"First, to confirm his impressions of the the apparatus; second" the subtle faint-blue eyes of the old man and the dark suspicious eyes of the young man met and held each other "and second, the question, the minor question, of the price. However" his lips, under the clipped, white moustache, widened in a smile without mirth "that need not take us long, since the price, you see, is not really a question at all."
The haggard young man heard him with no change in that painful intensity of his.
"Isn't it?" he said shortly. "We'll see! But first, I suppose, you want to see the thing at work. I have here cordite, gelignite, trinitrotoluol," but his hare's eyes fell on the suit-case, "perhaps you have brought your own stuff?"
"Yes," said the Baron; "I have brought my own stuff."
The garden of the villa was a plot of land reaching down to a parapet lapped by the still stone-blue waters of the lake. Wooden steps led down to it from the balcony; Herr Haase, descending them last with the suit-case, paused an instant to shift his burden from one hand to the other, and had time to survey the place the ruins of a lawn, pitted like the face of a small-pox patient with small holes, where the raw clay showed through the unkempt grass the "craters" of which Captain von Wetten had spoken. Tall fir-trees, the weed of Switzerland, bounded the garden on either hand, shutting it in as effectually as a wall. Out upon the blue-and-silver floor of the lake a male human being rowed a female of his species in a skiff; and near the parapet something was hooded under a black cloth, such as photographers use, beneath whose skirts there showed the feet of a tripod.
Herr Bettermann, the young man with the scar, walked across to it. At first glimpse, it had drawn all their eyes; each felt that here, properly and decently screened, was the core of the affair. It was right that it should be covered up and revealed only at the due moment; yet Bettermann went to it and jerked the black cloth off, raping the mystery of the thing as crudely as a Prussian in Belgium.
"Here it is," he said curtly. "Put your stuff where you like."
The cloth removed disclosed a contrivance like two roughly cubical boxes, fitted one above the other, the upper projecting a little beyond the lower, and mounted on the apex of the tripod. A third box, evidently, by the terminals which projected from its cover, the container of a storage battery, lay between the feet of the tripod, and wires linked it with the apparatus above. Beside the tripod lay a small black bag such as doctors are wont to carry.
Von Wetten took a key from his pocket and threw it on the ground.
"Unlock that bag," he said to Herr Haase, and turned towards the
Baron and his host.
Herr Haase picked up the key, unlocked the suitcase, and stood ready for further orders. The Baron was standing with Bettermann by the tripod; the latter was talking and detaching some piece of mechanism within the apparatus. His voice came clearly across to Herr Haase.