And it was Miss Margie herself who took the clincher off. How she learned the truth about Schmitt I have never discovered, but she made known in very unmistakable terms that the fate of the whole Schmitt family was nothing to her and that she was very sorry she had ever wasted a good photograph and a good sheet of notepaper on such a creature. As for the photograph, it was not exactly wasted for I returned it to her, and the last time I saw it was during one of my visits to Temple Camp where it hung in a birchbark frame in Tom’s cabin. I did not ask him how it got there.
So, the way being clear, we went ahead with our publishing enterprise and I will conclude with one or two scraps of information which I have lately had from Tom. One is in answer to the question of how the cable of the balloon was broken. He thinks now that he must have cut this himself in savage desperation, fearing that Toby Schmitt would return after falling from the car. If, indeed, he did such a thing he must, of course, have been stark mad, and it is awful to think of him, the prey of such maniac fury, being carried, a lone prisoner in that little car, through clouds and darkness, who shall say how high, and for how long, and finally cast like a shipwrecked mariner upon those lonely mountains.
The harrowing story of that awful night can only be imagined, and perhaps it is better so. No doubt, it is one of God’s mercies that Tom should never recall all that happened in that insane combat among the clouds, and in the frightful journey which followed. He believes that he was in the air through another day, but I think that unlikely unless, indeed, the fugitive balloon was born hither and yon upon the changing winds before landing. All he knows is that he crawled out from under that tangled wreckage in the darkness of night.
One or two trifling details he remembers more closely. I asked him how Toby Schmitt happened to wear an American uniform and he said that evidently it was the custom of that unspeakable creature to wear not only the American, but the French and British uniforms, as occasion and the work in hand suggested. It was the sight of Schmitt in Uncle Sam’s outfit which enraged Tom to the point of uncontrollable fury, but whether this was one of the causes or just a result of his nervous state I cannot say. He tells me that in Schmitt’s room in the Grigou cottage there was the uniform of an English lieutenant, and the jacket of an American Y. M. C. A. worker.
But enough of Schmitt; my pen rebels at the task of recalling his villainy. As for the tattered German coat which Tom wore, he supposes that he found it in the car. He says that his own coat was torn away by Schmitt in the struggle and no doubt this was so, since we know that the wretch also wrenched away the cord bearing his scout badge and identification disk.
There is only one more question and neither Tom nor myself could have any answer for it. It is whether the Germans really believed that they had discovered Slade, when in fact the body was that of their own man. Very likely they really thought it was Slade for, of course, Schmitt could not have been known to every subordinate in the German service, and doubtless he was disfigured beyond identification as the result of his tragic fall. Where his own mark of identification was, I have no guess, though perhaps, being a spy, he wore none.
It is a matter of rueful memory with me that I should have reverently laid a “tribute from our Bridgeboro scouts” upon the grave of that young scoundrel. But perhaps a better spirit of Christian charity should incline me to cherish no such angry regrets and I will not begrudge him the few flowers which I left there as a token of the far-off town where he was born.
Indeed, I am not of a mood for unavailing bitterness for the cruel war is over and the springtime is come and the flowers are coming forth and the birds are singing in the trees as if to lure one’s thoughts away from the horrid nightmare. And last Saturday Roy and I made the trip up to Temple Camp to see old Uncle Jeb and visit Tom in his retreat among those silent, lonely hills.
Not a soul was thereabout as we rowed across the lake to the camp shore, and the cabins and pavilion stood reflected in the black water and all the surrounding woods seemed permeated with a solemn stillness. It was at the day’s end and the frogs were sending up their harsh croakings out of the marshy places—those discordant voices which accord so fittingly with the quiet and the dusk.
“When the frogs begin croaking,” said Roy, “then you know that pretty soon the scouts will begin coming.”