"Certainly we shall go and see if there's anything in what you say, my good woman," replied the Quartermaster, in a condescending tone, which proved to her that he was still undecided whether to accept her story for gospel.
However, there was no knowing. So he promised he would see to the matter at once. Fraets and Lebas, his gendarmes, should accompany him into the wood. They would look into the mystery as a matter of duty.
III—"BUT FOR A CURSED COUNTRY WOMAN!"
On leaving the constabulary Octavie Delacourt, not wholly satisfied that she had set the administrative machinery sufficiently in motion, asked herself what more she could do. All at once she thought of the post-mistress she knew at Mainneville, a village some three miles off. Excellent idea! A post-mistress had both the telegraph and telephone at her disposal, and she knew that this official, at any rate, would not laugh at her. Pulling herself together once more, she set off at a brisk walk—almost a run—in the direction of Mainneville.
There, as she had foreseen, she met with the most sympathetic of receptions. Mme. B——, the post-mistress, lost not a moment in telephoning to M. Armand Bernard, the Prefect of the Eure, who immediately passed on the news to his colleagues of the adjoining departments. Within half an hour not a prefect, not a commissary of police, not a gendarme with a radius of a hundred miles was uninformed. The Germans in the Forêt de Lyons and their accomplices were entrapped, as it were, within the meshes of a net.
Octavie Delacourt went to sleep that night content indeed. But she little knew what a service she had rendered to France—nothing less, in fact, than the saving of the Western Railway line, on which Paris depended at that time for its supplies and the transport of troops.
The facts relating to the capture of the Huns in the Forêt de Lyons, and those working in conjunction with them, were briefly recorded at the time, but, overshadowed by the greater events of those early days of the war, their true significance was lost sight of. A Prussian captain, a non-commissioned officer, and eleven engineers were arrested at Oissel, thanks to the good marksmanship of Sergeant Leroy, of the G.V.C. Service, who punctured with rifle-bullets the tyres of the motor-cars in which they were fleeing. One of the cars bore the plate and number of the prefect of police of Aix-la-Chapelle. In a motor-lorry which formed part of the convoy was half a ton of explosives.
In the course of his examination the German officer declared that he had crossed the departments of the Somme and the Oise without being troubled, and that he had come into the Eure with the intention of blowing up the Oissel bridge, or, failing this, that of Manoir. He added that "but for a cursed countrywoman" whom one of his men had caught in the forest, and whom he ought to have "suppressed," he would certainly have succeeded.
This happened about three o'clock in the afternoon. Less than an hour later it was discovered that the capture had not been made without bloodshed. Between the "Molière" quarry and the excavation where the blond Hun had appeared to Octavie Delacourt three bodies were found stretched on the ground—those of the luckless Quartermaster Crosnier and his gendarmes, who had been shot almost point-blank when calling on the automobilists to surrender.