At length the carriage stopped on the narrow road, paved with the little bricks they make at Gouda, that leads from Scheveningen to the pumping-station on the Dunes. Major White was the first to quit it, dragging Uncle Ben unceremoniously after him. Then, with his disengaged hand, he helped the ladies. He screwed his glass tightly into his eye, and looked round him with a measuring glance.
“This place will be as light as day,” he said, “when the moon rises from behind those trees.”
He drew Uncle Ben aside, and talked with him for some time in a low voice. The man was almost sober now, but so weak that he could not stand without assistance. Major White was an advocate, it seemed, of heroic measures. He appeared to be asking many questions, for Uncle Ben pointed from time to time with an unsteady hand into the darkness. When his mind, muddled with malgamite and drink, failed to rise to the occasion, Major White shook him like a sack. After a few minutes' conversation, Ben broke down completely, and sat against a sand-bank to weep. Major White left him there, and went towards the ladies.
“Will you tell your man,” he said to Mrs. Vansittart, “to drive back to the junction of the two roads and wait there under the trees?” He paused, looking dubiously from one to the other. “And you and Miss Roden had better go back with him and stay in the carriage.”
“No,” said Dorothy, quietly.
“Oh no!” added Mrs. Vansittart.
And Major White moistened his lips with an air of patient toleration for the ways of a sex which had ever been far beyond his comprehension.
“It seems,” he said, when the carriage had rolled away over the noisy stones, “that we are in good time. They do not expect him until nearly ten. He has been attempting for some time to get the men to refuse to work, and these same men have written to ask him to meet them at the works at ten o'clock, when Roden is at Utrecht, and Von Holzen is out. There is no question of reaching the works at all. They are going to lie in ambush in a hollow of the Dunes, and knock him on the head about half a mile from here north-east.” And Major White paused in this great conversational effort to consult a small gold compass attached to his watch-chain.
The two women waited patiently.
“Fine place, these Dunes,” said the major, after a pause. “Could conceal three thousand men between here and Scheveningen.”