A Hero of the Pen

by E. Werner

"And this very night? You perhaps know what you will meet there."

"I do!" declared Alison, who thought it best to conceal his entire ignorance of affairs, and pretend to have been initiated. He reached his goal. He succeeded in goading on the Frenchman in the old steward's nature; in making serviceable his hatred to the enemy. The steward well knew what threatened in the mountains to-night, and the circumstance that the stranger, without the knowledge of the Germans, wished to go there alone, convinced him that here he had to deal with an ally. And so his resistance gave way.

"There is such a path," he said, lowering his voice. "It leads over the mountains to L. The Germans do not know it; even if they have chanced to discover it, it ends for them in the first defile on the right. They cannot possibly know that it continues on the other side, and extending through the forest, connects with our park. The beginning and end are too much hidden by rifts in the rock and by shrubbery; it is a secret of ours."

Alison's eyes gleamed with a savage joy. "Very well; and how am I to find the path?" he asked.

"You go into the park, and pass up the principal avenue, which is unguarded; to the left you will see a statue of Flora. Go past this into the grotto close by. It is not so closely shut in by the rocky walls, as it appears to be; there is a way of egress from it to the forest. Follow the narrow path through the bushes; there is but one, you cannot err, and in ten minutes you will have reached the defile; it leads to the left up the mountain road to the rocky plateau where stands a solitary fir. There you are already beyond the lines, and far enough from them not to be remarked."

Alison had listened in breathless attention, as if he would hold fast every word in his remembrance; now with an expression of sullen triumph in his eyes, he took the bank-note from the table and handed it to the Frenchman.

"I thank you!" he said. "Here, take this!"

The old man hesitated. "I did not do this for money, Monsieur," he said.

"I know it. It was from hatred to the enemy. Give yourself no uneasiness. I do not need the money, at least not for to-night," he added, while his lips curled with a cold, bitter irony. "But the information is worth more to me than this paper; take it; it will not lay heavy on your conscience!"

The steward threw one more glance at the money. One would hardly venture such a sum merely to compromise him, and the path certainly was not of so high value to the Prussians as to this morose stranger. He took the reward and muttered some words of thanks.