“Dunny,” I implored, “listen! You have got to find out for me about a girl. How am I to tell you, though? If I start the story, you’ll think I’m raving.”
“I know all about it, Dev,” my guardian reassured me. “I’ve seen Miss Falconer. She’s absolutely safe.”
If that were so, I could relax, and I did with fervent thankfulness. Not for long, however; my brain had begun to work.
“See here! I want to know who has been playing football with me,” was my next demand, which Dunny answered obligingly, if with a slightly dubious face.
“That French doctor, nice young chap, said you weren’t to talk,” he muttered, “but if I were in your place I’d want to know a few things myself. It was this way, Dev. A fragment of a shell struck you—”
“A fragment!” I raised weak eyebrows. “I know better. Twenty shells at least, and whole!”
“—and didn’t strike your Teuton friends,” he charged on, suddenly purple of visage. “It was a true German shell, my boy, the devil looking after his own. The man in the seat with you was cut up a bit; the other two were thrown clear of the motor. If you hadn’t already given the alarm, they would probably have got off scot-free. As it was, the French held a drumhead court martial a little later, and all three of the fellows—well, you can fill in the rest.”
I was silent for a minute while a picture rose before me: a dank, gray dawn; a firing-squad, and Franz von Blenheim’s dark, grim face. No doubt he had died bravely; but I could not pity him; I had too clear a recollection of the hall at Prezelay.
“As for you,” Dunny was continuing, “you seem to have puzzled them finely. There you were in a French uniform, at your last gasp apparently, and with an American passport, that you seem to have clung to through thick and thin, inside your coat. They took a chance on you, though, because you had made them a present of the Franz von Blenheim; and by the next day, thanks to Miss Falconer and the Duke of Raincy-la-Tour, you were being looked for all over France.
“So that’s how it stands. You’re at Raincy-la-Tour now, at the duke’s chateau. The place has been a hospital ever since the war began. Only you’re not with the other wounded. You are—well—a rather special patient in the pavilion across the lake; and you’re by way of being a hero. The day I landed, the first paper I saw shrieked at me how you had tracked the kaiser’s star agent and outwitted him and handed him over to justice.”