CHAPTER VI
MICK OTTER, INJUN
The newspapers had a great deal to say about the extraordinary behavior and mysterious disappearance of Major T. V. Akerley, M. C., of the Royal Air Force. Why had he hit Lieutenant-Colonel E. F. Nasher on the point of the chin? That was the question; and no one seemed to be so ignorant of the answer as Colonel Nasher himself. Many young men who possessed pens of ready writers (more or less) and little else dealt lengthily with the problem.
The Press soon came to the conclusion that the major had hit the colonel out of pure cussedness—that a young and distinguished officer had committed assault and battery; insubordination with violence; behavior unbecoming an officer and a gentleman; and desertion coupled with theft of Government property, all in an outburst of causeless and unreasoning temper.
Then military men, demobilized and otherwise, of various arms of the Service and various ranks, began dipping unaccustomed pens on the vanished Akerley’s behalf. One wrote, “I was Major Akerley’s groom when he was a cavalry lieutenant. He was the quietest officer I ever knew. Some of our officers ...; but that Mr. Akerley didn’t even get mad, so’s you’d notice when his batman burnt his boots he’d paid seven guineas for in London. I guess Major Akerley had a reason for doing what he did.”
Many other warriors wrote in the same vein, among them a retired major-general. Much was written of Akerley’s reserve of manner, devotion to duty, skill as an airman and cool courage as a fighter. All these champions had known Akerley in France, of course; and all denied any personal knowledge of Colonel Nasher, whose military activities had not carried him beyond Ottawa.
The result of all this literary effort on the part of the veterans was a very general sympathy, strong and wide-spread, for the run-away Ace—but as neither newspapers nor the faintest echoes of public opinion reach Gaspard’s clearings, Akerley knew nothing of it. The civil and military police continued to scratch their heads, and run finger-tips (not entirely free from splinters) across and around maps of the world, and submit reports to their respective headquarters through the proper channels, with a view to the disciplining and undoing of Major Akerley and the recovery of the aëroplane.
Tom Akerley, known to old Gaspard as Tom Anderson, lived his new life from day to day and tried not to worry. His shoulder mended rapidly, and he worked about the farm with a will. He spent much of his time in Gaspard’s company, working in the crops, mending fences and clearing stones from the fields; and the fact that the old man’s rifle always lay or stood near at hand at once amused and irritated him.
Gaspard continued to cling to his belief that he had been visited by a devil, a fiend of darkness out of the night, and that the visitor was still somewhere in the vicinity; and sometimes Tom joined him on these fruitless hunts for the intruder through the surrounding forests. On these occasions, Tom was armed with a muzzle-loading, double-barrelled gun, the left barrel rammed with a bullet and the right with duck-shot.
“Would you know him if you saw him?” asked Tom during one of these expeditions, as they rested after a stumbling struggle through an alder swamp.
“He’d be discovered to me quick as the flash of an eye,” replied the old man. “Fer years have I bin expectin’ him, in punishment for the reckless ways o’ my youth; an’ I’ll know ’im when I set eyes on ’im, ye kin lay to that!”