I flushed under my dye. I had never heard a word of it. I felt an absolute beast as we entered the private room, and I tried to explain to the millionaire.
"Think you callous and unfeeling?" he said in answer. "Guess I know better than that, my friend. You're out to prevent just such a spectacle as we're going to witness from ever happening again. You're playing a better game than prancing along at the head of a procession. You're getting busy at the heart of things. Now sit down and share the pork bosom and beans, or whatever they've given us. And tell me all about it."
We sat down to lunch, and after a glass of Burgundy, I told Van Adams of all that had occurred, and also expressed my complete confidence in Danjuro.
"You're right," he said. "There isn't an investigator on the globe that'd carry a tune to him. He has his orders to stick to you right through and he'll carry them out. That little man's got a brain like the Mammoth Cave, and he's without human passions, save only one—he'd go to hell in a paper suit for me! See here——" and the millionaire told me a string of anecdotes about the uncanny little Jap that would make the fortunes of a writer of Romance.
He was still on the same subject when he stopped in the middle of a sentence.
The noise in the square outside was suddenly hushed, and we heard a muffled chord of music. Rising from our chairs we went to the windows. Everywhere, as far as eye could reach, was a black sea of heads, from among which the slender clocktower on its island in the centre rose like a sentinel.
The pavements were lined by troops, soldiers and sailors in equal proportions, and there was a flutter as of falling leaves as every head was bared and the piercing sweetness of Chopin's "Funeral March" filled all the air.
Then they came, following the band: thirteen coffins covered with flowers, thirteen brave heroes, who would never slant down the long reaches of the upper air again.
After the hearses walked Paget and Fowles, the two heroic airmen who had called the rescuing ship by wireless, and then came the chaplains and Muir Lockhart.
For my part I saw the whole procession in a dream. The head of the Transatlantic Air Line, the Mayor and Corporation in their robes—the stately funereal pomp of it all seemed unsubstantial and unreal.