Herr Haase would have liked to watch the further intercourse of the Baron and the lean young man; but Von Wetten, indicating to him a small iron spade, such as children dig with on the sea-beach, and a pointed iron rod, set him to work at making graves for the little paper-wrapped packages which he took from the suit-case. The captain stood over him while he did it, directing him with orders curt as oaths and wounding as blows, looking down upon his sweating, unremonstrant obedience as from a very mountain-top of superiority. The clay was dry as flour, and puffed into dust under the spade; the slanting sun had yet a vigor of heat; and Herr Haase, in his tail-coat and his cloth boots, floundered among the little craters and earth-heaps, and dug and perspired submissively.
As he completed each hole to Von Wetten's satisfaction, that demigod dropped one or more of his small packages into it, and arranged them snugly with the iron rod. While he did so, Herr Haase eased himself upright, wiped the sweat from his brow, and gazed across at the other two. He saw the young man dipping a brush in a bottle, which he had taken from the black bag, and painting with it upon the metal plates, intent and careful; while beside him the old baron, with his hands clasped behind his back, watched him with just that air of blended patronage and admiration with which a connoisseur, visiting a studio, watches an artist at work.
Von Wetten spoke at his elbow. "Fill this in!" he said, in those tones of his that would have roused rebellion in a beast of burden. "And tread the earth down on it firmly!"
"Zu Befehl, Herr Hauptmann," answered Herr Haase hastily. But he was slow enough in obeying to see the young man, his painting finished, take the bottle in his hand, and toss it over the parapet into the lake and turn, the great jagged scar suddenly red and vivid on the pallor of his thin face, to challenge the Baron with his angry eyes.
The Baron met them with his small indomitable smile. "The machine is ready now?" he inquired smoothly.
"Ready when you are," snapped the other.
Herr Haase had to return to his labors then and lose the rest of that battle of purposes, of offence offered and refused, which went on over the head of the waiting machine. Von Wetten left him for a while and was busy throwing things that looked like glass jars into the lake. When at last the fifth and final hole was filled and trodden down under the sore heels in the cloth boots, the others were standing around the apparatus. They looked up at him as he cast down the spade and clapped a hand to the main stiffness in the small of his back.
"All finished?" called the Baron. "Then come over here, my good friend, or you will be blown up. Eh, Herr Bettermann?"
Herr Bettermann shrugged those sharp shoulders of his; he was shifting the tripod legs of his machine. "Blow him up if you like," he said. "He's your man."
Von Wetten and the Baron laughed at that, the Baron civilly and perfunctorily, as one laughs at the minor jests of one's host, and Von Wetten as though the joke were a good one. Herr Haase smiled deferentially, and eased himself into the background by the parapet.