“I promise. But, monsieur, pour l’amour de Dieu, let me stick that fat Busch!”
Dalroy was in such a fume to secure a reliable arm that he rather neglected the precautions of a soldier moving through the enemy’s country. It was still possible to see clearly for some distance ahead. Although the right bank of the Meuse that night was overrun with the Kaiser’s troops along a front of nearly twenty miles, the ravine, with its gurgling rivulet, was one of those peaceful oases which will occur in the centre of the most congested battlefield. Now that the crash of the guns had passed sullenly to a distance, white-tailed rabbits scurried across the path; some stray sheep, driven from the uplands by the day’s tumult, gathered in a group and looked inquiringly at the intruder; a weasel, stalking a selected rabbit as is his piratical way, elected to abandon the chase and leap for a tree.
These very signs showed that none other had breasted the slope recently, so Dalroy strode out somewhat carelessly. Nevertheless, he was endowed with no small measure of that sixth sense which every shikari must possess who would hunt either his fellowmen or the beasts of the jungle. He was passing a dense clump of brambles and briars when a man sprang at him. He had trained himself to act promptly in such circumstances, and had decided long ago that to remain on the same ground, or even try to retreat, was courting disaster. His plan was to jump sideways, and, if practicable, a little nearer an assailant. The sabots rendered him less nimble than usual, but the dodge quite disconcerted an awkward opponent. The vicious downward sweep of a heavy cudgel just missed his left shoulder, and he got home with the right in a half-arm jab which sent the recipient sprawling and nearly into the stream.
Dalroy made after him, seized the fallen stick, and recognised—Jan Maertz! “How now,” he said wrathfully, “are you, too, a Prussian?”
Jan raised a hand to ward off the expected blow. “Caput!” he cried. “I’m done! You must be the devil! But may the Lord help my poor master and mistress, and the little Léontine!”
“That is my wish also, sheep’s-head! What evil have I done you, then, that you should want to brain me at sight?”
“They’re after you—the Germans. They mean to catch you, dead or alive. A lieutenant of the Guard pulled me away from in front of a firing-party, and gave me my life on condition that I ran you down.”
Here was an extraordinary development. It was vitally important that Dalroy should get to know the exact meaning of the Walloon’s disjointed utterances, yet how could he wait and question the man while the Prussian sultans were feasting in the mill?
Dalroy stooped over Maertz, who had risen to his knees, and caught him by the shoulder. “Jan Maertz,” he said, “do you hope to marry Léontine Joos? If so, Heaven has just prevented you from committing a great crime. She, and her mother, and the lady who came with me from Aix, are in the mill with four German officers—a set of foul, drunken brutes who will stop at no excess. I’m going now to get a rifle. You make quietly for the stable opposite the kitchen door. You will find Joos there. He will explain. Tell me, are you for Belgium or Germany in this war?”
The Walloon might be slow-witted, but Dalroy’s words seemed to have pierced his skin.