"Thanks tremendously! ... I've no doubt I'm to blame for not producing my credentials earlier," said Carolan. "But I'd no notion of the rather serious turn things were going to take. However, all's well that ends——"
His smile froze upon his lips, and died out of his eyes as he encountered the stare the other turned upon him, answering haughtily:
"I regret that you have suffered some rough handling from my comrades, under the wrong impression that you were an agent of the French Secret Service. Admitting that our own side act advisedly in employing persons like you, I must say that to me, personally, a spy is—a spy!"
"But, hang it! you don't suppose——" Carolan choked out after a moment of angry bewilderment. And with the Sergeant's piggish little eyes curiously fixed on him, Valverden answered curtly:
"I suppose nothing. Excuse me from further conversation."
The revolver with its cartridges had not been returned with the other articles. Its owner asked the Sergeant for it, getting in reply only a glare. Thenceforward the long night's journey for one traveler was performed in unbroken silence. P. C. Breagh had been dispatched to Coventry by one and all.
Men who conversed spoke in barely-audible whispers, their covert glances, like the frigid indifference of Valverden's regard, and the extra six inches of seat-space accorded to the holder of the States Chancellor's written guarantee, testified to the aroma of suspicion that personage's document exhaled.
So at breathless, baking midnight the troop-train clanked into Cologne, no longer throbbing with the beat of drums, roaring with iron-shod wheels, swarming with men in brass-spiked helmets, choked with continuously shouting patriots, as it had been a few hours earlier when the Headquarter Staff trains had passed through,—and in the close, gray dawn of a thundery day, jolted into Bingen.
Here miles of rolling-stock and numberless engines blocked up the metal roads. Shuttered windows and barricaded doors testified that house-owners had temporarily abandoned their property. Strings of barges, laden with Commissariat stores and live-stock, were being towed up the Rhine by the gaily painted, white-awninged, paddle-wheel steamers familiar to the British tourist, while others were conveying voluntarily exiled residents and fugitive visitors down the classic stream out of harm's way.
Conveyance by railway—of a kind—was to be had upon terms prohibitory to all but the opulent. And disheveled ladies, pale or red with panic, besieged the station-master and his master, the Halt Commandant—with prayers, commands and entreaties, for places, but for places on some Northward-going train....