With an uncertain hand and a kind of limp disgust, I drew the papers forth and scanned them one after another. I felt sick, sick with a kind of nausea of bewilderment and utter despair. For if this were true (and how could it be otherwise?), then I had no more faith in human nature.
Yes, I had—I had faith in the faith which I knew lived back in Bridgeboro, and I think I drew a little hope, perhaps still a little confidence, from the stout heart which would not even believe that this—this aviator—was dead. Excruciating imp! Hero, I called him, and I resolved that he should never hear this from me. He believed that the worst had not happened, loyal, stouthearted friend and champion and comrade that he was. But death is not the worst.
I need not trouble you with the sordid contents of those other papers; nor have I them at hand to copy. They were the familiar baggage of a traitor and a spy, with all the nice details of sneaking ingenuity and signs of moral turpitude, such as to arouse the wrath of a saint. It will be enough to tell you that if this creature had lived, the hospital at Dormans would probably have seen its agonized victims writhing in flames. And one of our little cemeteries, with its rows of wooden crosses, was to have been torn with jagged holes—I do not know why. There was a detailed report for Dennheimer which would have pleased him had he received it. And Captain Pfeiffer would not have been disappointed.
I sat there, holding the watch in one hand, the wallet in the other, jerking the coarse chain as If I would break it asunder, and separate the American timepiece bearing the initials of an American boy from this other souvenir of cowardice and treachery. Then I looked again at the picture of the girl with the clear, honest eyes, and then at her friendly words about Bridgeboro. And he had torn a piece from that letter to make a treacherous memorandum. The wretch!
So I sat in the darkness and pondered, noticing a spider which hurried back and forth in the small glare of my light, and other irrelevant trifles, as one will do under the stress of shock and sorrow. My head throbbed and I felt a strange disinclination to move.
Could this thing be? Why, he had vowed to be revenged upon those wretches! Had the whole business, first and last, been a treacherous ruse? Had he gained admission to the hospital simply to spy there? Was the newspaper account all wrong and he, the sneak and traitor, been but the hero of some misinformed newspaper correspondent? Everything is green when you look through green spectacles and the only thing I could be certain of now was the unmistakable meaning of these papers and the identity of their possessor. Everything else seemed readily susceptible of a dark and sinister construction.
As I groped in my mind for some saving fact or discrepancy which might explain, or at least raise a doubt, the thought of one final clinching circumstance forced itself upon me and I gave up in hopeless despair. I knew now why the Germans had come here and taken away Slade’s body. It was not his body they were after, but his papers and for these they had searched in vain. The decent burial of his poor remains in some less cheerless spot than here, and the dropping of his American identification disk and scout badge (which apparently he had continued to wear) were perhaps the kindly act of Fritz in one of his erratic, sentimental moods—a fraternal and charitable afterthought.
And this was the secret of the Scuppers—dark and sordid and depressing, like all else there; and so, I was resolved, it should remain—an invisible part of that gloomy derelict community, like the very atmosphere of that grim, cheerless spot to which fate or a merciful Providence had relegated it.