“Well,” I suggested, “how will this suit you? I’ll go down to my stateroom and stop there until we land in Italy; and, if you like, just to be on the safe side with such a desperado as I am, you can put a guard outside my door. But first, you’ll send a sheaf of marconigrams for me in both directions. You’re welcome to read them, of course, before they go. Then when we get to Naples, my friend, Mr. Herriott, will meet the steamer. He is second secretary at the United States embassy, and his identification will be sufficient, I suppose. Anyhow, if it isn’t, I dare say the ambassador will say a word for me. I have known him for years, though not so well.”
“That would be quite sufficient as to identification.” He stressed the last word significantly, and I thanked heaven for Dunny and the forces which I knew that rather important old personage could set to work.
“Also,” I continued coolly, “there will be various cablegrams from United States officials awaiting us, which will convince you, I hope, that I am not likely to be a spy. There will be a statement from the friend who dined with me at the St. Ives. There will be the declaration of the policeman who saw the German climb down the fire-escape and bolt into the room beneath.” “And hang the expense!” I added inwardly, computing cable rates, but assuming a lordly indifference to them which only a multimillionaire could really feel.
The Englishman and the captain consulted a moment. Then the former spoke:
“That will be satisfactory, sir, to Captain Cecchi and to me. Write out your cables, if you please. They shall be sent. And I say, Mr. Bayne,—I hope you drive that ambulance. I’m not stationed here to be a partizan, but you’ve stood up to us like a man.”
An hour later as I finished my solitary dinner, the electric lights flickered and died, and the engines began their throb. Under cover of the darkness we were slipping out of Gibraltar. I leaned my arms on the table and scanned the remains of my feast by the light of my one sad candle, not thinking of what I saw, or of the various calls for help I had been dispatching, or of the sailor grimly mounting guard outside my door. I was remembering a girl, a girl with ruddy hair and a wild-rose flush and great, gray, starry eyes, a girl that by all the rules of the game I should have handed over to those who represented the countries she was duping, a girl that I had found I had to shield when I came face to face with the issue.
CHAPTER IX
THE BLACK BUTTERFLIES
The Turin-Paris express—the most direct, the Italians call it—was too popular by half to suit the taste of morose beings who wished for solitude. With great trouble and pains I had ferreted out a single vacant compartment; but as four o’clock sounded and the whistle blew for departure, a belated traveler joined me—worse still, an acquaintance who could not be quite ignored.