The Last Shot Part 30

"Catch them as they come back! Between them and home--between the badger and his hole!" Feller went on explosively; and then, while the two squadrons were approaching at countering angles, he breathed the thoughts that the spectacle aroused in his quick brain: "This is war--war! Talk about your old-fashioned, take-snuff-my-card-sir courage, pray-and-swear courage--what about this? What about old Lanny's chosen men of the air, without boasts or oaths, offering their lives in no wild charge, but coolly, hand on lever, concentratedly, scientifically, in sane, twentieth-century fashion, just to keep our positions secret!

Now--now for it!"

The Gray dirigibles, stern on, were little larger than umbrellas and the planes than swallows; the Brown dirigibles, side on, were big sausages and their planes specks. To the eye, this meeting was like that of two small flocks of soaring birds apparently unable to change their course.

But imagination could picture the fearful crash of forces, whose wounded would find the succor of no hospital except impact on the earth below.

Marta put her hands over her eyes for only a second, she thought, before she withdrew them in vexation--hadn't she promised herself not to be cowardly?--to see one Brown dirigible and two Brown aeroplanes ascending at a sharp angle above a cloud of smoke to escape the high-angle guns of the Grays.

"We've got them all! No lips survive to tell what the eye saw!"

exclaimed Feller, his words bubbling with the joy of water in the sunlight. "As I thought," he continued in professional enthusiasm and discrimination. "We are getting the theory of one feature of the new warfare in practice. It isn't like the popular dream of wiping out armies by dropping bombs as you sail overhead. The force of gravity is against the fliers. You have only to bring them to earth to put them out of action. Plane driven into plane dirigible into dirigible, and an end of bomb-dropping and scouting! War will still be won by the infantry and the guns. Yes, the guns--the new guns! They--"

Feller recalled with a nervous shock flashing through his system that he was a gardener, a gentle old gardener. He put his hat back on a head already bent, while the shoulders, after a pathetic shrug, drew together in the accustomed stoop. His slim fingers slipped under the largest chrysanthemum blossom, his att.i.tude the same as when he had held it up for Marta's inspection before they heard the roar of the Gray squadron's motors.

"I think that we might cut them all now and fill the vases," he suggested, a musical, ingratiating note in his voice. "To-morrow we may not have a chance."

"Yes," she agreed mechanically, her thoughts still dwelling on the collision of the squadrons.

"And some of the finest ones for you to take now," he added, plying the shears as he made his selections. "I'll bring the rest," he concluded when he had gathered a dozen choice blossoms.

His fingers touched hers as the stems changed hands. In his eyes, showing just below the rim of his hat, was the light which she had seen first during the dramatic scene in his sitting-room and the appeal of deference, of suffering, and of the boyish hope of a cadet.

XXI

SHE CHANGES HER MIND

The indefatigable captain of engineers had turned spectator. With high-power binoculars glued to his eyes, he was watching to see if the faint brown line of Dellarme's men were going to hold or break. If it held, he might have hours in which to complete his task; if it broke, he had only minutes.

Marta came up the terrace path from the chrysanthemum bed in time to watch the shroud of shrapnel smoke billowing over the knoll, to visualise another scene in place of the collision of the squadrons, and to note the captain's exultation over Fraca.s.se's repulse.

"How we must have punished them!" he exclaimed to his lieutenant. "How we must have mowed them down! Lanstron certainly knew what he was doing."

"You mean that he knew how we should mow them down?" asked Marta.

Not until she spoke did he realize that she was standing near him.

"Why, naturally! If we hadn't mowed them down his plan would have failed. Mowing them down was the only way to hold them back," he said; and seeing her horror made haste to add: "Miss Galland, now you know what a ghastly business war is. It will be worse here than there."

"Yes," she said blankly. Her colorless cheeks, her drooping underlip convinced him that now, with a little show of masculine authority, he would gain his point.

"You and your mother must go!" he said firmly.

This was the very thing to whip her thoughts back from the knoll. He was thunderstruck at the transformation: hot color in her cheeks, eyes aflame, lips curving around a whirlwind of words.

"You name the very reason why I wish to stay. Why do you want to save the women? Why shouldn't they bear their share? Why don't you want them to see men mowed down? Is it because you are ashamed of your profession?

Why, I ask?"

The problem of dealing with an angry woman breaking a sh.e.l.l fire of questions over his head had not been ready-solved in the captain's curriculum like other professional problems, nor was it mentioned in the official instructions about the defences of the Galland house. He aimed to smile soothingly in the helplessness of man in presence of feminine fury.

"It is an old custom," he was saying, but she had turned away.

"Picking flowers! What mockery! Lanny's plan--mow them down! mow them down! mow them down!" she went on, more to herself than to him, as she dropped the chrysanthemums on the veranda table.

In a fire of resolution she hastened back down the terrace steps. The Grays and the Browns were fighting in their way for their causes; she must fight in her way for hers. Stopping before Feller, she seemed taller than her usual self and quivering with impatience.

"Have you connected the wire to the telephone yet?" she asked abruptly.

"No, not yet," he answered.

"Then please come with me to the tower!"

Whatever his fears, he held them within the serene bounds of the gardener's personality, while his covert glimpse of her warned him against the mistake of trying to dam the current of a pa.s.sion running so strong.

"Certainly, Miss Galland," he said agreeably, quite as if there were nothing unusual in her att.i.tude. No word pa.s.sed between them as he kept pace with her rapid gait along the path, but out of the corner of his eye he surveyed in measuring admiration and curiosity the straight line of nose and forehead under its heavy crown of hair, with a few detached and riotous tendrils.

"Bring a lantern!" she said, as they entered his sitting-room, in a way that left no excuse for refusal.

When he had brought the lantern she took it from his hand and led the way into the tunnel.

"Please make the connection so that I can speak to Lanny!" she instructed him after she had pressed the b.u.t.ton and the panel door of the telephone recess flew open.

For an instant he hesitated; then curiosity and the unremitting authority of her tone had their way. He dropped to his knees, ran his fingers into an aperture between two stones and made a jointure of two wire ends.

"All ready!" he said, and eagerly. What a delightfully spirited rage she was in! And what the devil was she going to do, anyway?

As she took the receiver from the hook she heard an electric bell at the other end of the line, but no "h.e.l.lo!"

"The bell means that Lanny will be called if he is there. No one except him is to talk over this telephone," Feller explained softly.

Marta waited for some time before she heard a familiar, calm voice, with a faint echo of irritation over being interrupted in the midst of pressing duties.

"Well, Gustave, old boy, it can't be that you are in touch with Westerling yet?"

"It is I--Marta!" and she came abruptly to the flaming interrogation that had brought her there. "I want to ask a question. I want a clear answer--I want everything clear! If Feller's plan succeeds it means that you will know where the Grays are going to attack?"

"Yes; why, yes, Marta!"

"So that you can mow them down?"

"That is one way of putting it--yes."

"If I keep your secret--if I let the telephone remain, I am an accomplice! I shall not be that--not to any kind of murder! I shall not let the telephone remain!"

"As you will, Marta," he replied. "But anything that leads to victory means less slaughter in the end. For we have tested our army well enough to know that only when it is decimated will it ever retreat from its main line of defence."

"The old argument!" she answered bitterly.