“Don’t talk about it,” urged his wife. “It is bad for you to get so excited. Remember, the doctor warned you——”
“The doctor! Dr. Lafarge! A soldier hammered on the surgery door with the butt of his rifle, and, when the doctor came out, twirled the rifle and stabbed him right through the body. I saw it. It was like a conjuring trick. I was giving an officer some figures about the contents of the mill. The doctor screamed, and clutched at the bayonet with both hands. And who do you think the murderer was?”
Madame Joos’s healthy red cheeks had turned a ghastly yellow, but she contrived to stammer, “Dieu! The poor doctor! But how should I know?”
“The barber, Karl Schwartz.”
“Karl a soldier!”
“More, a sergeant. He lived and worked among us ten years—a spy. It was the doctor who got him fined for beating his wife. No wonder Monsieur Lafarge used to say there were too many Germans in Belgium. The officer I was talking to watched the whole thing. He was a fat man, and wore spectacles for writing. He lifted them, and screwed up his eyes, so, like a pig, to read the letters on the brass door-plate. ‘Almächtig!’ he said, grinning, ‘a successful operation on a doctor by a patient.’ I saw red. I felt in my pocket for a knife. I meant to rip open his paunch. Then one of our shells burst near us, and he scuttled. The wind of the explosion knocked me over, so I came home.”
The two, to some extent, were using the local patois; but their English hearers understood nearly every word, because these residents on the Belgian border mingle French, German, and a Low Dutch dialect almost indiscriminately. Dalroy at once endeavoured to divert the old man’s thoughts. The massacre which had been actually permitted, or even organised, in the town by daylight would probably develop into an orgy that night. Not one woman now, but three, required protection. He must evolve some definite plan which could be carried out during the day, because the hordes of cavalry pressing toward the Meuse would soon deplete Joos’s mill; and when the place ceased to be of value to the commissariat the protecting order would almost certainly be revoked. Moreover, Léontine Joos was young and fairly attractive.
In a word, Dalroy was beginning to understand the psychology of the German soldier in war-time.
“Let us think of the immediate future,” he struck in boldly. “You have a wife and daughter to safeguard, Monsieur Joos, while I have Mademoiselle Beresford on my hands. Your mill is on the outskirts of the town. Is there no village to the west, somewhere out of the direct line, to which they could be taken for safety?”
“The west!” growled Joos, springing up again, “isn’t that where these savages are going? That is the way to Liège. I asked the officer. He said they would be in Liège to-night, and in Paris in three weeks.”