“The day I spoke to him in this way was the last I saw of him until about two weeks ago. Then I got a letter, asking me to pack a bag and run up to Marlowe Furnace for a visit. ‘The shooting’s good,’ says he, ‘and I’ve got a brace of dogs that’ll give you some excitement.’
“‘This,’ says I, to myself, ‘is just about the right thing. Nothing’d suit me better now than to fuss with a dog and a gun.’
“So I wrote him I’d come at once. Marlowe Furnace, if you don’t know the place, is about twenty miles out, tucked away among the hills. It was quite a place in revolutionary times; they beat out sword blades and bayonets there, and cast cannon, and the round shot to stuff them with.
“There’s only a few houses, with an inn for summer visitors; and there’s a little covered bridge crosses the river, just like a picture on a plate. Campe was holding out at Schwartzberg, or Castle Schwartzberg, as the people of the town call it. The castle is a regular robber-baron kind of a place, with a wall around it, towers, battlements, little windows with heavy bars, and all the rest of the fixings.”
“I know it,” said Ashton-Kirk. “It was built by a German officer who came over with Baron Steuben during the Revolution. When peace came, he decided he liked the section well enough to stay. He was rich, and built Schwartzberg in the effort to get some of the colour of the old land into the new.”
“It was something like that,” said Mr. Scanlon, nodding. “And the builder must have been related, in a way, to the Campes. Anyhow, they came into the castle some years ago. Well, to be invited to a place like that was not usual with me; and I felt a little swelled up about it.
“‘You’ve been asked because of your qualities as a sportsman and boon companion,’ says I to myself; ‘the discriminating always pick you for an ace.’
“But twenty-four hours later I had learned my true status,” said Scanlon, his brows corrugating, and his thick forefinger tapping the table. “I had been asked to Schwartzberg to act as a body-guard, and for nothing else in the world.”
“I see,” said Ashton-Kirk.
“Mind you, the situation has never been put into plain words. In fact, it’s never been even hinted at. But things happened, queer things, with no meanings attached, and so I gradually understood. A body-guard I was; and my job was to protect young Campe from something out among the hills.”