The guns had commenced again with intermittent bursts of firing, but they were not so close now, and the vibration of the air not so terrific. The Allied guns were turned toward Château-Plessis since the capture, and the German batteries had found new emplacement outside the town’s western edge; the edge nearest to the railways and the channel. Lucy looked from the window toward the eastern sky, where the clouds were gleaming with a soft, pearly light. There were no bursting shells to mar the sunrise to-day. All was quiet on this side now. She glanced down at the street, along which a dozen German soldiers were strolling. A few shouted words reached her ears, and once more she wished with all her heart she did not understand that language of which every word had grown hateful. Then suddenly she remembered Captain Beattie and the possibility of help to him which that knowledge had put into her hands. It would give her glorious satisfaction to bring the enemy’s own tongue to use against them. She had first, though, to learn the whereabouts of the old prison to which he had been taken.
She quickly finished dressing and joined the two nurses, who saw her with surprise and a little protest on Miss Pearse’s part against her early rising. She did not scold much though, and seemed glad of the promise of Lucy’s help. “I’ll give you work to do the minute you are ready for it,” she said in answer to Lucy’s eager demand, as they crossed the street and climbed the hospital steps under the inspection of the gray-uniformed sentry. “Go in and speak to your father first, and then we’ll see.”
Lucy entered the little room softly, mindful of the other wounded officers as well as of her father, and found Colonel Gordon awake, with eyes turned toward the door. He looked rested and stronger with the improvement each day now brought, but his lips were firmly set, as Lucy had often seen them when he was thinking out a hard piece of work, and his smile was but a faint one as he greeted her.
“Did you sleep well, Father? Are you all right?” she asked, stammering a little because she hated to remember the unhappy secret between them.
Colonel Gordon’s keen, far-seeing eyes studied her flushed and anxious face as he answered quietly, “Yes, I’m all right, little girl. You may drop the camouflage now. I know we’ve lost the town.”
“Oh, Father, who told you? I didn’t,” cried Lucy, dropping down beside him, a great rush of relief overpowering all her fears. He knew the worst and they could share it together, and he had borne the news with his old, unshakable courage. Lucy thought of what Bob had said more than four years ago at Fort Douglas, when the Mexican rebels rose over night, threatening the border. “Father may get excited if breakfast is late, but when anything is really wrong, he’s all right.”
“Greyson told me,” said Colonel Gordon. “I suppose he thought I should guess it anyhow, when I began asking him about Elizabeth. Funny idea—not letting me know.” He spoke with a faint scorn for the ways of the Medical Corps, forgetting, as a man on the road to recovery is apt to do, how ill he had been only a few days before.
“I wondered what in thunder was the matter that they couldn’t get you off,” he went on. “Poor little daughter—it’s pretty tough luck.” His face was drawn with anxiety as he reached out a hand and caught hers in a strong clasp, but she broke in eagerly:
“I’m all right, Father! Please don’t feel so worried. I’m working in the hospital, and, honestly, you don’t know how glad and proud I am—now the scary part is getting better—that I can be of use here.”
“It can’t be helped,” was her father’s slow and almost unheeding answer. “Greyson tells me the enemy has left the hospital pretty much in our own hands. They are rather too tired to bother us,” he said, a flash of satisfaction lighting his face. “I know that much from the action in which I was hit. Their advance is made with a desperately driven force that leaves them limp and done for when it is over. A couple of million Americans will turn the great tide. Long before that time our counter-attack should free the town—but meanwhile, you poor little girl, you’re in the German lines.”