Suddenly the miller’s alert eye was caught by a spasmodic movement in the limbs of the last man whom Dalroy struck down. “Tiens!” he cried, “that fellow isn’t finished with yet.”
He was making for the prostrate form with that terrible fork when Dalroy ran swiftly, and collared him. “Stop that!” came the angry command. “A fair fight must not degenerate into murder. Out you get now, or I’ll throw you out!”
Joos laughed. “You’re making a mistake, monsieur,” he said. “These Prussians don’t fight that way. They’d kill you just for the fun of the thing if you were tied hand and foot. But let the rascal live if it pleases you. As for this one,” and he spurned Busch’s body with his foot, “he’s done. Did you hear him? He squealed like a pig.”
Dalroy was profoundly relieved when the automatic pistols and ammunition were collected, the lamp extinguished, the door closed, and the whole party had passed through a garden and orchard to the gloom of the ravine. The hour was about half-past eight o’clock. Twenty-four hours earlier he and Irene were about to leave Cologne by train, believing with some degree of confidence that they might be allowed to cross the frontier without let or hindrance! Life was then conventional, with a spice of danger. Now it had descended in the social scale until they ranked on a par with the dog that had gone mad and must be slain at sight. The German code of war is a legal paraphrase of the trickster’s formula, “Heads I win, tails you lose.” The armies of the Fatherland are ordered to practise “frightfulness,” and so terrorise the civil population that the inhabitants of the stricken country will compel their rulers to sue for peace on any terms. But woe to that same civil population if some small section of its members resists or avenges any act of “frightfulness.” Soldiers might murder the Widow Jaquinot and ravish her granddaughter, officers might plan a bestial orgy in the miller’s house; but Dalroy and Joos and Maertz, in punishing the one set of crimes and preventing another, had placed themselves outside the law. Neither Joos nor Maertz cared a farthing rushlight about the moral consequences of that deadly struggle in the kitchen, but Dalroy was in different case. He knew the certain outcome. Small wonder if his heart was heavy and his brow seamed. His own fate was of slight concern, since he had ceased to regard life as worth more than an hour’s purchase at any time from the moment he leaped down into the station yard at Aix-la-Chapelle. But it was hard luck that the accident of mere association should have bound up Irene Beresford’s fortunes so irrevocably with his. Was there no way out of the maze in which they were wandering? What, for instance, had Jan Maertz meant by his cryptic statements?
“We must halt here,” Dalroy said authoritatively, stopping short in the shadow of a small clump of trees on the edge of the ravine, a place whence there was a fair field of view, yet so close to dense brushwood that the best of cover was available instantly if needed.
“Why?” demanded Joos. “I know every inch of the way.”
“I want to question Maertz,” said Dalroy shortly. “But don’t let me delay you on that account. Indeed, I advise you to go ahead, and safeguard Madame Joos and your daughter. I would even persuade, if I can, Mademoiselle Beresford to go with you.”
“I don’t mind listening to Jan’s yarn myself,” grunted the miller. “And isn’t it time we had some supper? Killing Prussians is hungry work. Did you hear Busch? He squealed like a pig.—Léontine, cut some chunks of beef and bread, and open one of these bottles of wine.”
There was solid sense in the old man’s crude rejoinder. Criminals about to suffer the death penalty often enjoy a good meal. These six people, who had just escaped death, or—where the women were concerned—a degradation worse than death, and before whose feet the grave might yawn wide and deep at once and without warning, were nevertheless greatly in want of food.