HE DOES MOST OF THE TALKING AND TAKES ALL THE BLAME
Tramp, tramp, tramp—all through the endless, wakeful hours he heard that soldier marching back and forth, back and forth, outside the door. Every sound of those steady footfalls was like a blow, stinging afresh the cruel wound which had been opened in his impassive nature. He was under arrest and under guard. If he should try to get out that soldier would order him to halt, and if he didn’t halt the soldier would shoot him. He wondered if the guard were Pickles.
He did not think at all about his deductive triumph now. And he did not care much about what they would do with him. He wondered a little what the soldiers would say—particularly Frenchy. But if only his brother would talk to him and ask about their mother he could bear everything else—the dashing of his triumph, the danger he was in, the shame. The shame, most of all.
He did not care so much now about being Sherlock Nobody Holmes—he had had enough of that. And no matter what they thought of “Yankee Doodle Whitey,” he knew that he was loyal. Let them think that all his talk of Uncle Job and the flag and his father’s patriotism was just bluff—let Frenchy think he had been just deceiving him—he could stand anything, if only his brother would be like a brother to him now that they were alone together.
It was a strange, unreasonable feeling.
Once, only once, in the long night, he tried to make his brother understand.
“Maybe you won’t believe me, but I’m sorry,” he said; “if you ain’t asleep I wish you’d listen—Bill. Now that I told ’em I feel kind of different—I had to tell ’em. I had to decide quick—and I didn’t have nobody—anybody—to help me. Maybe you think I was crazy—— Are you listenin’?”
There was no response, but he knew his brother was not asleep.
“It ain’t because I wanted ’em to think I was smart—Bill—if you think it was that, you’re wrong. And anyway, it didn’t show I was so smart—you was smarter, anyway, if it comes to that. I got to admit it. ’Cause you thought about it first—about using the dish. It served me right for thinking I could deduce, and all like that, anyway. You ain’t asleep, are you?”
“Aw, shut up!” his brother grunted. “You could ’a’ kept me out o’ this by keepin’ yer mouth shut. But you had to jabber it out, you——. And they’ll plug me full of lead.”
A cold shudder ran through Tom.
“I got to admit I’m a kind of a (he was going to say traitor, but for his brother’s sake he avoided the word). I got to admit I wasn’t loyal, too. I wasn’t loyal to you, anyway. But I had to decide quick, Bill. And I saw I had to tell ’em. You got to be loyal to Uncle Sam first of all. But—but—— Are you listening, Bill? I ain’t mad, anyway. ’Cause Adolf Schmitt’s most to blame. It ain’t—it ain’t ’cause I want to get let off free either, it ain’t. I wouldn’t care so much now what they did to me, anyway. ’Cause everything is kind of spoiled now about all of us—our family—being so kind of patriotic——”
His brother, goaded out of his sullenness, turned upon him with a tirade of profane abuse, leaving the boy shamed and silent.
And all the rest of that night Tom Slade, whose hand had extinguished the guiding light, perhaps, to some lurking submarine; who had had to “think quick and all by himself,” and had decided for his Uncle Sam against his brother Bill, sat there upon the leather settee, feeling guilty and ashamed. He knew that he had done right, but his generous heart could not feel the black, shameless treason of his brother because his own smaller treason stood in the way. He could not see the full guilt of that wretched brother because he felt mean and contemptible himself. Truly, the soldier had hit the nail on the head when he said, “You’re all right, Whitey!”
And now, suspected, shamed, sworn at and denounced, even now, as his generous nature groped for some extenuation for this traitor whose scheme he had discovered and exposed, he found it comforting to lay the whole blame and responsibility upon the missing Adolf Schmitt.
“Anyway, he tempted you,” he said, though he knew his brother would neither listen nor respond. “Maybe you think I don’t know that. He’s worse than anybody—he is.”
You’re all right, Whitey!