Something was in the air besides the short, staccato bugle-calls, the scream of signal-whistles and the ceaseless beating of the Prussian side-drums. P. C. Breagh knew it, even as a tall, lean, red-faced Inspector caught his eye and beckoned him imperiously to quit his cage, asking:
"You have a Legitimation to proceed with the troops to Kreuznach? No? Then be good enough to stand aside until I have an opportunity of ascertaining why you were originally permitted. Here is the Commandant."
Standing on the whitewashed platform, hot, dusty, unbrushed and unwashed, burdened with his unstrapped knapsack, a stout walking-stick, a leather-covered, screw topped sling water-bottle, some crumpled newspapers and a package of solid sandwiches—thrust upon him at one of the previous stopping-places, P. C. Breagh was conscious of cutting a sorry figure. Conscious, too, of Valverden's supercilious eye-glass, glittering a few yards off, as he stretched his long legs on the platform and talked eagerly with some comrades of his own standing, straight-backed, long-legged youngsters, with arrogant manners, clear eyes, budding mustaches, newly fledged whiskers, broad shoulders and regulation waists.
No new pupil at a young ladies' boarding school, smarting under the double stigma of plainness and poverty, no cheaply arrayed debutante at a suburban subscription-ball, ever blushed more hotly or winced more painfully under the scrutiny of prettier and richer girls, than did P. C. Breagh under the glances of these young men.
Not the memory of the Army Service examinations he had failed in galled him, or that missed shot for the I.C.S., or the University career foregone. It was the word "spy" that rankled in his memory and took the starch out of his self-conceit.
Before the discovery of the Minister's written guarantee, Valverden had gossiped with him as an equal—the other Guardsmen had been friendly in their rougher way. The fateful half-sheet of Chancellory note had changed everything. "As though one had blossomed out in plague or smallpox," P. C. Breagh had said to himself bitterly. "And I feel like a kind of Ali Baba or somebody, whose talisman would only work upside down!"
Even his parting salute had met with grudging acknowledgment. The Sergeant had grunted. Braun and Kleiss had spat, and looked the other way. Valverden's finger had barely brushed the narrow peak of his forage-cap. Only Kunz, the spectacled ex-chemist's assistant, had civilly bidden the parting guest good-day.
He was horribly sore at the treatment received from Valverden. Susceptible of hero-worship, warm and sincere in feeling, he had taken a liking to the brilliant youngster, three years his junior, his superior in social status and in cynical knowledge of the world. Was it disgraceful to belong to the Prussian Diplomatic Secret Intelligence Department, that ramifying spider-web of invisible wires, reaching to the uttermost Kingdoms of the civilized globe, and emanating from the Chancellory in the Friedrichstrasse, Berlin?
The Army had its secret agents, an army of them, by Jingo! Had not scraps of conversation reached the ears of P. C. Breagh no later than the previous day, relative to a certain dandy Colonel of Prussian Field Artillery, who for the past two years had filled the well-paid post of lace and ribbon Department Manager at the Paris Bon Marche.
Then why on earth.... But at this juncture the Halt Inspector returned with the Commandant, a white-whiskered, potty officer, in blue infantry uniform with distinctive white shoulder-straps, beside whom stalked a tall, middle-aged Colonel of Uhlans, whose pale eyes, unshaded by the tufted schlapka, glittered through steel-rimmed glasses, whose teeth were clenched on a familiar meerschaum—and whose gaunt, broad-shouldered figure looked better in the dark blue cavalry uniform with its yellow plastron and white cross-belt, than in Herr von Rosius's Berlin-made private clothes.