Old Adelbert stared with curious, rather scornful eyes. The rapier he detested. Give him a saber, and a free field, and he would show them. Even yet, he felt, he had not lost his cunning. And the saber requires cunning as well as strength.
Two or three students came toward him at once. “You are seeking Haeckle?” one of them asked.
“I am. I knew him, but not well. Lately, however, I have thought—is he here?”
The students exchanged glances. “He is not here,” one said. “Where did you know him?”
“He came frequently to a shop I know of—a cobbler’s shop, a neighborhood meeting-place. A fine lad. I liked him. But recently he has not come, and knowing his corps, I came here to find him.”
They had hoped to learn something from him, and he knew nothing. “He has disappeared,” they told him. “He is not at his lodging, and he has left his classes. He went away suddenly, leaving everything. That is all we know.”
It sounded sinister. Old Adelbert, heavy-hearted, turned away and climbed again to the street. That gateway was closed, too. And he felt a pang of uneasiness. What could have happened to the boy? Was the world, after all, only a place of trouble?
But now came good fortune, and, like evil, it came not singly. The operation was over, and his daughter on the mend. The fee was paid also. And the second followed on the heels of the first.
He did not like Americans. Too often, in better days, had he heard the merits of the American republic compared with the shortcomings of his own government. When, as happened now and then, he met the American family on the staircase, he drew sharply aside that no touch of republicanism might contaminate his uniform.
On that day, however, things changed.