, I was fortunate; but perhaps nature was not altogether unkind to you," said Lanstron. "In Napoleonic times, Stransky, I think you might even have carried a marshal's baton in your knapsack."

"You--what rot!" A sort of triumph played around Stransky's full lips and his jaw shot out challengingly. "No, never against my comrades on the other side of the border!" he concluded, his dogged stare returning.

Now the colonel gave the order to fall in; the bugle sounded and the centipede's legs began to a.s.semble on the road. But Stransky remained a statue, his rifle untouched on the sward. He seemed of a mind to let the regiment go on without him.

"Stransky, fall in!" called the sergeant.

Still Stransky did not move. A comrade picked up the rifle and fairly thrust it into his hands.

"Come on, Bert, and knead dough with the rest of us!" he whispered.

"Come on! Cheer up!" Evidently his comrades liked Stransky.

"No!" roared Stransky, bringing the rifle down on the ground with a heavy blow.

Then impulse broke through the restraint that seemed to characterize the Lanstron of thirty-five. The Lanstron of twenty-five, who had met catastrophe because he was "wool-gathering," a.s.serted himself. He put his hand on Stransky's shoulder. It was a strong though slim hand that looked as if it had been trained to do the work of two hands in the process of its owner's own transformation. Thus the old sergeant had seen a general remonstrate with a brave veteran who had been guilty of bad conduct in Africa. The old colonel gasped at such a subversion of the dignity of rank. He saw the army going to the devil. But young Dellarme, watching with eager curiosity, was sensible of no familiarity in the act. It all depended on how such a thing was done, he was thinking.

"We all have minutes when we are more or less anarchists," said Lanstron in the human appeal of one man to another. "But we don't want to be judged by one of those minutes. I got a hand mashed up for a mistake that took only a second. Think this over to-night before you act. Then, if you are of the same opinion, go to the colonel and tell him so. Come, why not?"

"All right, sir, you're so decent about it!" grumbled Stransky, taking his place in the ranks.

Hep-hep-hep! the regiment started on its way, with Grandfather Fragini keeping at his grandson's side.

"Makes me feel young again, but it's darned solemn beside the Hussars, with their horses' bits a-jingling. Times have certainly changed--officers' hands in their pockets, saying 'if you don't mind' to a man that's insulted the flag! Kicking ain't good enough for that traitor! Ought to hang him--yes, sir, hang and draw him!"

Lanstron watched the marching column for a time.

"Hep-hep-hep! It's the brown of the infantry that counts in the end," he mused. "I liked that wall-eyed giant. He's all man!"

Then his livening glance swept the heavens inquiringly. A speck in the blue, far away in the realms of atmospheric infinity, kept growing in size until it took the form of the wings with which man flies. The plane volplaned down with steady swiftness, till its racing shadow lay large over the landscape for a few seconds before it rose again with beautiful ease and precision.

"Bully for you, Etzel!" Lanstron thought, as he started back to the aeroplane station. "You belong in the corps. We shall not let you return to your regiment for a while. You've a cool head and you'd charge a church tower if that were the orders."

VIII

THANKS TO A b.u.mBLEBEE

"Has he changed much?" Mrs. Galland asked, when she learned that Marta had seen Westerling.

"Jove has reached his own--the very top of Olympus, and he likes the prospect," Marta replied.

The only home news of importance that her mother had to impart related to a tiny strip of paper with the greeting, "h.e.l.lo, Marta!" that had been dropped from the pilot aeroplane as the Brown aerial squadron flew over the garden after its race with the Gray. She noted Marta's customary quickening interest at mention of Lanstron's name. It had become the talisman of a hope whose fulfilment was always being deferred.

"How different Lanny and Westerling are!" Marta exclaimed, the picture of the two men rising before her vision. "Lanny trying so hard under the pressure of his responsibility not to be human and unable to forget himself, and Westerling trying, really trying, to be human at times, but unable to forget that he is Jove! Did you wave your acknowledgments to Lanny,'?"

"Why, no! How could I?" asked Mrs. Galland. "He went over so fast I didn't know it was he--a little figure so far overhead."

"It's odd, but I think I'd know Lanny a mile away by a sort of instinct," said Marta. "You know I'd like a gun that would fire a bomb and drop a message of 'h.e.l.lo, yourself!' right on his knee. Wouldn't that give him a surprise?"

"You and he are so full of nonsense that you--" But Mrs. Galland desisted. What was the use?

Sometimes she wished that Colonel Lanstron would stay away altogether and leave a free field for a newcomer. Yet if two or three weeks pa.s.sed without a call from him she was apprehensive. Besides being one of the Thorbourg Lanstrons, he was a most charming, capable man, who had risen very rapidly in his profession. It had been only six months after he had bolted up from the wreck of his plane by way of self-introduction to Marta before he alighted in the field across the road from the garden to report a promise kept.

Once she knew that he was a Lanstron of Thorbourg, a fact of hardly pa.s.sing interest to Marta, Mrs. Galland made him intimately welcome. By the time he had paid his third call he was Lanny to Marta and she was Marta to him, quite as if they had known each other from childhood. She had a gift for unaffected comradeship. He was the kind of man with whom she could be a comrade. There was always something to say the moment they met and they were never through talking when he had to go. They disagreed so often that Mrs. Galland thought they made a business of it.

She wondered how real friendship could exist between two such controversialists. They could be seriously disputatious to the point of quarrelling; they could be light-heartedly disputatious to the bantering point, where either was uncertain which side of the argument he had originally espoused.

"The gardener did not cut the chrysanthemums," Mrs. Galland said. "That is why we had asters in the bowl at luncheon. His deafness is really a cross, I never realized before what a companion one naturally makes of a gardener."

"No, there's no purpose in having a deaf gardener," said Marta. "Nature distributes her defects unintelligently. Now, if we had dumb demagogues, deaf gossips, and steel that when it was being formed into a sword-blade or a gun would turn to putty, we should be much better off. But we couldn't let Feller go, could we? He's already made himself a fixture.

So few people would put up with his deafness! He's so desirous of pleasing and he loves flowers."

"And Colonel Lanstron recommended him. Except for his deafness he is a perfect gardener. Of course he had to have some drawback, for complete perfection is impossible," Mrs. Galland agreed.

The old straw hat that shaded the fringe of white hair had been hovering within easy approaching distance of the chrysanthemum bed ever since the whistle of the train that brought Marta home had been heard from the station. Feller was watching Marta when she paused for a moment on the second terrace steps, enjoying the sweep of landscape anew with the freshness of a first glimpse and the intimacy of every familiar detail cut in the memory. It was her landscape, famed in history, where history might yet be made.

His greeting was picturesque and effective. With white head bared, he looked up from the chrysanthemums to her and back at them and up at her again, with a sort of covert comradeship in his eyes which were young, very young for such white hair, and held out his little pad and pencil.

She smiled approval and slowly worked out a "perfect" in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet before she took the proffered pencil and wrote:

"I practised the deaf-and-dumb alphabet on the train. I'm learning fast.

We've never had such chrysanthemums before. Next year we shall have some irises--just a few--as fine as they have in j.a.pan. How's your rheumatism?"

He had replaced the broad-brimmed hat over his brow and his lips were visible in a lingering smile as he read the message.

"Thank you, Miss Galland," he said in his even monotone. "You are very kind and I am very fortunate to find a place like this. I already knew something about irises and I've been reading up on the subject. We'll try to hold our own with those little j.a.panese. As for the rheumatism, since you are good enough to inquire, Miss Galland, it's about the same.

My legs are getting old. There are bound to be some kinks in them."

"You select those to cut--a great armful!" she slowly spelled out on her fingers, clapping her hands with a triumphant cry of "How's that?" at the finish.