“But your sister?”
“Oh, yes.” He gathered himself together. “I went to Brussels and Charleyroy—I say I’ll kill him—and Maw-booge. She ain’t there—at none of those places. I dream about her all the time, I see her and hear her. Preehaps you don’t altogether understand me. Suh—they’re chokin’ her—and—and mistreatin’ her, the Germans are, suh; and she’s callin’ to me—screamin’ and callin’—I told him I’d kill him! Then I come back to Malines. I got a paper from the burgomaster to go out and see ’em diggin’ up the dead Belgian soldiers and buryin’ ’em in new cemeteries.” Some wild, morbid impulse must have led him to do this thing. “And the Germans caught me, suh. They said my passport was expired. I cain’t read German, suh, so how was I to know? They drug me up here to Antwerp, and a German officer—I told him I’d kill him—and in the police place, he said I was an English spy. They stripped me, suh. They searched my skin. They took photygraphs of my clothes and looked at my collar against a light. They even went over my money with a microscope and looked under my hair to see if anything was tattooed on to me. I told that officer I’d kill him!
“‘Where is your baggage?’ he says.
“‘I haven’t got any.’
“‘You damned spy’—I told him I’d kill him—‘you dirty spy,’ he says.
“‘I’m just as clean as you are,’ I told him. ‘I buy a shirt when I need it. I reckon I’m as clean as you, and I’ll kill you!’
“He jumped at me and beat me with his fists. ‘I’ll kill you! Some day I’ll kill you,’ I says. They wouldn’t let me sleep; hectored me for two nights, but ‘I’ll kill you,’ I says to him. ‘I’ll——’”
He rose to his feet and faced me, then his knees sagged, and slowly, very slowly, he fell over in a dead faint.