Shirley Claiborne

THE PORT OF MISSING MEN

by

MEREDITH NICHOLSON

Author of The House of a Thousand Candles, The Main Chance, Zelda Dameron, etc.

With Illustrations by
CLARENCE F. RUTHERFORD

Then Sir Pellinore put off his armour; then a little afore midnight they heard the trotting of an horse. Be ye still, said King Pellinore, for we shall hear of some adventure.—Malory.

INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT 1907
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
JANUARY

To the Memory of Herman Kountze

THE SHINING ROAD

Come, sweetheart, let us ride away beyond the city’s bound,
And seek what pleasant lands across the distant hills are found.
There is a golden light that shines beyond the verge of dawn,
And there are happy highways leading on and always on;
So, sweetheart, let us mount and ride, with never a backward glance, To find the pleasant shelter of the Valley of Romance.

Before us, down the golden road, floats dust from charging steeds,
Where two adventurous companies clash loud in mighty deeds;
And from the tower that stands alert like some tall, beckoning pine,
E’en now, my heart, I see afar the lights of welcome shine!
So loose the rein and cheer the steed and let us race away To seek the lands that lie beyond the Borders of To-day.

Draw rein and rest a moment here in this cool vale of peace;
The race half-run, the goal half-won, half won the sure release!
To right and left are flowery fields, and brooks go singing down
To mock the sober folk who still are prisoned in the town.
Now to the trail again, dear heart; my arm and blade are true, And on some plain ere night descend I’ll break a lance for you!

O sweetheart, it is good to find the pathway shining clear!
The road is broad, the hope is sure, and you are near and dear!
So loose the rein and cheer the steed and let us race away
To seek the lands that lie beyond the borders of To-day.
Oh, we shall hear at last, my heart, a cheering welcome cried
As o’er a clattering drawbridge through the Gate of Dreams we ride!

CONTENTS

CHAPTER
I “Events, Events”
II The Claibornes, of Washington
III Dark Tidings
IV John Armitage a Prisoner
V A Lost Cigarette Case
VI Toward the Western Stars
VII On the Dark Deck
VIII “The King Is Dead; Long Live the King”
IX “This Is America, Mr. Armitage”
X John Armitage Is Shadowed
XI The Toss of a Napkin
XII A Camp in the Mountains
XIII The Lady of the Pergola
XIV An Enforced Interview
XV Shirley Learns a Secret
XVI Narrow Margins
XVII A Gentleman in Hiding
XVIII An Exchange of Messages
XIX Captain Claiborne on Duty
XX The First Ride Together
XXI The Comedy of a Sheepfold
XXII The Prisoner at the Bungalow
XXIII The Verge of Morning
XXIV The Attack in the Road
XXV The Port of Missing Men
XXVI “Who Are You, John Armitage?”
XXVII Decent Burial
XXVIII John Armitage

CHAPTER I

“EVENTS, EVENTS”

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back Wherein he puts alms for oblivion. —Troilus and Cressida.

“The knowledge that you’re alive gives me no pleasure,” growled the grim old Austrian premier.

“Thank you!” laughed John Armitage, to whom he had spoken. “You have lost none of your old amiability; but for a renowned diplomat, you are remarkably frank. When I called on you in Paris, a year ago, I was able to render you—I believe you admitted it—a slight service.”

Count Ferdinand von Stroebel bowed slightly, but did not take his eyes from the young man who sat opposite him in his rooms at the Hotel Monte Rosa in Geneva. On the table between them stood an open despatch box, and about it lay a number of packets of papers which the old gentleman, with characteristic caution, had removed to his own side of the table before admitting his caller. He was a burly old man, with massive shoulders and a great head thickly covered with iron-gray hair.

He trusted no one, and this accounted for his presence in Geneva in March, of the year 1903, whither he had gone to receive the report of the secret agents whom he had lately despatched to Paris on an errand of peculiar delicacy. The agents had failed in their mission, and Von Stroebel was not tolerant of failure. Perhaps if he had known that within a week the tapers would burn about his bier in Saint Stephen’s Cathedral, at Vienna, while his life and public services would be estimated in varying degrees of admiration or execration by the newspapers of Europe, he might not have dealt so harshly with his hard-worked spies.

It was not often that the light in the old man’s eyes was as gentle as now. He had sent his secret agents away and was to return to Vienna on the following day. The young man whom he now entertained in his apartments received his whole attention. He picked up the card which lay on the table and scrutinized it critically, while his eyes lighted with sudden humor.

The card was a gentleman’s carte de visite, and bore the name John Armitage.

“I believe this is the same alias you were using when I saw you in Paris.
Where did you get it?” demanded the minister.

“I rather liked the sound of it, so I had the cards made,” replied the young man. “Besides, it’s English, and I pass readily for an Englishman. I have quite got used to it.”

“Which is not particularly creditable; but it’s probably just as well so.”

He drew closer to the table, and his keen old eyes snapped with the intentness of his thought. The hands he clasped on the table were those of age, and it was pathetically evident that he folded them to hide their slight palsy.

“I hope you are quite well,” said Armitage kindly.

“I am not. I am anything but well. I am an old man, and I have had no rest for twenty years.”

“It is the penalty of greatness. It is Austria’s good fortune that you have devoted yourself to the affairs of government. I have read—only to-day, in the Contemporary Review—an admirable tribute to your sagacity in handling the Servian affair. Your work was masterly. I followed it from the beginning with deepest interest.”

The old gentleman bowed half-unconsciously, for his thoughts were far away, as the vague stare in his small, shrewd eyes indicated.

“But you are here for rest—one comes to Geneva at this season for nothing else.”

“What brings you here?” asked the old man with sudden energy. “If the papers you gave me in Paris are forgeries and you are waiting—”

“Yes; assuming that, what should I be waiting for?”

“If you are waiting for events—for events! If you expect something to happen!”

Armitage laughed at the old gentleman’s earnest manner, asked if he might smoke, and lighted a cigarette.

“Waiting doesn’t suit me. I thought you understood that. I was not born for the waiting list. You see, I have strong hands—and my wits are—let us say—average!”

Von Stroebel clasped his own hands together more firmly and bent toward Armitage searchingly.

“Is it true”—he turned again and glanced about—“is it positively true that the Archduke Karl is dead?”

“Yes; quite true. There is absolutely no doubt of it,” said Armitage, meeting the old man’s eyes steadily.

“The report that he is still living somewhere in North America is persistent. We hear it frequently in Vienna; I have heard it since you told me that story and gave me those papers in Paris last year.”

“I am aware of that,” replied John Armitage; “but I told you the truth. He died in a Canadian lumber camp. We were in the north hunting—you may recall that he was fond of that sort of thing.”

“Yes, I remember; there was nothing else he did so well,” growled Von Stroebel.

“And the packet I gave you—”

The old man nodded.

“—that packet contained the Archduke Karl’s sworn arraignment of his wife. It is of great importance, indeed, to Francis, his worthless son, or supposed son, who may present himself for coronation one of these days!”

“Not with Karl appearing in all parts of the world, never quite dead, never quite alive—and his son Frederick Augustus lurking with him in the shadows. Who knows whether they are dead?”

“I am the only person on earth in a position to make that clear,” said John Armitage.

“Then you should give me the documents.”

“No; I prefer to keep them. I assure you that I have sworn proof of the death of the Archduke Karl, and of his son Frederick Augustus. Those papers are in a box in the Bronx Loan and Trust Company, in New York City.”

“I should have them; I must have them!” thundered the old man.

“In due season; but not just now. In fact, I have regretted parting with that document I gave you in Paris. It is safer in America than in Vienna. If you please, I should like to have it again, sir.”

The palsy in the old man’s hands had increased, and he strove to control his agitation; but fear had never been reckoned among his weaknesses, and he turned stormily upon Armitage.

“That packet is lost, I tell you!” he blurted, as though it were something that he had frequently explained before. “It was stolen from under my very nose only a month ago! That’s what I’m here for—my agents are after the thief, and I came to Geneva to meet them, to find out why they have not caught him. Do you imagine that I travel for pleasure at my age, Mr. John Armitage?”

Count von Stroebel’s bluster was merely a cloak to hide his confusion—a cloak, it may be said, to which he did not often resort; but in this case he watched Armitage warily. He clearly expected some outburst of indignation from the young man, and he was unfeignedly relieved when Armitage, after opening and closing his eyes quickly, reached for a fresh cigarette and lighted it with the deft ease of habit.

“The packet has been stolen,” he observed calmly; “whom do you suspect of taking it?”

The old man leaned upon the table heavily.

“That amiable Francis—”

“The suggestion is not dismaying. Francis would not know an opportunity if it offered.”

“But his mother—she is the devil!” blurted the old man.

“Pray drop that,” said Armitage in a tone that caused the old man to look at him with a new scrutiny. “I want the paper back for the very reason that it contains that awful indictment of her. I have been uncomfortable ever since I gave it to you; and I came to ask you for it that I might keep it safe in my own hands. But the document is lost,—am I to understand that Francis has it?”

“Not yet! But Rambaud has it, and Rambaud and Francis are as thick as thieves.”

“I don’t know Rambaud. The name is unfamiliar.”

“He has a dozen names—one for every capital. He even operates in Washington, I have heard. He’s a blackmailer, who aims high—a broker in secrets, a scandal-peddler. He’s a bad lot, I tell you. I’ve had my best men after him, and they’ve just been here to report another failure. If you have nothing better to do—” began the old man.

“Yes; that packet must be recovered,” answered Armitage. “If your agents have failed at the job it may be worth my while to look for it.”

His quiet acceptance of the situation irritated the minister.

“You entertain me, John Armitage! You speak of that packet as though it were a pound of tea. Francis and his friends, Winkelried and Rambaud, are not chasers of fireflies, I would have you know. If the Archduke and his son are dead, then a few more deaths and Francis would rule the Empire.”

John Armitage and Count von Stroebel stared at each other in silence.

“Events! Events!” muttered the old man presently, and he rested one of his hands upon the despatch box, as though it were a symbol of authority and power.

“Events!” the young man murmured.

“Events!” repeated Count von Stroebel without humor. “A couple of deaths and there you see him, on the ground and quite ready. Karl was a genius, therefore he could not be king. He threw away about five hundred years of work that had been done for him by other people—and he cajoled you into sharing his exile. You threw away your life for him! Bah! But you seem sane enough!”

The prime minister concluded with his rough burr; and Armitage laughed outright.

“Why the devil don’t you go to Vienna and set yourself up like a gentleman?” demanded the premier.

“Like a gentleman?” repeated Armitage. “It is too late. I should die in Vienna in a week. Moreover, I am dead, and it is well, when one has attained that beatific advantage, to stay dead.”

“Francis is a troublesome blackguard,” declared the old man. “I wish to God he would form the dying habit, so that I might have a few years in peace; but he is forever turning up in some mischief. And what can you do about it? Can we kick him out of the army without a scandal? Don’t you suppose he could go to Budapest to-morrow and make things interesting for us if he pleased? He’s as full of treason as he can stick, I tell you.”

Armitage nodded and smiled.

“I dare say,” he said in English; and when the old statesman glared at him he said in German: “No doubt you are speaking the truth.”

“Of course I speak the truth; but this is a matter for action, and not for discussion. That packet was stolen by intention, and not by chance, John Armitage!”

There was a slight immaterial sound in the hall, and the old prime minister slipped from German to French without changing countenance as he continued:

“We have enough troubles in Austria without encouraging treason. If Rambaud and his chief, Winkelried, could make a king of Francis, the brokerage—the commission—would be something handsome; and Winkelried and Rambaud are clever men.”

“I know of Winkelried. The continental press has given much space to him of late; but Rambaud is a new name.”

“He is a skilled hand. He is the most daring scoundrel in Europe.”

Count von Stroebel poured a glass of brandy from a silver flask and sipped it slowly.

“I will show you the gentleman’s pleasant countenance,” said the minister, and he threw open a leather portfolio and drew from it a small photograph which he extended to Armitage, who glanced at it carelessly and then with sudden interest.

“Rambaud!” he exclaimed.

“That’s his name in Vienna. In Paris he is something else. I will furnish you a list of his noms de guerre.”

“Thank you. I should like all the information you care to give me; but it may amuse you to know that I have seen the gentleman before.”

“That is possible,” remarked the old man, who never evinced surprise in any circumstances.

“I expect to see him here within a few days.”

Count von Stroebel held up his empty glass and studied it attentively, while he waited for Armitage to explain why he expected to see Rambaud in Geneva.

“He is interested in a certain young woman. She reached here yesterday; and Rambaud, alias Chauvenet, is quite likely to arrive within a day or so.”

“Jules Chauvenet is the correct name. I must inform my men,” said the minister.

“You wish to arrest him?”

“You ought to know me better than that, Mr. John Armitage! Of course I shall not arrest him! But I must get that packet. I can’t have it peddled all over Europe, and I can’t advertise my business by having him arrested here. If I could catch him once in Vienna I should know what to do with him! He and Winkelried got hold of our plans in that Bulgarian affair last year and checkmated me. He carries his wares to the best buyers—Berlin and St. Petersburg. So there’s a woman, is there? I’ve found that there usually is!”

“There’s a very charming young American girl, to be more exact.”

The old man growled and eyed Armitage sharply, while Armitage studied the photograph.

“I hope you are not meditating a preposterous marriage. Go back where you belong, make a proper marriage and wait—”

“Events!” and John Armitage laughed. “I tell you, sir, that waiting is not my forte. That’s what I like about America; they’re up and at it over there; the man who waits is lost.”

“They’re a lot of swine!” rumbled Von Stroebel’s heavy bass.

“I still owe allegiance to the Schomburg crown, so don’t imagine you are hitting me. But the swine are industrious and energetic. Who knows but that John Armitage might become famous among them—in politics, in finance! But for the deplorable accident of foreign birth he might become president of the United States. As it is, there are thousands of other offices worth getting—why not?”

“I tell you not to be a fool. You are young and—fairly clever—”

Armitage laughed at the reluctance of the count’s praise.

“Thank you, with all my heart!”

“Go back where you belong and you will have no regrets. Something may happen—who can tell? Events—events—if a man will watch and wait and study events—”

“Bless me! They organize clubs in every American village for the study of events,” laughed Armitage; then he changed his tone. “To be sure, the Bourbons have studied events these many years—a pretty spectacle, too.”

“Carrion! Carrion!” almost screamed the old man, half-rising in his seat. “Don’t mention those scavengers to me! Bah! The very thought of them makes me sick. But”—he gulped down more of the brandy—“where and how do you live?”

“Where? I own a cattle ranch in Montana and since the Archduke’s death I have lived there. He carried about fifty thousand pounds to America with him. He took care that I should get what was left when he died—and, I am almost afraid to tell you that I have actually augmented my inheritance! Just before I left I bought a place in Virginia to be near Washington when I got tired of the ranch.”

“Washington!” snorted the count. “In due course it will be the storm center of the world.”

“You read the wrong American newspapers,” laughed Armitage.

They were silent for a moment, in which each was busy with his own thoughts; then the count remarked, in as amiable a tone as he ever used:

“Your French is first rate. Do you speak English as well?”

“As readily as German, I think. You may recall that I had an English tutor, and maybe I did not tell you in that interview at Paris that I had spent a year at Harvard University.”

“What the devil did you do that for?” growled Von Stroebel.

“From curiosity, or ambition, as you like. I was in Cambridge at the law school for a year before the Archduke died. That was three years ago. I am twenty-eight, as you may remember. I am detaining you; I have no wish to rake over the past; but I am sorry—I am very sorry we can’t meet on some common ground.”

“I ask you to abandon this democratic nonsense and come back and make a man of yourself. You might go far—very far; but this democracy has hold of you like a disease.”

“What you ask is impossible. It is just as impossible now as it was when we discussed it in Paris last year. To sit down in Vienna and learn how to keep that leaning tower of an Empire from tumbling down like a stack of bricks—it does not appeal to me. You have spent a laborious life in defending a silly medieval tradition of government. You are using all the apparatus of the modern world to perpetuate an ideal that is as old and dead as the Rameses dynasty. Every time you use the telegraph to send orders in an emperor’s name you commit an anachronism.”

The count frowned and growled.

“Don’t talk to me like that. It is not amusing.”

“No; it is not funny. To see men like you fetching and carrying for dull kings, who would drop through the gallows or go to planting turnips without your brains—it does not appeal to my sense of humor or to my imagination.”

“You put it coarsely,” remarked the old man grimly. “I shall perhaps have a statue when I am gone.”

“Quite likely; and mobs will rendezvous in its shadow to march upon the royal palaces. If I were coming back to Europe I should go in for something more interesting than furnishing brains for sickly kings.”

“I dare say! Very likely you would persuade them to proclaim democracy and brotherhood everywhere.”

“On the other hand, I should become king myself.”

“Don’t be a fool, Mr. John Armitage. Much as you have grieved me, I should hate to see you in a madhouse.”

“My faculties, poor as they are, were never clearer. I repeat that if I were going to furnish the brains for an empire I should ride in the state carriage myself, and not be merely the driver on the box, who keeps the middle of the road and looks out for sharp corners. Here is a plan ready to my hand. Let me find that lost document, appear in Vienna and announce myself Frederick Augustus, the son of the Archduke Karl! I knew both men intimately. You may remember that Frederick and I were born in the same month. I, too, am Frederick Augustus! We passed commonly in America as brothers. Many of the personal effects of Karl and Augustus are in my keeping—by the Archduke’s own wish. You have spent your life studying human nature, and you know as well as I do that half the world would believe my story if I said I was the Emperor’s nephew. In the uneasy and unstable condition of your absurd empire I should be hailed as a diversion, and then—events, events!”

Count von Stroebel listened with narrowing eyes, and his lips moved in an effort to find words with which to break in upon this impious declaration. When Armitage ceased speaking the old man sank back and glared at him.

“Karl did his work well. You are quite mad. You will do well to go back to America before the police discover you.”

Armitage rose and his manner changed abruptly.

“I do not mean to trouble or annoy you. Please pardon me! Let us be friends, if we can be nothing more.”

“It is too late. The chasm is too deep.”

The old minister sighed deeply. His fingers touched the despatch box as though by habit. It represented power, majesty and the iron game of government. The young man watched him eagerly.

The heavy, tremulous hands of Count von Stroebel passed back and forth over the box caressingly. Suddenly he bent forward and spoke with a new and gentler tone and manner.

“I have given my life, my whole life, as you have said, to one service—to uphold one idea. You have spoken of that work with contempt. History, I believe, will reckon it justly.”

“Your place is secure—no one can gainsay that,” broke in Armitage.

“If you would do something for me—for me—do something for Austria, do something for my country and yours! You have wits; I dare say you have courage. I don’t care what that service may be; I don’t care where or how you perform it. I am not so near gone as you may think. I know well enough that they are waiting for me to die; but I am in no hurry to afford my enemies that pleasure. But stop this babble of yours about democracy. Do something for Austria—for the Empire that I have held here under my hand these difficult years—then take your name again—and you will find that kings can be as just and wise as mobs.”

“Do something for Austria”

“For the Empire—something for the Empire?” murmured the young man, wondering.

Count Ferdinand von Stroebel rose.

“You will accept the commission—I am quite sure you will accept. I leave on an early train, and I shall not see you again.” As he took Armitage’s hand he scrutinized him once more with particular care; there was a lingering caress in his touch as he detained the young man for an instant; then he sighed heavily.

“Good night; good-by!” he said abruptly, and waved his caller toward the door.

CHAPTER II

THE CLAIBORNES, OF WASHINGTON

—the Englishman who is not an Englishman and therefore doubly incomprehensible.—The Naulahka.

The girl with the white-plumed hat started and flushed slightly, and her brother glanced over his shoulder toward the restaurant door to see what had attracted her attention.

“’Tis he, the unknown, Dick.”

“I must say I like his persistence!” exclaimed the young fellow, turning again to the table. “In America I should call him out and punch his head, but over here—”

“Over here you have better manners,” replied the girl, laughing. “But why trouble yourself? He doesn’t even look at us. We are of no importance to him whatever. We probably speak a different language.”

“But he travels by the same trains; he stops at the same inns; he sits near us at the theater—he even affects the same pictures in the same galleries! It’s growing a trifle monotonous; it’s really insufferable. I think I shall have to try my stick on him.”

“You flatter yourself, Richard,” mocked the girl. “He’s fully your height and a trifle broader across the shoulders. The lines about his mouth are almost—yes, I should say, quite as firm as yours, though he is a younger man. His eyes are nice blue ones, and they are very steady. His hair is”—she paused to reflect and tilted her head slightly, her eyes wandering for an instant to the subject of her comment—“light brown, I should call it. And he is beardless, as all self-respecting men should be. I’m sure that he is an exemplary person—kind to his sisters and aunts, very willing to sacrifice himself for others and light the candles on his nephews’ and nieces’ Christmas trees.”

She rested her cheek against her lightly-clasped hands and sighed deeply to provoke a continuation of her brother’s growling disdain.

The young gentleman to whom she had referred had seated himself at a table not far distant, given an order with some particularity, and settled himself to the reading of a newspaper which he had drawn from the pocket of his blue serge coat. He was at once absorbed, and the presence of the Claibornes gave him apparently not the slightest concern.

“He has a sense of humor,” the girl resumed. “I saw him yesterday—”

“You’re always seeing him: you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“Don’t interrupt me, please. As I was saying, I saw him laughing over the Fliegende Blätter.”

“But that’s no sign he has a sense of humor. It rather proves that he hasn’t. I’m disappointed in you, Shirley. To think that my own sister should be able to tell the color of a wandering blackguard’s eyes!”

He struck a match viciously, and his sister laughed.

“I might add to his portrait. That blue and white scarf is tied beautifully; and his profile would be splendid in a medallion. I believe from his nose he may be English, after all,” she added with a dreamy air assumed to add to her brother’s impatience.

“Which doesn’t help the matter materially, that I can see!” exclaimed the young man. “With a full beard he’d probably look like a Sicilian bandit. If I thought he was really pursuing you in this darkly mysterious way I should certainly give him a piece of my American mind. You might suppose that a girl would be safe traveling with her brother.”

“It isn’t your fault, Dick,” laughed the girl. “You know our parents dear were with us when we first began to notice him—that was in Rome. And now that we are alone he continues to follow our trail just the same. It’s really diverting; and if you were a good brother you’d find out all about him, and we might even do stunts together—the three of us, with you as the watchful chaperon. You forget how I have worked for you, Dick. I took great chances in forcing an acquaintance with those frosty English people at Florence just because you were crazy about the scrawny blonde who wore the frightful hats. I wash my hands of you hereafter. Your taste in girls is horrible.”

“Your mind has been affected by reading these fake-kingdom romances, where a ridiculous prince gives up home and mother and his country to marry the usual beautiful American girl who travels about having silly adventures. I belong to the Know-nothing Party—America for Americans and only white men on guard!”

“Yes, Richard! Your sentiments are worthy, but they’d have more weight if I hadn’t seen you staring your eyes out every time we came within a mile of a penny princess. I haven’t forgotten your disgraceful conduct in collecting photographs of that homely daughter of a certain English duke. We’ll call the incident closed, little brother.”

“Our friend Chauvenet, even,” continued Captain Claiborne, “is less persistent—less gloomily present on the horizon. We haven’t seen him for a week or two. But he expects to visit Washington this spring. His waistcoats are magnificent. The governor shies every time the fellow unbuttons his coat.”

“Mr. Chauvenet is an accomplished man of the world,” declared Shirley with an insincere sparkle in her eyes.

“He lives by his wits—and lives well.”

Claiborne dismissed Chauvenet and turned again toward the strange young man, who was still deep in his newspaper.

“He’s reading the Neue Freie Presse,” remarked Dick, “by which token I argue that he’s some sort of a Dutchman. He’s probably a traveling agent for a Vienna glass-factory, or a drummer for a cheap wine-house, or the agent for a Munich brewery. That would account for his travels. We simply fall in with his commercial itinerary.”

“You seem to imply, brother, that my charms are not in themselves sufficient. But a commercial traveler hardly commands that fine repose, that distinction—that air of having been places and seen things and known people—”

“Tush! I have seen American book agents who had all that—even the air of having been places! Your instincts ought to serve you better, Shirley. It’s well that we go on to-morrow. I shall warn mother and the governor that you need watching.”

Shirley Claiborne’s eyes rested again upon the calm reader of the Neue Freie Presse. The waiter was now placing certain dishes upon the table without, apparently, interesting the young gentleman in the least. Then the unknown dropped his newspaper, and buttered a roll reflectively. His gaze swept the room for the first time, passing over the heads of Miss Claiborne and her brother unseeingly—with, perhaps, too studied an air of indifference.

“He has known real sorrow,” persisted Shirley, her elbows on the table, her fingers interlocked, her chin resting idly upon them. “He’s traveling in an effort to forget a blighting grief,” the girl continued with mock sympathy.

“Then let us leave him in peace! We can’t decently linger in the presence of his sacred sorrow.”

Captain Richard Claiborne and his sister Shirley had stopped at Geneva to spend a week with a younger brother, who was in school there, and were to join their father and mother at Liverpool and sail for home at once. The Claibornes were permanent residents of Washington, where Hilton Claiborne, a former ambassador to two of the greatest European courts, was counsel for several of the embassies and a recognized authority in international law. He had been to Rome to report to the Italian government the result of his efforts to collect damages from the United States for the slaughter of Italian laborers in a railroad strike, and had proceeded thence to England on other professional business.

Dick Claiborne had been ill, and was abroad on leave in an effort to shake off the lingering effects of typhoid fever contracted in the Philippines. He was under orders to report for duty at Fort Myer on the first of April, and it was now late March. He and his sister had spent the morning at their brother’s school and were enjoying a late déjeuner at the Monte Rosa. There existed between them a pleasant comradeship that was in no wise affected by divergent tastes and temperaments. Dick had just attained his captaincy, and was the youngest man of his rank in the service. He did not know an orchid from a hollyhock, but no man in the army was a better judge of a cavalry horse, and if a Wagner recital bored him to death his spirit rose, nevertheless, to the bugle, and he drilled his troop until he could play with it and snap it about him like a whip.

Shirley Claiborne had been out of college a year, and afforded a pleasant refutation of the dull theory that advanced education destroys a girl’s charm, or buoyancy, or whatever it is that is so greatly admired in young womanhood. She gave forth the impression of vitality and strength. She was beautifully fair, with a high color that accentuated her youthfulness. Her brown hair, caught up from her brow in the fashion of the early years of the century, flashed gold in sunlight.

Much of Shirley’s girlhood had been spent in the Virginia hills, where Judge Claiborne had long maintained a refuge from the heat of Washington. From childhood she had read the calendar of spring as it is written upon the landscape itself. Her fingers found by instinct the first arbutus; she knew where white violets shone first upon the rough breast of the hillsides; and particular patches of rhododendron had for her the intimate interest of private gardens.

Undoubtedly there are deities fully consecrated to the important business of naming girls, so happily is that task accomplished. Gladys is a child of the spirit of mischief. Josephine wears a sweet gravity, and Mary, too, discourses of serious matters. Nora, in some incarnation, has seen fairies scampering over moor and hill and the remembrance of them teases her memory. Katherine is not so faithless as her ways might lead you to believe. Laura without dark eyes would be impossible, and her predestined Petrarch would never deliver his sonnets. Helen may be seen only against a background of Trojan wall. Gertrude must be tall and fair and ready with ballads in the winter twilight. Julia’s reserve and discretion commend her to you; but she has a heart of laughter. Anne is to be found in the rose garden with clipping-shears and a basket. Hilda is a capable person; there is no ignoring her militant character; the battles of Saxon kings ring still in her blood. Marjorie has scribbled verses in secret, and Celia is the quietest auditor at the symphony. And you may have observed that there is no button on Elizabeth’s foil; you do well not to clash wits with her. Do you say that these ascriptions are not square with your experience? Then verily there must have been a sad mixing of infant candidates for the font in your parish. Shirley, in such case, will mean nothing to you. It is a waste of time to tell you that the name may become audible without being uttered; you can not be made to understand that the r and l slip into each other as ripples glide over pebbles in a brook. And from the name to the girl—may you be forever denied a glimpse of Shirley Claiborne’s pretty head, her brown hair and dream-haunted eyes, if you do not first murmur the name with honest liking.

As the Claibornes lingered at their table a short stout man espied them from the door and advanced beamingly.

“Ah, my dear Shirley, and Dick! Can it be possible! I only heard by the merest chance that you were here. But Switzerland is the real meeting-place of the world.”

The young Americans greeted the new-comer cordially. A waiter placed a chair for him, and took his hat. Arthur Singleton was an American, though he had lived abroad so long as to have lost his identity with any particular city or state of his native land. He had been an attaché of the American embassy at London for many years. Administrations changed and ambassadors came and went, but Singleton was never molested. It was said that he kept his position on the score of his wide acquaintance; he knew every one, and he was a great peddler of gossip, particularly about people in high station.

The children of Hilton Claiborne were not to be overlooked. He would impress himself upon them, as was his way; for he was sincerely social by instinct, and would go far to do a kindness for people he really liked.

“Ah me! You have arrived opportunely, Miss Claiborne. There’s mystery in the air—the great Stroebel is here—under this very roof and in a dreadfully bad humor. He is a dangerous man—a very dangerous man, but failing fast. Poor Austria! Count Ferdinand von Stroebel can have no successor—he’s only a sort of holdover from the nineteenth century, and with him and his Emperor out of the way—what? For my part I see only dark days ahead;” and he concluded with a little sigh that implied crumbling thrones and falling dynasties.

“We met him in Vienna,” said Shirley Claiborne, “when father was there before the Ecuador Claims Commission. He struck me as being a delightful old grizzly bear.”

“He will have his place in history; he is a statesman of the old blood and iron school; he is the peer of Bismarck, and some things he has done. He holds more secrets than any other man in Europe—and you may be quite sure that they will die with him. He will leave no memoirs to be poked over by his enemies—no post-mortem confidences from him!”

The reader of the Neue Freie Presse, preparing to leave his table, tore from the newspaper an article that seemed to have attracted him, placed it in his card-case, and walked toward the door. The eyes of Arthur Singleton lighted in recognition, and the attaché, muttering an apology to the Claibornes, addressed the young gentleman cordially.

“Why, Armitage, of all men!” and he rose, still facing the Claibornes, with an air of embracing the young Americans in his greetings. He never liked to lose an auditor; and he would, in no circumstances, miss a chance to display the wide circumference of his acquaintance.

“Shirley—Miss Claiborne—allow me to present Mr. Armitage.” The young army officer and Armitage then shook hands, and the three men stood for a moment, detained, it seemed, by the old attaché, who had no engagement for the next hour or two and resented the idea of being left alone.

“One always meets Armitage!” declared Singleton. “He knows our America as well as we do—and very well indeed—for an Englishman.”

Armitage bowed gravely.

“You make it necessary again for me to disavow any allegiance to the powers that rule Great Britain. I’m really a fair sort of American—I have sometimes told New York people all about—Colorado—Montana—New Mexico!”

His voice and manner were those of a gentleman. His color, as Shirley Claiborne now observed, was that of an outdoors man; she was familiar with it in soldiers and sailors, and knew that it testified to a vigorous and wholesome life.

“Of course you’re not English!” exclaimed Singleton, annoyed as he remembered, or thought he did, that Armitage had on some other occasion made the same protest.

“I’m really getting sensitive about it,” said Armitage, more to the Claibornes than to Singleton. “But must we all be from somewhere? Is it so melancholy a plight to be a man without a country?”

The mockery in his tone was belied by the good humor in his face; his eyes caught Shirley’s passingly, and she smiled at him—it seemed a natural, a perfectly inevitable thing to do. She liked the kind tolerance with which he suffered the babble of Arthur Singleton, whom some one had called an international bore. The young man’s dignity was only an expression of self-respect; his appreciation of the exact proprieties resulting from this casual introduction to herself and her brother was perfect. He was already withdrawing. A waiter had followed him with his discarded newspaper—and Armitage took it and idly dropped it on a chair.

“Have you heard the news, Armitage? The Austrian sphinx is here—in this very house!” whispered Singleton impressively.

“Yes; to be sure, Count von Stroebel is here, but he will probably not remain long. The Alps will soon be safe again. I am glad to have met you.” He bowed to the Claibornes inclusively, nodded in response to Singleton’s promise to look him up later, and left them.

When Shirley and her brother reached their common sitting-room Dick
Claiborne laughingly held up the copy of the Neue Freie Presse which Armitage had cast aside at their table.

“Now we shall know!” he declared, unfolding the newspaper.

“Know what, Dick?”

“At least what our friend without a country is so interested in.”

He opened the paper, from which half a column had been torn, noted the date, rang the bell, and ordered a copy of the same issue. When it was brought he opened it, found the place, laughed loudly, and passed the sheet over to his sister.

“Oh, Shirley, Shirley! This is almost too much!” he cried, watching her as her eyes swept the article. She turned away to escape his noise, and after a glance threw down the paper in disgust. The article dealt in detail with Austro-Hungarian finances, and fairly bristled with figures and sage conclusions based upon them.

“Isn’t that the worst!” exclaimed Shirley, smiling ruefully.

“He’s certainly a romantic figure ready to your hand. Probably a bank-clerk who makes European finance his recreation.”

“He isn’t an Englishman, at any rate. He repudiated the idea with scorn.”

“Well, your Mr. Armitage didn’t seem so awfully excited at meeting Singleton; but he seemed rather satisfied with your appearance, to put it mildly. I wonder if he had arranged with Singleton to pass by in that purely incidental way, just for the privilege of making your acquaintance!”

“Don’t be foolish, Dick. It’s unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. But if you should see Mr. Singleton again—”

“Yes—not if I see him first!” ejaculated Claiborne.

“Well, you might ask him who Mr. Armitage is. It would be amusing—and satisfying—to know.”

Later in the day the old attaché fell upon Claiborne in the smoking-room and stopped to discuss a report that a change was impending in the American State Department. Changes at Washington did not trouble Singleton, who was sure of his tenure. He said as much; and after some further talk, Claiborne remarked:

“Your friend Armitage seems a good sort.”

“Oh, yes; a capital talker, and thoroughly well posted in affairs.”

“Yes, he seemed interesting. Do you happen to know where he lives—when he’s at home?”

“Lord bless you, boy, I don’t know anything about Armitage!” spluttered Singleton, with the emphasis so thrown as to imply that of course in any other branch of human knowledge he would be found abundantly qualified to answer questions.

“But you introduced us to him—my sister and me. I assumed—”

“My dear Claiborne, I’m always introducing people! It’s my business to introduce people. Armitage is all right. He’s always around everywhere. I’ve dined with him in Paris, and I’ve rarely seen a man order a better dinner.”

CHAPTER III

DARK TIDINGS

The news I bring is heavy in my tongue.—Shakespeare.

The second day thereafter Shirley Claiborne went into a jeweler’s on the Grand Quai to purchase a trinket that had caught her eye, while she waited for Dick, who had gone off in their carriage to the post-office to send some telegrams. It was a small shop, and the time early afternoon, when few people were about. A man who had preceded her was looking at watches, and seemed deeply absorbed in this occupation. She heard his inquiries as to quality and price, and knew that it was Armitage’s voice before she recognized his tall figure. She made her purchase quickly, and was about to leave the shop, when he turned toward her and she bowed.

“Good afternoon, Miss Claiborne. These are very tempting bazaars, aren’t they? If the abominable tariff laws of America did not give us pause—”

He bent above her, hat in hand, smiling. He had concluded the purchase of a watch, which the shopkeeper was now wrapping in a box.

“I have just purchased a little remembrance for my ranch foreman out in Montana, and before I can place it in his hands it must be examined and appraised and all the pleasure of the gift destroyed by the custom officers in New York. I hope you are a good smuggler, Miss Claiborne.”

“I’d like to be. Women are supposed to have a knack at the business; but my father is so patriotic that he makes me declare everything.”

“Patriotism will carry one far; but I object both to being taxed and to the alternative of corrupting the gentlemen who lie in wait at the receipt of customs.”

“Of course the answer is that Americans should buy at home,” replied Shirley. She received her change, and Armitage placed his small package in his pocket.

“My brother expected to meet me here; he ran off with our carriage,” Shirley explained.

“These last errands are always trying—there are innumerable things one would like to come back for from mid-ocean, tariff or no tariff.”

“There’s the wireless,” said Shirley. “In time we shall be able to commit our afterthoughts to it. But lost views can hardly be managed that way. After I get home I shall think of scores of things I should like to see again—that photographs don’t give.”

“Such as—?”

“Oh—the way the Pope looks when he gives his blessing at St. Peter’s; and the feeling you have when you stand by Napoleon’s tomb—the awfulness of what he did and was—and being here in Switzerland, where I always feel somehow the pressure of all the past of Europe about me. Now,”—and she laughed lightly,—“I have made a most serious confession.”

“It is a new idea—that of surveying the ages from these mountains. They must be very wise after all these years, and they have certainly seen men and nations do many evil and wretched things. But the history of the world is all one long romance—a tremendous story.”

“That is what makes me sorry to go home,” said Shirley meditatively. “We are so new—still in the making, and absurdly raw. When we have a war, it is just politics, with scandals about what the soldiers have to eat, and that sort of thing; and there’s a fuss about pensions, and the heroic side of it is lost.”

“But it is easy to overestimate the weight of history and tradition. The glory of dead Caesar doesn’t do the peasant any good. When you see Italian laborers at work in America digging ditches or laying railroad ties, or find Norwegian farmers driving their plows into the new hard soil of the Dakotas, you don’t think of their past as much as of their future—the future of the whole human race.”

Armitage had been the subject of so much jesting between Dick and herself that it seemed strange to be talking to him. His face brightened pleasantly when he spoke; his eyes were grayer than she had mockingly described them for her brother’s benefit the day before. His manner was gravely courteous, and she did not at all believe that he had followed her about.

Her ideals of men were colored by the American prejudice in favor of those who aim high and venture much. In her childhood she had read Malory and Froissart with a boy’s delight. She possessed, too, that poetic sense of the charm of “the spirit of place” that is the natural accompaniment of the imaginative temperament. The cry of bugles sometimes brought tears to her eyes; her breath came quickly when she sat—as she often did—in the Fort Myer drill hall at Washington and watched the alert cavalrymen dashing toward the spectators’ gallery in the mimic charge. The work that brave men do she admired above anything else in the world. As a child in Washington she had looked wonderingly upon the statues of heroes and the frequent military pageants of the capital; and she had wept at the solemn pomp of military funerals. Once on a battleship she had thrilled at the salutes of a mighty fleet in the Hudson below the tomb of Grant; and soon thereafter had felt awe possess her as she gazed upon the white marble effigy of Lee in the chapel at Lexington; for the contemplation of heroes was dear to her, and she was proud to believe that her father, a veteran of the Civil War, and her soldier brother were a tie between herself and the old heroic times.

Armitage was aware that a jeweler’s shop was hardly the place for extended conversation with a young woman whom he scarcely knew, but he lingered in the joy of hearing this American girl’s voice, and what she said interested him immensely. He had seen her first in Paris a few months before at an exhibition of battle paintings. He had come upon her standing quite alone before High Tide at Gettysburg, the picture of the year; and he had noted the quick mounting of color to her cheeks as the splendid movement of the painting—its ardor and fire—took hold of her. He saw her again in Florence; and it was from there that he had deliberately followed the Claibornes.

His own plans were now quite unsettled by his interview with Von Stroebel. He fully expected Chauvenet in Geneva; the man had apparently been on cordial terms with the Claibornes; and as he had seemed to be master of his own time, it was wholly possible that he would appear before the Claibornes left Geneva. It was now the second day after Von Stroebel’s departure, and Armitage began to feel uneasy.

He stood with Shirley quite near the shop door, watching for Captain Claiborne to come back with the carriage.

“But America—isn’t America the most marvelous product of romance in the world,—its discovery,—the successive conflicts that led up to the realization of democracy? Consider the worthless idlers of the Middle Ages going about banging one another’s armor with battle-axes. Let us have peace, said the tired warrior.”

“He could afford to say it; he was the victor,” said Shirley.

“Ah! there is Captain Claiborne. I am indebted to you, Miss Claiborne, for many pleasant suggestions.”

The carriage was at the door, and Dick Claiborne came up to them at once and bowed to Armitage.

“There is great news: Count Ferdinand von Stroebel was murdered in his railway carriage between here and Vienna; they found him dead at Innsbruck this morning.”

“Is it possible! Are you quite sure he was murdered?”

It was Armitage who asked the question. He spoke in a tone quite matter-of-fact and colorless, so that Shirley looked at him in surprise; but she saw that he was very grave; and then instantly some sudden feeling flashed in his eyes.

“There is no doubt of it. It was an atrocious crime; the count was an old man and feeble when we saw him the other day. He wasn’t fair game for an assassin,” said Claiborne.

“No; he deserved a better fate,” remarked Armitage.

“He was a grand old man,” said Shirley, as they left the shop and walked toward the carriage. “Father admired him greatly; and he was very kind to us in Vienna. It is terrible to think of his being murdered.”

“Yes; he was a wise and useful man,” observed Armitage, still grave. “He was one of the great men of his time.”

His tone was not that of one who discusses casually a bit of news of the hour, and Captain Claiborne paused a moment at the carriage door, curious as to what Armitage might say further.

“And now we shall see—” began the young American.

“We shall see Johann Wilhelm die of old age within a few years at most; and then Charles Louis, his son, will be the Emperor-king in his place; and if he should go hence without heirs, his cousin Francis would rule in the house of his fathers; and Francis is corrupt and worthless, and quite necessary to the plans of destiny for the divine order of kings.”

John Armitage stood beside the carriage quite erect, his hat and stick and gloves in his right hand, his left thrust lightly into the side pocket of his coat.

“A queer devil,” observed Claiborne, as they drove away. “A solemn customer, and not cheerful enough to make a good drummer. By what singular chance did he find you in that shop?”

“I found him, dearest brother, if I must make the humiliating disclosure.”

“I shouldn’t have believed it! I hardly thought you would carry it so far.”

“And while he may be a salesman of imitation cut-glass, he has expensive tastes.”

“Lord help us, he hasn’t been buying you a watch?”

“No; he was lavishing himself on a watch for the foreman of his ranch in Montana.”

“Humph! you’re chaffing.”

“Not in the least. He paid—I couldn’t help being a witness to the transaction—he actually paid five hundred francs for a watch to give to the foreman of his ranch—his ranch, mind you, in Montana, U.S.A. He spoke of it incidentally, as though he were always buying watches for cowboys. Now where does that leave us?”

“I’m afraid it rather does for my theory. I’ll look him up when I get home. Montana isn’t a good hiding-place any more. But it was odd the way he acted about old Stroebel’s death. You don’t suppose he knew him, do you?”

“It’s possible. Poor Count von Stroebel! Many hearts are lighter, now that he’s done for.”

“Yes; and there will be something doing in Austria, now that he’s out of the way.”

Four days passed, in which they devoted themselves to their young brother. The papers were filled with accounts of Count von Stroebel’s death and speculations as to its effect on the future of Austria and the peace of Europe. The Claibornes saw nothing of Armitage. Dick asked for him in the hotel, and found that he had gone, but would return in a few days.

It was on the morning of the fourth day that Armitage appeared suddenly at the hotel as Dick and his sister waited for a carriage to carry them to their train. He had just returned, and they met by the narrowest margin. He walked with them to the door of the Monte Rosa.

“We are running for the King Edward, and hope for a day in London before we sail. Perhaps we shall see you one of these days in America,” said Claiborne, with some malice, it must be confessed, for his sister’s benefit.

“That is possible; I am very fond of Washington,” responded Armitage carelessly.

“Of course you will look us up,” persisted Dick. “I shall be at Fort Myer for a while—and it will always be a pleasure—”

Claiborne turned for a last word with the porter about their baggage, and Armitage stood talking to Shirley, who had already entered the carriage.

“Oh, is there any news of Count von Stroebel’s assassin?” she asked, noting the newspaper that Armitage held in his hand.

“Nothing. It’s a very mysterious and puzzling affair.”

“It’s horrible to think such a thing possible—he was a wonderful old man. But very likely they will find the murderer.”

“Yes; undoubtedly.”

Then, seeing her brother beating his hands together impatiently behind Armitage’s back—a back whose ample shoulders were splendidly silhouetted in the carriage door—Shirley smiled in her joy of the situation, and would have prolonged it for her brother’s benefit even to the point of missing the train, if the matter had been left wholly in her hands. It amused her to keep the conversation pitched in the most impersonal key.

“The secret police will scour Europe in pursuit of the assassin,” she observed.

“Yes,” replied Armitage gravely.

He thought her brown traveling gown, with hat and gloves to match, exceedingly becoming, and he liked the full, deep tones of her voice, and the changing light of her eyes; and a certain dimple in her left cheek—he had assured himself that it had no counterpart on the right—made the fate of principalities and powers seem, at the moment, an idle thing.

“The truth will be known before we sail, no doubt,” said Shirley. “The assassin may be here in Geneva by this time.”

“That is quite likely,” said John Armitage, with unbroken gravity. “In fact, I rather expect him here, or I should be leaving to-day myself.”

He bowed and made way for the vexed and chafing Claiborne, who gave his hand to Armitage hastily and jumped into the carriage.

“Your imitation cut-glass drummer has nearly caused us to miss our train. Thank the Lord, we’ve seen the last of that fellow.”

Shirley said nothing, but gazed out of the window with a wondering look in her eyes. And on the way to Liverpool she thought often of Armitage’s last words. “I rather expect him here, or I should be leaving to-day myself,” he had said.

She was not sure whether, if it had not been for those words, she would have thought of him again at all. She remembered him as he stood framed in the carriage door—his gravity, his fine ease, the impression he gave of great physical strength, and of resources of character and courage.

And so Shirley Claiborne left Geneva, not knowing the curious web that fate had woven for her, nor how those last words spoken by Armitage at the carriage door were to link her to strange adventures at the very threshold of her American home.

CHAPTER IV

JOHN ARMITAGE A PRISONER

All things are bright in the track of the sun,
All things are fair I see;
And the light in a golden tide has run Down out of the sky to me.

And the world turns round and round and round,
And my thought sinks into the sea;
The sea of peace and of joy profound Whose tide is mystery.

—S.W. Duffield.

The man whom John Armitage expected arrived at the Hotel Monte Rosa a few hours after the Claibornes’ departure.

While he waited, Mr. Armitage employed his time to advantage. He carefully scrutinized his wardrobe, and after a process of elimination and substitution he packed his raiment in two trunks and was ready to leave the inn at ten minutes’ notice. Between trains, when not engaged in watching the incoming travelers, he smoked a pipe over various packets of papers and letters, and these he burned with considerable care. All the French and German newspaper accounts of the murder of Count von Stroebel he read carefully; and even more particularly he studied the condition of affairs in Vienna consequent upon the great statesman’s death. Secret agents from Vienna and detectives from Paris had visited Geneva in their study of this astounding crime, and had made much fuss and asked many questions; but Mr. John Armitage paid no heed to them. He had held the last conversation of length that any one had enjoyed with Count Ferdinand von Stroebel, but the fact of this interview was known to no one, unless to one or two hotel servants, and these held a very high opinion of Mr. Armitage’s character, based on his generosity in the matter of gold coin; and there could, of course, be no possible relationship between so shocking a tragedy and a chance acquaintance between two travelers. Mr. Armitage knew nothing that he cared to impart to detectives, and a great deal that he had no intention of imparting to any one. He accumulated a remarkable assortment of time-tables and advertisements of transatlantic sailings against sudden need, and even engaged passage on three steamers sailing from English and French ports within the week.

He expected that the person for whom he waited would go direct to the Hotel Monte Rosa for the reason that Shirley Claiborne had been there; and Armitage was not mistaken. When this person learned that the Claibornes had left, he would doubtless hurry after them. This is the conclusion that was reached by Mr. Armitage, who, at times, was singularly happy in his speculations as to the mental processes of other people. Sometimes, however, he made mistakes, as will appear.

The gentleman for whom John Armitage had been waiting arrived alone, and was received as a distinguished guest by the landlord.

Monsieur Chauvenet inquired for his friends the Claibornes, and was clearly annoyed to find that they had gone; and no sooner had this intelligence been conveyed to him than he, too, studied time-tables and consulted steamer advertisements. Mr. John Armitage in various discreet ways was observant of Monsieur Chauvenet’s activities, and bookings at steamship offices interested him so greatly that he reserved passage on two additional steamers and ordered the straps buckled about his trunks, for it had occurred to him that he might find it necessary to leave Geneva in a hurry.

It was not likely that Monsieur Chauvenet, being now under his eyes, would escape him; and John Armitage, making a leisurely dinner, learned from his waiter that Monsieur Chauvenet, being worn from his travels, was dining alone in his rooms.

At about eight o’clock, as Armitage turned the pages of Figaro in the smoking-room, Chauvenet appeared at the door, scrutinized the group within, and passed on. Armitage had carried his coat, hat and stick into the smoking-room, to be ready for possible emergencies; and when Chauvenet stepped out into the street he followed.

It was unusually cold for the season, and a fine drizzle filled the air. Chauvenet struck off at once away from the lake, turned into the Boulevard Helvétique, thence into the Boulevard Froissart with its colony of pensions. He walked rapidly until he reached a house that was distinguished from its immediate neighbors only by its unlighted upper windows. He pulled the bell in the wall, and the door was at once opened and instantly closed.

Armitage, following at twenty yards on the opposite side of the street, paused abruptly at the sudden ending of his chase. It was not an hour for loitering, for the Genevan gendarmerie have rather good eyes, but Armitage had by no means satisfied his curiosity as to the nature of Chauvenet’s errand. He walked on to make sure he was unobserved, crossed the street, and again passed the dark, silent house which Chauvenet had entered. He noted the place carefully; it gave no outward appearance of being occupied. He assumed, from the general plan of the neighboring buildings, that there was a courtyard at the rear of the darkened house, accessible through a narrow passageway at the side. As he studied the situation he kept moving to avoid observation, and presently, at a moment when he was quite alone in the street, walked rapidly to the house Chauvenet had entered.

Gentlemen in search of adventures do well to avoid the continental wall. Mr. Armitage brushed the glass from the top with his hat. It jingled softly within under cover of the rain-drip. The plaster had crumbled from the bricks in spots, giving a foot its opportunity, and Mr. Armitage drew himself to the top and dropped within. The front door and windows stared at him blankly, and he committed his fortunes to the bricked passageway. The rain was now coming down in earnest, and at the rear of the house water had begun to drip noisily into an iron spout. The electric lights from neighboring streets made a kind of twilight even in the darkened court, and Armitage threaded his way among a network of clothes-lines to the rear wall and viewed the premises. He knew his Geneva from many previous visits; the quarter was undeniably respectable; and there is, to be sure, no reason why the blinds of a house should not be carefully drawn at nightfall at the pleasure of the occupants. The whole lower floor seemed utterly deserted; only at one point on the third floor was there any sign of light, and this the merest hint.

The increasing fall of rain did not encourage loitering in the wet courtyard, where the downspout now rattled dolorously, and Armitage crossed the court and further assured himself that the lower floor was dark and silent. Balconies were bracketed against the wall at the second and third stories, and the slight iron ladder leading thither terminated a foot above his head. John Armitage was fully aware that his position, if discovered, was, to say the least, untenable; but he was secure from observation by police, and he assumed that the occupants of the house were probably too deeply engrossed with their affairs to waste much time on what might happen without. Armitage sprang up and caught the lowest round of the ladder, and in a moment his tall figure was a dark blur against the wall as he crept warily upward. The rear rooms of the second story were as dark and quiet as those below. Armitage continued to the third story, where a door, as well as several windows, gave upon the balcony; and he found that it was from a broken corner of the door shade that a sharp blade of light cut the dark. All continued quiet below; he heard the traffic of the neighboring thoroughfares quite distinctly; and from a kitchen near by came the rough clatter of dishwashing to the accompaniment of a quarrel in German between the maids. For the moment he felt secure, and bent down close to the door and listened.

Two men were talking, and evidently the matter under discussion was of importance, for they spoke with a kind of dogged deliberation, and the long pauses in the dialogue lent color to the belief that some weighty matter was in debate. The beat of the rain on the balcony and its steady rattle in the spout intervened to dull the sound of voices, but presently one of the speakers, with an impatient exclamation, rose, opened the small glass-paned door a few inches, peered out, and returned to his seat with an exclamation of relief. Armitage had dropped down the ladder half a dozen rounds as he heard the latch snap in the door. He waited an instant to make sure he had not been seen, then crept back to the balcony and found that the slight opening in the door made it possible for him to see as well as hear.

“It’s stifling in this hole,” said Chauvenet, drawing deeply upon his cigarette and blowing a cloud of smoke. “If you will pardon the informality, I will lay aside my coat.”

He carefully hung the garment upon the back of his chair to hold its shape, then resumed his seat. His companion watched him meanwhile with a certain intentness.

“You take excellent care of your clothes, my dear Jules. I never have been able to fold a coat without ruining it.”

The rain was soaking Armitage thoroughly, but its persistent beat covered any slight noises made by his own movements, and he was now intent upon the little room and its occupants. He observed the care with which the man kept close to his coat, and he pondered the matter as he hung upon the balcony. If Chauvenet was on his way to America it was possible that he would carry with him the important paper whose loss had caused so much anxiety to the Austrian minister; if so, where was it during his stay in Geneva?

“The old man’s death is only the first step. We require a succession of deaths.”

“We require three, to be explicit, not more or less. We should be fortunate if the remaining two could be accomplished as easily as Stroebel’s.”

“He was a beast. He is well dead.”

“That depends on the way you look at it. They seem really to be mourning the old beggar at Vienna. It is the way of a people. They like to be ruled by a savage hand. The people, as you have heard me say before, are fools.”

The last speaker was a young man whom Armitage had never seen before; he was a decided blond, with close-trimmed straw-colored beard and slightly-curling hair. Opposite him, and facing the door, sat Chauvenet. On the table between them were decanters and liqueur glasses.

“I am going to America at once,” said Chauvenet, holding his filled glass toward a brass lamp of an old type that hung from the ceiling.

“It is probably just as well,” said the other. “There’s work to do there. We must not forget our more legitimate business in the midst of these pleasant side issues.”

“The field is easy. After our delightful continental capitals, where, as you know, one is never quite sure of one’s self, it is pleasant to breathe the democratic airs of Washington,” remarked Chauvenet.

“Particularly so, my dear friend, when one is blessed with your delightful social gifts. I envy you your capacity for making others happy.”

There was a keen irony in the fellow’s tongue and the edge of it evidently touched Chauvenet, who scowled and bent forward with his fingers on the table.

“Enough of that, if you please.”

“As you will, carino; but you will pardon me for offering my condolences on the regrettable departure of la belle Americaine. If you had not been so intent on matters of state you would undoubtedly have found her here. As it is, you are now obliged to see her on her native soil. A month in Washington may do much for you. She is beautiful and reasonably rich. Her brother, the tall captain, is said to be the best horseman in the American army.”

“Humph! He is an ass,” ejaculated Chauvenet.

A servant now appeared bearing a fresh bottle of cordial. He was distinguished by a small head upon a tall and powerful body, and bore little resemblance to a house servant. While he brushed the cigar ashes from the table the men continued their talk without heeding him.

Chauvenet and his friend had spoken from the first in French, but in addressing some directions to the servant, the blond, who assumed the rôle of host, employed a Servian dialect.

“I think we were saying that the mortality list in certain directions will have to be stimulated a trifle before we can do our young friend Francis any good. You have business in America, carino. That paper we filched from old Stroebel strengthens our hold on Francis; but there is still that question as to Karl and Frederick Augustus. Our dear Francis is not satisfied. He wishes to be quite sure that his dear father and brother are dead. We must reassure him, dearest Jules.”

“Don’t be a fool, Durand. You never seem to understand that the United States of America is a trifle larger than a barnyard. And I don’t believe those fellows are over there. They’re probably lying in wait here somewhere, ready to take advantage of any opportunity,—that is, if they are alive. A man can hardly fail to be impressed with the fact that so few lives stand between him and—”

“The heights—the heights!” And the young man, whom Chauvenet called Durand, lifted his tiny glass airily.

“Yes; the heights,” repeated Chauvenet a little dreamily.

“But that declaration—that document! You have never honored me with a glimpse; but you have it put safely away, I dare say.”

“There is no place—but one—that I dare risk. It is always within easy reach, my dear friend.”

“You will do well to destroy that document. It is better out of the way.”

“Your deficiencies in the matter of wisdom are unfortunate. That paper constitutes our chief asset, my dear associate. So long as we have it we are able to keep dear Francis in order. Therefore we shall hold fast to it, remembering that we risked much in removing it from the lamented Stroebel’s archives.”

“Do you say ‘risked much’? My valued neck, that is all!” said the other. “You and Winkelried are without gratitude.”

“You will do well,” said Chauvenet, “to keep an eye open in Vienna for the unknown. If you hear murmurs in Hungary one of these fine days—! Nothing has happened for some time; therefore much may happen.”

He glanced at his watch.

“I have work in Paris before sailing for New York. Shall we discuss the matter of those Peruvian claims? That is business. These other affairs are more in the nature of delightful diversions, my dear comrade.”

They drew nearer the table and Durand produced a box of papers over which he bent with serious attention. Armitage had heard practically all of their dialogue, and, what was of equal interest, had been able to study the faces and learn the tones of voice of the two conspirators. He was cramped from his position on the narrow balcony and wet and chilled by the rain, which was now slowly abating. He had learned much that he wished to know, and with an ease that astonished him; and he was well content to withdraw with gratitude for his good fortune.

His legs were numb and he clung close to the railing of the little ladder for support as he crept toward the area. At the second story his foot slipped on the wet iron, smooth from long use, and he stumbled down several steps before he recovered himself. He listened a moment, heard nothing but the tinkle of the rain in the spout, then continued his retreat.

As he stepped out upon the brick courtyard he was seized from behind by a pair of strong arms that clasped him tight. In a moment he was thrown across the threshold of a door into an unlighted room, where his captor promptly sat upon him and proceeded to strike a light.

CHAPTER V

A LOST CIGARETTE CASE

To other woods the trail leads on,
To other worlds and new,
Where they who keep the secret here Will keep the promise too.

—Henry A. Beers.

The man clenched Armitage about the body with his legs while he struck a match on a box he produced from his pocket. The suddenness with which he had been flung into the kitchen had knocked the breath out of Armitage, and the huge thighs of his captor pinned his arms tight. The match spurted fire and he looked into the face of the servant whom he had seen in the room above. His round head was covered with short, wire-like hair that grew low upon his narrow forehead. Armitage noted, too, the man’s bull-like neck, small sharp eyes and bristling mustache. The fitful flash of the match disclosed the rough furniture of a kitchen; the brick flooring and his wet inverness lay cold at Armitage’s back.

The fellow growled an execration in Servian; then with ponderous difficulty asked a question in German.

“Who are you and what do you want here?”

Armitage shook his head; and replied in English:

“I do not understand.”

The man struck a series of matches that he might scrutinize his captive’s face, then ran his hands over Armitage’s pockets to make sure he had no arms. The big fellow was clearly puzzled to find that he had caught a gentleman in water-soaked evening clothes lurking in the area, and as the matter was beyond his wits it only remained for him to communicate with his master. This, however, was not so readily accomplished. He had reasons of his own for not calling out, and there were difficulties in the way of holding the prisoner and at the same time bringing down the men who had gone to the most distant room in the house for their own security.

Several minutes passed during which the burly Servian struck his matches and took account of his prisoner; and meanwhile Armitage lay perfectly still, his arms fast numbing from the rough clasp of the stalwart servant’s legs. There was nothing to be gained by a struggle in this position, and he knew that the Servian would not risk losing him in the effort to summon the odd pair who were bent over their papers at the top of the house. The Servian was evidently a man of action.

“Get up,” he commanded, still in rough German, and he rose in the dark and jerked Armitage after him. There was a moment of silence in which Armitage shook and stretched himself, and then the Servian struck another match and held it close to a revolver which he held pointed at Armitage’s head.

“I will shoot,” he said again in his halting German.

“Undoubtedly you will!” and something in the fellow’s manner caused Armitage to laugh. He had been caught and he did not at once see any safe issue out of his predicament; but his plight had its preposterous side and the ease with which he had been taken at the very outset of his quest touched his humor. Then he sobered instantly and concentrated his wits upon the immediate situation.

The Servian backed away with a match upheld in one hand and the leveled revolver in the other, leaving Armitage in the middle of the kitchen.

“I am going to light a lamp and if you move I will kill you,” admonished the fellow, and Armitage heard his feet scraping over the brick floor of the kitchen as he backed toward a table that stood against the wall near the outer door.

Armitage stood perfectly still. The neighborhood and the house itself were quiet; the two men in the third-story room were probably engrossed with the business at which Armitage had left them; and his immediate affair was with the Servian alone. The fellow continued to mumble his threats; but Armitage had resolved to play the part of an Englishman who understood no German, and he addressed the man sharply in English several times to signify that he did not understand.

The Servian half turned toward his prisoner, the revolver in his left hand, while with the fingers of his right he felt laboriously for a lamp that had been revealed by the fitful flashes of the matches. It is not an easy matter to light a lamp when you have only one hand to work with, particularly when you are obliged to keep an eye on a mysterious prisoner of whose character you are ignorant; and it was several minutes before the job was done.

“You will go to that corner;” and the Servian translated for his prisoner’s benefit with a gesture of the revolver.

“Anything to please you, worthy fellow,” replied Armitage, and he obeyed with amiable alacrity. The man’s object was to get him as far from the inner door as possible while he called help from above, which was, of course, the wise thing from his point of view, as Armitage recognized.

Armitage stood with his back against a rack of pots; the table was at his left and beyond it the door opening upon the court; a barred window was at his right; opposite him was another door that communicated with the interior of the house and disclosed the lower steps of a rude stairway leading upward. The Servian now closed and locked the outer kitchen door with care.

Armitage had lost his hat in the area; his light walking-stick lay in the middle of the floor; his inverness coat hung wet and bedraggled about him; his shirt was crumpled and soiled. But his air of good humor and his tame acceptance of capture seemed to increase the Servian’s caution, and he backed away toward the inner door with his revolver still pointed at Armitage’s head.

He began calling lustily up the narrow stair-well in Servian, changing in a moment to German. He made a ludicrous figure, as he held his revolver at arm’s length, craning his neck into the passage, and howling until he was red in the face. He paused to listen, then renewed his cries, while Armitage, with his back against the rack of pots, studied the room and made his plans.

“There is a thief here! I have caught a thief!” yelled the Servian, now exasperated by the silence above. Then, as he relaxed a moment and turned to make sure that his revolver still covered Armitage, there was a sudden sound of steps above and a voice bawled angrily down the stairway:

“Zmai, stop your noise and tell me what’s the trouble.”

It was the voice of Durand speaking in the Servian dialect; and Zmai opened his mouth to explain.

As the big fellow roared his reply Armitage snatched from the rack a heavy iron boiling-pot, swung it high by the bail with both hands and let it fly with all his might at the Servian’s head, upturned in the earnestness of his bawling. On the instant the revolver roared loudly in the narrow kitchen and Armitage seized the brass lamp and flung it from him upon the hearth, where it fell with a great clatter without exploding.

It was instantly pitch dark. The Servian had gone down like a felled ox and Armitage at the threshold leaped over him into the hall past the rear stairs down which the men were stumbling, cursing volubly as they came.

Armitage had assumed the existence of a front stairway, and now that he was launched upon an unexpected adventure, he was in a humor to prolong it for a moment, even at further risk. He crept along a dark passage to the front door, found and turned the key to provide himself with a ready exit, then, as he heard the men from above stumble over the prostrate Servian, he bounded up the front stairway, gained the second floor, then the third, and readily found by its light the room that he had observed earlier from the outside.

Below there was smothered confusion and the crackling of matches as Durand and Chauvenet sought to grasp the unexpected situation that confronted them. The big servant, Armitage knew, would hardly be able to clear matters for them at once, and he hurriedly turned over the packets of papers that lay on the table. They were claims of one kind and another against several South and Central American republics, chiefly for naval and military supplies, and he merely noted their general character. They were, on the face of it, certified accounts in the usual manner of business. On the back of each had been printed with a rubber stamp the words:

“Vienna, Paris, Washington. Chauvenet et Durand.”

Armitage snatched up the coat which Chauvenet had so carefully placed on the back of his chair, ran his hands through the pockets, found them empty, then gathered the garment tightly in his hands, laughed a little to himself to feel papers sewn into the lining, and laughed again as he tore the lining loose and drew forth a flat linen envelope brilliant with three seals of red wax.

Steps sounded below; a man was running up the back stairs; and from the kitchen rose sounds of mighty groanings and cursings in the heavy gutturals of the Servian, as he regained his wits and sought to explain his plight.

Armitage picked up a chair, ran noiselessly to the head of the back stairs, and looked down upon Chauvenet, who was hurrying up with a flaming candle held high above his head, its light showing anxiety and fear upon his face. He was half-way up the last flight, and Armitage stood in the dark, watching him with a mixture of curiosity and something, too, of humor. Then he spoke—in French—in a tone that imitated the cool irony he had noted in Durand’s tone:

“A few murders more or less! But Von Stroebel was hardly a fair mark, dearest Jules!”

With this he sent the chair clattering down the steps, where it struck Jules Chauvenet’s legs with a force that carried him howling lustily backward to the second landing.

Armitage turned and sped down the front stairway, hearing renewed clamor from the rear and cries of rage and pain from the second story. In fumbling for the front door he found a hat, and, having lost his own, placed it upon his head, drew his inverness about his shoulders, and went quickly out. A moment later he slipped the catch in the wall door and stepped into the boulevard.

The stars were shining among the flying clouds overhead and he drew deep breaths of the freshened air into his lungs as he walked back to the Monte Rosa. Occasionally he laughed quietly to himself, for he still grasped tightly in his hand, safe under his coat, the envelope which Chauvenet had carried so carefully concealed; and several times Armitage muttered to himself:

“A few murders, more or less!”

At the hotel he changed his clothes, threw the things from his dressing-table into a bag, and announced his departure for Paris by the night express.

As he drove to the railway station he felt for his cigarette case, and discovered that it was missing. The loss evidently gave him great concern, for he searched and researched his pockets and opened his bags at the station to see if he had by any chance overlooked it, but it was not to be found.

His annoyance at the loss was balanced—could he have known it—by the interest with which, almost before the wall door had closed upon him, two gentlemen—one of them still in his shirt sleeves and with a purple lump over his forehead—bent over a gold cigarette case in the dark house on the Boulevard Froissart. It was a pretty trinket, and contained, when found on the kitchen floor, exactly four cigarettes of excellent Turkish tobacco. On one side of it was etched, in shadings of blue and white enamel, a helmet, surmounted by a falcon, poised for flight, and, beneath, the motto Fide non armis. The back bore in English script, written large, the letters F.A.

The men stared at each other wonderingly for an instant, then both leaped to their feet.

“It isn’t possible!” gasped Durand.

“It is quite possible,” replied Chauvenet. “The emblem is unmistakable. Good God, look!”

The sweat had broken out on Chauvenet’s face and he leaped to the chair where his coat hung, and caught up the garment with shaking hands. The silk lining fluttered loose where Armitage had roughly torn out the envelope.

“Who is he? Who is he?” whispered Durand, very white of face.

“It may be—it must be some one deeply concerned.”

Chauvenet paused, drawing his hand across his forehead slowly; then the color leaped back into his face, and he caught Durand’s arm so tight that the man flinched.

“There has been a man following me about; I thought he was interested in the Claibornes. He’s here—I saw him at the Monte Rosa to-night. God!”

He dropped his hand from Durand’s arm and struck the table fiercely with his clenched hand.

“John Armitage—John Armitage! I heard his name in Florence.”

His eyes were snapping with excitement, and amazement grew in his face.

“Who is John Armitage?” demanded Durand sharply; but Chauvenet stared at him in stupefaction for a tense moment, then muttered to himself:

“Is it possible? Is it possible?” and his voice was hoarse and his hand trembled as he picked up the cigarette case.

“My dear Jules, you act as though you had seen a ghost. Who the devil is Armitage?”

Chauvenet glanced about the room cautiously, then bent forward and whispered very low, close to Durand’s ear:

“Suppose he were the son of the crazy Karl! Suppose he were Frederick Augustus!”

“Bah! It is impossible! What is your man Armitage like?” asked Durand irritably.

“He is the right age. He is a big fellow and has quite an air. He seems to be without occupation.”

“Clearly so,” remarked Durand ironically. “But he has evidently been watching us. Quite possibly the lamented Stroebel employed him. He may have seen Stroebel here—”

Chauvenet again struck the table smartly.

“Of course he would see Stroebel! Stroebel was the Archduke’s friend; Stroebel and this fellow between them—”

“Stroebel is dead. The Archduke is dead; there can be no manner of doubt of that,” said Durand; but doubt was in his tone and in his eyes.

“Nothing is certain; it would be like Karl to turn up again with a son to back his claims. They may both be living. This Armitage is not the ordinary pig of a secret agent. We must find him.”

“And quickly. There must be—”

“—another death added to our little list before we are quite masters of the situation in Vienna.”

They gave Zmai orders to remain on guard at the house and went hurriedly out together.

CHAPTER VI

TOWARD THE WESTERN STARS

Her blue eyes sought the west afar, For lovers love the western star.

—Lay of the Last Minstrel.

Geneva is a good point from which to plan flight to any part of the world, for there at the top of Europe the whole continental railway system is easily within your grasp, and you may make your choice of sailing ports. It is, to be sure, rather out of your way to seek a ship at Liverpool unless you expect to gain some particular advantage in doing so. Mr. John Armitage hurried thither in the most breathless haste to catch the King Edward, whereas he might have taken the Touraine at Cherbourg and saved himself a mad scamper; but his satisfaction in finding himself aboard the King Edward was supreme. He was and is, it may be said, a man who salutes the passing days right amiably, no matter how somber their colors.

Shirley Claiborne and Captain Richard Claiborne, her brother, were on deck watching the shipping in the Mersey as the big steamer swung into the channel.

“I hope,” observed Dick, “that we have shaken off all your transatlantic suitors. That little Chauvenet died easier than I had expected. He never turned up after we left Florence, but I’m not wholly sure that we shan’t find him at the dock in New York. And that mysterious Armitage, who spent so much railway fare following us about, and who almost bought you a watch in Geneva, really disappoints me. His persistence had actually compelled my admiration. For a glass-blower he was fairly decent, though, and better than a lot of these little toy men with imitation titles.”

“Is that an American cruiser? I really believe it is the Tecumseh. What on earth were you talking about, Dick?”

Shirley fluttered her handkerchief in the direction of the American flag displayed by the cruiser, and Dick lifted his cap.

“I was bidding farewell to your foreign suitors, Shirley, and congratulating myself that as soon as père et mère get their sea legs they will resume charge of you, and let me look up two or three very presentable specimens of your sex I saw come on board. Your affairs have annoyed me greatly and I shall be glad to be free of the responsibility.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

“And if there are any titled blackguards on board—”

“You will do dreadfully wicked things to them, won’t you, little brother?”

“Humph! Thank God, I’m an American!”

“That’s a worthy sentiment, Richard.”

“I’d like to give out, as our newspapers say, a signed statement throwing a challenge to all Europe. I wish we’d get into a real war once so we could knock the conceit out of one of their so-called first-class powers. I’d like to lead a regiment right through the most sacred precincts of London; or take an early morning gallop through Berlin to wake up the Dutch. All this talk about hands across the sea and such rot makes me sick. The English are the most benighted and the most conceited and condescending race on earth; the Germans and Austrians are stale beer-vats, and the Italians and French are mere decadents and don’t count.”

“Yes, dearest,” mocked Shirley. “Oh, my large brother, I have a confession to make. Please don’t indulge in great oaths or stamp a hole in this sturdy deck, but there are flowers in my state-room—”

“Probably from the Liverpool consul—he’s been pestering father to help him get a transfer to a less gloomy hole.”

“Then I shall intercede myself with the President when I get home. They’re orchids—from London—but—with Mr. Armitage’s card. Wouldn’t that excite you?”

“It makes me sick!” and Dick hung heavily on the rail and glared at a passing tug.

“They are beautiful orchids. I don’t remember when orchids have happened to me before, Richard—in such quantities. Now, you really didn’t disapprove of him so much, did you? This is probably good-by forever, but he wasn’t so bad; and he may be an American, after all.”

“A common adventurer! Such fellows are always turning up, like bad pennies, or a one-eyed dog. If I should see him again—”

“Yes, Richard, if you should meet again—”

“I’d ask him to be good enough to stop following us about, and if he persisted I should muss him up.”

“Yes; I’m sure you would protect me from his importunities at any hazard,” mocked Shirley, turning and leaning against the rail so that she looked along the deck beyond her brother’s stalwart shoulders.

“Don’t be silly,” observed Dick, whose eyes were upon a trim yacht that was steaming slowly beneath them.

“I shan’t, but please don’t be violent! Do not murder the poor man, Dickie, dear,”—and she took hold of his arm entreatingly—“for there he is—as tall and mysterious as ever—and me found guilty with a few of his orchids pinned to my jacket!”

“This is good fortune, indeed,” said Armitage a moment later when they had shaken hands. “I finished my errand at Geneva unexpectedly and here I am.”

He smiled at the feebleness of his explanation, and joined in their passing comment on the life of the harbor. He was not so dull but that he felt Dick Claiborne’s resentment of his presence on board. He knew perfectly well that his acquaintance with the Claibornes was too slight to be severely strained, particularly where a fellow of Dick Claiborne’s high spirit was concerned. He talked with them a few minutes longer, then took himself off; and they saw little of him the rest of the day.

Armitage did not share their distinction of a seat at the captain’s table, and Dick found him late at night in the smoking-saloon with pipe and book. Armitage nodded and asked him to sit down.

“You are a sailor as well as a soldier, Captain. You are fortunate; I always sit up the first night to make sure the enemy doesn’t lay hold of me in my sleep.”

He tossed his book aside, had brandy and soda brought and offered Claiborne a cigar.

“This is not the most fortunate season for crossing; I am sure to fall to-morrow. My father and mother hate the sea particularly and have retired for three days. My sister is the only one of us who is perfectly immune.”

“Yes; I can well image Miss Claiborne in the good graces of the elements,” replied Armitage; and they were silent for several minutes while a big Russian, who was talking politics in a distant corner with a very small and solemn German, boomed out his views on the Eastern question in a tremendous bass.

Dick Claiborne was a good deal amused at finding himself sitting beside Armitage,—enjoying, indeed, his fellow traveler’s hospitality; but Armitage, he was forced to admit, bore all the marks of a gentleman. He had, to be sure, followed Shirley about, but even the young man’s manner in this was hardly a matter at which he could cavil. And there was something altogether likable in Armitage; his very composure was attractive to Claiborne; and the bold lines of his figure were not wasted on the young officer. In the silence, while they smoked, he noted the perfect taste that marked Armitage’s belongings, which to him meant more, perhaps, than the steadiness of the man’s eyes or the fine lines of his face. Unconsciously Claiborne found himself watching Armitage’s strong ringless hands, and he knew that such a hand, well kept though it appeared, had known hard work, and that the long supple fingers were such as might guide a tiller fearlessly or set a flag daringly upon a fire-swept parapet.

Armitage was thinking rapidly of something he had suddenly resolved to say to Captain Claiborne. He knew that the Claibornes were a family of distinction; the father was an American diplomat and lawyer of wide reputation; the family stood for the best of which America is capable, and they were homeward bound to the American capital where their social position and the father’s fame made them conspicuous.

Armitage put down his cigar and bent toward Claiborne, speaking with quiet directness.

“Captain Claiborne, I was introduced to you at Geneva by Mr. Singleton. You may have observed me several times previously at Venice, Borne, Florence, Paris, Berlin. I certainly saw you! I shall not deny that I intentionally followed you, nor”—John Armitage smiled, then grew grave again—“can I make any adequate apology for doing so.”

Claiborne looked at Armitage wonderingly. The man’s attitude and tone were wholly serious and compelled respect. Claiborne nodded and threw away his cigar that he might give his whole attention to what Armitage might have to say.

“A man does not like to have his sister forming the acquaintances of persons who are not properly vouched for. Except for Singleton you know nothing of me; and Singleton knows very little of me, indeed.”

Claiborne nodded. He felt the color creeping into his cheeks consciously as Armitage touched upon this matter.

“I speak to you as I do because it is your right to know who and what I am, for I am not on the King Edward by accident but by intention, and I am going to Washington because your sister lives there.”

Claiborne smiled in spite of himself.

“But, my dear sir, this is most extraordinary! I don’t know that I care to hear any more; by listening I seem to be encouraging you to follow us—it’s altogether too unusual. It’s almost preposterous!”

And Dick Claiborne frowned severely; but Armitage still met his eyes gravely.

“It’s only decent for a man to give his references when it’s natural for them to be required. I was educated at Trinity College, Toronto. I spent a year at the Harvard Law School. And I am not a beggar utterly. I own a ranch in Montana that actually pays and a thousand acres of the best wheat land in Nebraska. At the Bronx Loan and Trust Company in New York I have securities to a considerable amount,—I am perfectly willing that any one who is at all interested should inquire of the Trust Company officers as to my standing with them. If I were asked to state my occupation I should have to say that I am a cattle herder—what you call a cowboy. I can make my living in the practice of the business almost anywhere from New Mexico north to the Canadian line. I flatter myself that I am pretty good at it,” and John Armitage smiled and took a cigarette from a box on the table and lighted it.

Dick Claiborne was greatly interested in what Armitage had said, and he struggled between an inclination to encourage further confidence and a feeling that he should, for Shirley’s sake, make it clear to this young-stranger that it was of no consequence to any member of the Claiborne family who he was or what might be the extent of his lands or the unimpeachable character of his investments. But it was not so easy to turn aside a fellow who was so big of frame and apparently so sane and so steady of purpose as this Armitage. And there was, too, the further consideration that while Armitage was volunteering gratuitous information, and assuming an interest in his affairs by the Claibornes that was wholly unjustified, there was also the other side of the matter: that his explanations proceeded from motives of delicacy that were praiseworthy. Dick was puzzled, and piqued besides, to find that his resources as a big protecting brother were so soon exhausted. What Armitage was asking was the right to seek his sister Shirley’s hand in marriage, and the thing was absurd. Moreover, who was John Armitage?

The question startled Claiborne into a realization of the fact that Armitage had volunteered considerable information without at all answering this question. Dick Claiborne was a human being, and curious.

“Pardon me,” he asked, “but are you an Englishman?”

“I am not,” answered Armitage. “I have been so long in America that I feel as much at home there as anywhere—but I am neither English nor American by birth; I am, on the other hand—”

He hesitated for the barest second, and Claiborne was sensible of an intensification of interest; now at last there was to be a revelation that amounted to something.

“On the other hand,” Armitage repeated, “I was born at Fontainebleau, where my parents lived for only a few months; but I do not consider that that fact makes me a Frenchman. My mother is dead. My father died—very recently. I have been in America enough to know that a foreigner is often under suspicion—particularly if he have a title! My distinction is that I am a foreigner without one!” John Armitage laughed.

“It is, indeed, a real merit,” declared Dick, who felt that something was expected of him. In spite of himself, he found much to like in John Armitage. He particularly despised sham and pretense, and he had been won by the evident sincerity of Armitage’s wish to appear well in his eyes.

“And now,” said Armitage, “I assure you that I am not in the habit of talking so much about myself—and if you will overlook this offense I promise not to bore you again.”

“I have been interested,” remarked Dick; “and,” he added, “I can not do less than thank you, Mr. Armitage.”

Armitage began talking of the American army—its strength and weaknesses—with an intimate knowledge that greatly surprised and interested the young officer; and when they separated presently it was with a curious mixture of liking and mystification that Claiborne reviewed their talk.

The next day brought heavy weather, and only hardened sea-goers were abroad. Armitage, breakfasting late, was not satisfied that he had acted wisely in speaking to Captain Claiborne; but he had, at any rate, eased in some degree his own conscience, and he had every intention of seeing all that he could of Shirley Claiborne during these days of their fellow-voyaging.

CHAPTER VII

ON THE DARK DECK

Ease, of all good gifts the best,
War and wave at last decree:
Love alone denies us rest, Crueler than sword or sea.

William Watson.

“I am Columbus every time I cross,” said Shirley. “What lies out there in the west is an undiscovered country.”

“Then I shall have to take the part of the rebellious and doubting crew. There is no America, and we’re sure to get into trouble if we don’t turn back.”

“You shall be clapped into irons and fed on bread and water, and turned over to the Indians as soon as we reach land.”

“Don’t starve me! Let me hang from the yard-arm at once, or walk the plank. I choose the hour immediately after dinner for my obsequies!”

“Choose a cheerfuller word!” pleaded Shirley.

“I am sorry to suggest mortality, but I was trying to let my imagination play a little on the eternal novelty of travel, and you have dropped me down ‘full faddom five.’”

“I’m sorry, but I have only revealed an honest tendency of character. Piracy is probably a more profitable line of business than discovery. Discoverers benefit mankind at great sacrifice and expense, and die before they can receive the royal thanks. A pirate’s business is all done over the counter on a strictly cash basis.”

They were silent for a moment, continuing their tramp. Pair weather was peopling the decks. Dick Claiborne was engrossed with a vivacious California girl, and Shirley saw him only at meals; but he and Armitage held night sessions in the smoking-room, with increased liking on both sides.

“Armitage isn’t a bad sort,” Dick admitted to Shirley. “He’s either an awful liar, or he’s seen a lot of the world.”

“Of course, he has to travel to sell his glassware,” observed Shirley. “I’m surprised at your seeming intimacy with a mere ‘peddler,’—and you an officer in the finest cavalry in the world.”

“Well, if he’s a peddler he’s a high-class one—probably the junior member of the firm that owns the works.”

Armitage saw something of all the Claibornes every day in the pleasant intimacy of ship life, and Hilton Claiborne found the young man an interesting talker. Judge Claiborne is, as every one knows, the best-posted American of his time in diplomatic history; and when they were together Armitage suggested topics that were well calculated to awaken the old lawyer’s interest.

“The glass-blower’s a deep one, all right,” remarked Dick to Shirley. “He jollies me occasionally, just to show there’s no hard feeling; then he jollies the governor; and when I saw our mother footing it on his arm this afternoon I almost fell in a faint. I wish you’d hold on to him tight till we’re docked. My little friend from California is crazy about him—and I haven’t dared tell her he’s only a drummer; such a fling would be unchivalrous of me—”

“It would, Richard. Be a generous foe—whether—whether you can afford to be or not!”

“My sister—my own sister says this to me! This is quite the unkindest. I’m going to offer myself to the daughter of the redwoods at once.”

Shirley and Armitage talked—as people will on ship-board—of everything under the sun. Shirley’s enthusiasms were in themselves interesting; but she was informed in the world’s larger affairs, as became the daughter of a man who was an authority in such matters, and found it pleasant to discuss them with Armitage. He felt the poetic quality in her; it was that which had first appealed to him; but he did not know that something of the same sort in himself touched her; it was enough for those days that he was courteous and amusing, and gained a trifle in her eyes from the fact that he had no tangible background.

Then came the evening of the fifth day. They were taking a turn after dinner on the lighted deck. The spring stars hung faint and far through thin clouds and the wind was keen from the sea. A few passengers were out; the deck stewards went about gathering up rugs and chairs for the night.

“Time oughtn’t to be reckoned at all at sea, so that people who feel themselves getting old might sail forth into the deep and defy the old man with the hour-glass.”

“I like the idea. Such people could become fishers—permanently, and grow very wise from so much brain food.”

“They wouldn’t eat, Mr. Armitage. Brain-food forsooth! You talk like a breakfast-food advertisement. My idea—mine, please note—is for such fortunate people to sail in pretty little boats with orange-tinted sails and pick up lost dreams. I got a hint of that in a pretty poem once—

“‘Time seemed to pause a little pace, I heard a dream go by.’”

“But out here in mid-ocean a little boat with lateen sails wouldn’t have much show. And dreams passing over—the idea is pretty, and is creditable to your imagination. But I thought your fancy was more militant. Now, for example, you like battle pictures—” he said, and paused inquiringly.

She looked at him quickly.

“How do you know I do?”

“You like Detaille particularly.”

“Am I to defend my taste?—what’s the answer, if you don’t mind?”

“Detaille is much to my liking, also; but I prefer Flameng, as a strictly personal matter. That was a wonderful collection of military and battle pictures shown in Paris last winter.”

She half withdrew her hand from his arm, and turned away. The sea winds did not wholly account for the sudden color in her cheeks. She had seen Armitage in Paris—in cafés, at the opera, but not at the great exhibition of world-famous battle pictures; yet undoubtedly he had seen her; and she remembered with instant consciousness the hours of absorption she had spent before those canvases.

“It was a public exhibition, I believe; there was no great harm in seeing it.”

“No; there certainly was not!” He laughed, then was serious at once. Shirley’s tense, arrested figure, her bright, eager eyes, her parted lips, as he saw her before the battle pictures in the gallery at Paris, came up before him and gave him pause. He could not play upon that stolen glance or tease her curiosity in respect to it. If this were a ship flirtation, it might be well enough; but the very sweetness and open-heartedness of her youth shielded her. It seemed to him in that moment a contemptible and unpardonable thing that he had followed her about—and caught her, there at Paris, in an exalted mood, to which she had been wrought by the moving incidents of war.

“I was in Paris during the exhibition,” he said quietly. “Ormsby, the American painter—the man who did the High Tide at Gettysburg—is an acquaintance of mine.”

“Oh!”

It was Ormsby’s painting that had particularly captivated Shirley. She had returned to it day after day; and the thought that Armitage had taken advantage of her deep interest in Pickett’s charging gray line was annoying, and she abruptly changed the subject.

Shirley had speculated much as to the meaning of Armitage’s remark at the carriage door in Geneva—that he expected the slayer of the old Austrian prime minister to pass that way. Armitage had not referred to the crime in any way in his talks with her on the King Edward; their conversations had been pitched usually in a light and frivolous key, or if one were disposed to be serious the other responded in a note of levity.

“We’re all imperialists at heart,” said Shirley, referring to a talk between them earlier in the day. “We Americans are hungry for empire; we’re simply waiting for the man on horseback to gallop down Broadway and up Fifth Avenue with a troop of cavalry at his heels and proclaim the new dispensation.”

“And before he’d gone a block a big Irish policeman would arrest him for disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace, or for giving a show without a license, and the republic would continue to do business at the old stand.”

“No; the police would have been bribed in advance, and would deliver the keys of the city to the new emperor at the door of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and his majesty would go to Sherry’s for luncheon, and sign a few decrees, and order the guillotine set up in Union Square. Do you follow me, Mr. Armitage?”

“Yes; to the very steps of the guillotine, Miss Claiborne. But the looting of the temples and the plundering of banks—if the thing is bound to be—I should like to share in the general joy. But I have an idea, Miss Claiborne,” he exclaimed, as though with inspiration.

“Yes—you have an idea—”

“Let me be the man on horseback; and you might be—”

“Yes—the suspense is terrible!—what might I be, your Majesty?”

“Well, we should call you—”

He hesitated, and she wondered whether he would be bold enough to meet the issue offered by this turn of their nonsense.

“I seem to give your Majesty difficulty; the silence isn’t flattering,” she said mockingly; but she was conscious of a certain excitement as she walked the deck beside him.

“Oh, pardon me! The difficulty is only as to title—you would, of course, occupy the dais; but whether you should be queen or empress—that’s the rub! If America is to be an empire, then of course you would be an empress. So there you are answered.”

They passed laughingly on to the other phases of the matter in the whimsical vein that was natural in her, and to which he responded. They watched the lights of an east-bound steamer that was passing near. The exchange of rocket signals—that pretty and graceful parley between ships that pass in the night—interested them for a moment. Then the deck lights went out so suddenly it seemed that a dark curtain had descended and shut them in with the sea.

“Accident to the dynamo—we shall have the lights on in a moment!” shouted the deck officer, who stood near, talking to a passenger.

“Shall we go in?” asked Armitage.

“Yes, it is getting cold,” replied Shirley.

For a moment they were quite alone on the dark deck, though they heard voices near at hand.

They were groping their way toward the main saloon, where they had left Mr. and Mrs. Claiborne, when Shirley was aware of some one lurking near. A figure seemed to be crouching close by, and she felt its furtive movements and knew that it had passed but remained a few feet away. Her hand on Armitage’s arm tightened.

“What is that?—there is some one following us,” she said.

At the same moment Armitage, too, became aware of the presence of a stooping figure behind him. He stopped abruptly and faced about.

“Stand quite still, Miss Claiborne.”

He peered about, and instantly, as though waiting for his voice, a tall figure rose not a yard from him and a long arm shot high above his head and descended swiftly. They were close to the rail, and a roll of the ship sent Armitage off his feet and away from his assailant. Shirley at the same moment threw out her hands, defensively or for support, and clutched the arm and shoulder of the man who had assailed Armitage. He had driven a knife at John Armitage, and was poising himself for another attempt when Shirley seized his arm. As he drew back a fold of his cloak still lay in Shirley’s grasp, and she gave a sharp little cry as the figure, with a quick jerk, released the cloak and slipped away into the shadows. A moment later the lights were restored, and she saw Armitage regarding ruefully a long slit in the left arm of his ulster.

“Are you hurt? What has happened?” she demanded.

“It must have been a sea-serpent,” he replied, laughing.

The deck officer regarded them curiously as they blinked in the glare of light, and asked whether anything was wrong. Armitage turned the matter off.

“I guess it was a sea-serpent,” he said. “It bit a hole in my ulster, for which I am not grateful.” Then in a lower tone to Shirley: “That was certainly a strange proceeding. I am sorry you were startled; and I am under greatest obligations to you, Miss Claiborne. Why, you actually pulled the fellow away!”

“Oh, no,” she returned lightly, but still breathing hard; “it was the instinct of self-preservation. I was unsteady on my feet for a moment, and sought something to take hold of. That pirate was the nearest thing, and I caught hold of his cloak; I’m sure it was a cloak, and that makes me sure he was a human villain of some sort. He didn’t feel in the least like a sea-serpent. But some one tried to injure you—it is no jesting matter—”

“Some lunatic escaped from the steerage, probably. I shall report it to the officers.”

“Yes, it should be reported,” said Shirley.

“It was very strange. Why, the deck of the King Edward is the safest place in the world; but it’s something to have had hold of a sea-serpent, or a pirate! I hope you will forgive me for bringing you into such an encounter; but if you hadn’t caught his cloak—”

Armitage was uncomfortable, and anxious to allay her fears. The incident was by no means trivial, as he knew. Passengers on the great transatlantic steamers are safeguarded by every possible means; and the fact that he had been attacked in the few minutes that the deck lights had been out of order pointed to an espionage that was both close and daring. He was greatly surprised and more shaken than he wished Shirley to believe. The thing was disquieting enough, and it could not but impress her strangely that he, of all the persons on board, should have been the object of so unusual an assault. He was in the disagreeable plight of having subjected her to danger, and as they entered the brilliant saloon he freed himself of the ulster with its telltale gash and sought to minimize her impression of the incident.

Shirley did not refer to the matter again, but resolved to keep her own counsel. She felt that any one who would accept the one chance in a thousand of striking down an enemy on a steamer deck must be animated by very bitter hatred. She knew that to speak of the affair to her father or brother would be to alarm them and prejudice them against John Armitage, about whom her brother, at least, had entertained doubts. And it is not reassuring as to a man of whom little or nothing is known that he is menaced by secret enemies.

The attack had found Armitage unprepared and off guard, but with swift reaction his wits were at work. He at once sought the purser and scrutinized every name on the passenger list. It was unlikely that a steerage passenger could reach the saloon deck unobserved; a second cabin passenger might do so, however, and he sought among the names in the second cabin list for a clue. He did not believe that Chauvenet or Durand had boarded the King Edward. He himself had made the boat only by a quick dash, and he had left those two gentlemen at Geneva with much to consider.

It was, however, quite within the probabilities that they would send some one to watch him, for the two men whom he had overheard in the dark house on the Boulevard Froissart were active and resourceful rascals, he had no doubt. Whether they would be able to make anything of the cigarette case he had stupidly left behind he could not conjecture; but the importance of recovering the packet he had cut from Chauvenet’s coat was not a trifle that rogues of their caliber would ignore. There was, the purser said, a sick man in the second cabin, who had kept close to his berth. The steward believed the man to be a continental of some sort, who spoke bad German. He had taken the boat at Liverpool, paid for his passage in gold, and, complaining of illness, retired, evidently for the voyage. His name was Peter Ludovic, and the steward described him in detail.

“Big fellow; bullet head; bristling mustache; small eyes—”

“That will do,” said Armitage, grinning at the ease with which he identified the man.

“You understand that it is wholly irregular for us to let such a matter pass without acting—” said the purser.

“It would serve no purpose, and might do harm. I will take the responsibility.”

And John Armitage made a memorandum in his notebook:

“Zmai—; travels as Peter Ludovic.”

Armitage carried the envelope which he had cut from Chauvenet’s coat pinned into an inner pocket of his waistcoat, and since boarding the _King Edward _he had examined it twice daily to see that it was intact. The three red wax seals were in blank, replacing those of like size that had originally been affixed to the envelope; and at once after the attack on the dark deck he opened the packet and examined the papers—some half-dozen sheets of thin linen, written in a clerk’s clear hand in black ink. There had been no mistake in the matter; the packet which Chauvenet had purloined from the old prime minister at Vienna had come again into Armitage’s hands. He was daily tempted to destroy it and cast it in bits to the sea winds; but he was deterred by the remembrance of his last interview with the old prime minister.

“Do something for Austria—something for the Empire.” These phrases repeated themselves over and over again in his mind until they rose and fell with the cadence of the high, wavering voice of the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna as he chanted the mass of requiem for Count Ferdinand von Stroebel.

CHAPTER VIII

“THE KING IS DEAD; LONG LIVE THE KING”

Low he lies, yet high and great
Looms he, lying thus in state.—
How exalted o’er ye when Dead, my lords and gentlemen!

—James Whitcomb Riley.

John Armitage lingered in New York for a week, not to press the Claibornes too closely, then went to Washington. He wrote himself down on the register of the New American as John Armitage, Cinch Tight, Montana, and took a suite of rooms high up, with an outlook that swept Pennsylvania Avenue. It was on the evening of a bright April day that he thus established himself; and after he had unpacked his belongings he stood long at the window and watched the lights leap out of the dusk over the city. He was in Washington because Shirley Claiborne lived there, and he knew that even if he wished to do so he could no longer throw an air of inadvertence into his meetings with her. He had been very lonely in those days when he first saw her abroad; the sight of her had lifted his mood of depression; and now, after those enchanted hours at sea, his coming to Washington had been inevitable.

Many things passed through his mind as he stood at the open window. His life, he felt, could never be again as it had been before, and he sighed deeply as he recalled his talk with the old prime minister at Geneva. Then he laughed quietly as he remembered Chauvenet and Durand and the dark house on the Boulevard Froissart; but the further recollection of the attack made on his life on the deck of the King Edward sobered him, and he turned away from the window impatiently. He had seen the sick second-cabin passenger leave the steamer at New York, but had taken no trouble either to watch or to avoid him. Very likely the man was under instructions, and had been told to follow the Claibornes home; and the thought of their identification with himself by his enemies angered him. Chauvenet was likely to appear in Washington at any time, and would undoubtedly seek the Claibornes at once. The fact that the man was a scoundrel might, in some circumstances, have afforded Armitage comfort, but here again Armitage’s mood grew dark. Jules Chauvenet was undoubtedly a rascal of a shrewd and dangerous type; but who, pray, was John Armitage?

The bell in his entry rang, and he flashed on the lights and opened the door.

“Well, I like this! Setting yourself up here in gloomy splendor and never saying a word. You never deserved to have any friends, John Armitage!”

“Jim Sanderson, come in!” Armitage grasped the hands of a red-bearded giant of forty, the possessor of alert brown eyes and a big voice.

“It’s my rural habit of reading the register every night in search of constituents that brings me here. They said they guessed you were in, so I just came up to see whether you were opening a poker game or had come to sneak a claim past the watch-dog of the treasury.”

The caller threw himself into a chair and rolled a fat, unlighted cigar about in his mouth. “You’re a peach, all right, and as offensively hale and handsome as ever. When are you going to the ranch?”

“Well, not just immediately; I want to sample the flesh-pots for a day or two.”

“You’re getting soft,—that’s what’s the matter with you! You’re afraid of the spring zephyrs on the Montana range. Well, I’ll admit that it’s rather more diverting here.”

“There is no debating that, Senator. How do you like being a statesman? It was so sudden and all that. I read an awful roast of you in an English paper. They took your election to the Senate as another evidence of the complete domination of our politics by the plutocrats.”

Sanderson winked prodigiously.

“The papers have rather skinned me; but on the whole, I’ll do very well. They say it isn’t respectable to be a senator these days, but they oughtn’t to hold it up against a man that he’s rich. If the Lord put silver in the mountains of Montana and let me dig it out, it’s nothing against me, is it?”

“Decidedly not! And if you want to invest it in a senatorship it’s the Lord’s hand again.”

“Why sure!” and the Senator from Montana winked once more. “But it’s expensive. I’ve got to be elected again next winter—I’m only filling out Billings’ term—and I’m not sure I can go up against it.”

“But you are nothing if not unselfish. If the good of the country demands it you’ll not falter, if I know you.”

“There’s hot water heat in this hotel, so please turn off the hot air. I saw your foreman in Helena the last time I was out there, and he was sober. I mention the fact, knowing that I’m jeopardizing my reputation for veracity, but it’s the Lord’s truth. Of course you spent Christmas at the old home in England—one of those yule-log and plum-pudding Christmases you read of in novels. You Englishmen—”

“My dear Sanderson, don’t call me English! I’ve told you a dozen times that I’m not English.”

“So you did; so you did! I’d forgotten that you’re so damned sensitive about it;” and Sanderson’s eyes regarded Armitage intently for a moment, as though he were trying to recall some previous discussion of the young man’s nativity.

“I offer you free swing at the bar, Senator. May I summon a Montana cocktail? You taught me the ingredients once—three dashes orange bitters; two dashes acid phosphate; half a jigger of whisky; half a jigger of Italian vermuth. You undermined the constitutions of half Montana with that mess.”

Sanderson reached for his hat with sudden dejection.

“The sprinkling cart for me! I’ve got a nerve specialist engaged by the year to keep me out of sanatoriums. See here, I want you to go with us to-night to the Secretary of State’s push. Not many of the Montana boys get this far from home, and I want you for exhibition purposes. Say, John, when I saw Cinch Tight, Montana, written on the register down there it increased my circulation seven beats! You’re all right, and I guess you’re about as good an American as they make—anywhere—John Armitage!”

The function for which the senator from Montana provided an invitation for Armitage was a large affair in honor of several new ambassadors. At ten o’clock Senator Sanderson was introducing Armitage right and left as one of his representative constituents. Armitage and he owned adjoining ranches in Montana, and Sanderson called upon his neighbor to stand up boldly for their state before the minions of effete monarchies.

Mrs. Sanderson had asked Armitage to return to her for a little Montana talk, as she put it, after the first rush of their entrance was over, and as he waited in the drawing-room for an opportunity of speaking to her, he chatted with Franzel, an attaché of the Austrian embassy, to whom Sanderson had introduced him. Franzel was a gloomy young man with a monocle, and he was waiting for a particular girl, who happened to be the daughter of the Spanish Ambassador. And, this being his object, he had chosen his position with care, near the door of the drawing-room, and Armitage shared for the moment the advantage that lay in the Austrian’s point of view. Armitage had half expected that the Claibornes would be present at a function as comprehensive of the higher official world as this, and he intended asking Mrs. Sanderson if she knew them as soon as opportunity offered. The Austrian attaché proved tiresome, and Armitage was about to drop him, when suddenly he caught sight of Shirley Claiborne at the far end of the broad hall. Her head was turned partly toward him; he saw her for an instant through the throng; then his eyes fell upon Chauvenet at her side, talking with liveliest animation. He was not more than her own height, and his profile presented the clean, sharp effect of a cameo. The vivid outline of his dark face held Armitage’s eyes; then as Shirley passed on through an opening in the crowd her escort turned, holding the way open for her, and Armitage met the man’s gaze.

It was with an accented gravity that Armitage nodded his head to some declaration of the melancholy attaché at this moment. He had known when he left Geneva that he had not done with Jules Chauvenet; but the man’s prompt appearance surprised Armitage. He ran over the names of the steamers by which Chauvenet might easily have sailed from either a German or a French port and reached Washington quite as soon as himself. Chauvenet was in Washington, at any rate, and not only there, but socially accepted and in the good graces of Shirley Claiborne.

The somber attaché was speaking of the Japanese.

“They must be crushed—crushed,” said Franzel. The two had been conversing in French.

“Yes, he must be crushed,” returned Armitage absent-mindedly, in
English; then, remembering himself, he repeated the affirmation in French, changing the pronoun.

Mrs. Sanderson was now free. She was a pretty, vivacious woman, much younger than her stalwart husband,—a college graduate whom he had found teaching school near one of his silver mines.

“Welcome once more, constituent! We’re proud to see you, I can tell you. Our host owns some marvelous tapestries and they’re hung out to-night for the world to see.” She guided Armitage toward the Secretary’s gallery on an upper floor. Their host was almost as famous as a connoisseur as for his achievements in diplomacy, and the gallery was a large apartment in which every article of furniture, as well as the paintings, tapestries and specimens of pottery, was the careful choice of a thoroughly cultivated taste.

“It isn’t merely an art gallery; it’s the most beautiful room in America,” murmured Mrs. Sanderson.

“I can well believe it. There’s my favorite Vibert,—I wondered what had become of it.”

“It isn’t surprising that the Secretary is making a great reputation by his dealings with foreign powers. It’s a poor ambassador who could not be persuaded after an hour in this splendid room. The ordinary affairs of life should not be mentioned here. A king’s coronation would not be out of place,—in fact, there’s a chair in the corner against that Gobelin that would serve the situation. The old gentleman by that cabinet is the Baron von Marhof, the Ambassador from Austria-Hungary. He’s a brother-in-law of Count von Stroebel, who was murdered so horribly in a railway carriage a few weeks ago.”

“Ah, to be sure! I haven’t seen the Baron in years. He has changed little.”

“Then you knew him,—in the old country?”

“Yes; I used to see him—when I was a boy,” remarked Armitage.

Mrs. Sanderson glanced at Armitage sharply. She had dined at his ranch house in Montana and knew that he lived like a gentleman,—that his house, its appointments and service were unusual for a western ranchman. And she recalled, too, that she and her husband had often speculated as to Armitage’s antecedents and history, without arriving at any conclusion in regard to him.

The room had slowly filled and they strolled about, dividing attention between distinguished personages and the not less celebrated works of art.

“Oh, by the way, Mr. Armitage, there’s the girl I have chosen for you to marry. I suppose it would be just as well for you to meet her now, though that dark little foreigner seems to be monopolizing her.”

“I am wholly agreeable,” laughed Armitage. “The sooner the better, and be done with it.”

“Don’t be so frivolous. There—you can look safely now. She’s stopped to speak to that bald and pink Justice of the Supreme Court,—the girl with the brown eyes and hair,—have a care!”

Shirley and Chauvenet left the venerable Justice, and Mrs. Sanderson intercepted them at once.

“To think of all these beautiful things in our own America!” exclaimed Shirley. “And you, Mr. Armitage,—”

“Among the other curios, Miss Claiborne,” laughed John, taking her hand.

“But I haven’t introduced you yet”—began Mrs. Sanderson, puzzled.

“No; the King Edward did that. We crossed together. Oh, Monsieur Chauvenet, let me present Mr. Armitage,” said Shirley, seeing that the men had not spoken.

The situation amused Armitage and he smiled rather more broadly than was necessary in expressing his pleasure at meeting Monsieur Chauvenet. They regarded each other with the swift intentness of men who are used to the sharp exercise of their eyes; and when Armitage turned toward Shirley and Mrs. Sanderson, he was aware that Chauvenet continued to regard him with fixed gaze.

“Miss Claiborne is a wonderful sailor; the Atlantic is a little tumultuous at times in the spring, but she reported to the captain every day.”

“Miss Claiborne is nothing if not extraordinary,” declared Mrs. Sanderson with frank admiration.

“The word seems to have been coined for her,” said Chauvenet, his white teeth showing under his thin black mustache.

“And still leaves the language distinguished chiefly for its poverty,” added Armitage; and the men bowed to Shirley and then to Mrs. Sanderson, and again to each other. It was like a rehearsal of some trifle in a comedy.

“How charming!” laughed Mrs. Sanderson. “And this lovely room is just the place for it.”

They were still talking together as Franzel, with whom Armitage had spoken below, entered hurriedly. He held a crumpled note, whose contents, it seemed, had shaken him out of his habitual melancholy composure.

“Is Baron von Marhof in the room?” he asked of Armitage, fumbling nervously at his monocle.

The Austrian Ambassador, with several ladies, and led by Senator Sanderson, was approaching.

The attaché hurried to his chief and addressed him in a low tone. The Ambassador stopped, grew very white, and stared at the messenger for a moment in blank unbelief.

The young man now repeated, in English, in a tone that could be heard in all parts of the hushed room:

“His Majesty, the Emperor Johann Wilhelm, died suddenly to-night, in Vienna,” he said, and gave his arm to his chief.

It was a strange place for the delivery of such a message, and the strangeness of it was intensified to Shirley by the curious glance that passed between John Armitage and Jules Chauvenet. Shirley remembered afterward that as the attaché’s words rang out in the room, Armitage started, clenched his hands, and caught his breath in a manner very uncommon in men unless they are greatly moved. The Ambassador walked directly from the room with bowed head, and every one waited in silent sympathy until he had gone.

The word passed swiftly through the great house, and through the open windows the servants were heard crying loudly for Baron von Marhof’s carriage in the court below.

“The King is dead; long live the King!” murmured Shirley.

“Long live the King!” repeated Chauvenet and Mrs. Sanderson, in unison; and then Armitage, as though mastering a phrase they were teaching him, raised his head and said, with an unction that surprised them, “Long live the Emperor and King! God save Austria!”

Then he turned to Shirley with a smile.

“It is very pleasant to see you on your own ground. I hope your family are well.”

“Thank you; yes. My father and mother are here somewhere.”

“And Captain Claiborne?”

“He’s probably sitting up all night to defend Fort Myer from the crafts and assaults of the enemy. I hope you will come to see us, Mr. Armitage.”

“Thank you; you are very kind,” he said gravely. “I shall certainly give myself the pleasure very soon.”

As Shirley passed on with Chauvenet Mrs. Sanderson launched upon the girl’s praises, but she found him suddenly preoccupied.

“The girl has gone to your head. Why didn’t you tell me you knew the Claibornes?”

“I don’t remember that you gave me a chance; but I’ll say now that I intend to know them better.”

She bade him take her to the drawing-room. As they went down through the house they found that the announcement of the Emperor Johann Wilhelm’s death had cast a pall upon the company. All the members of the diplomatic corps had withdrawn at once as a mark of respect and sympathy for Baron von Marhof, and at midnight the ball-room held all of the company that remained. Armitage had not sought Shirley again. He found a room that had been set apart for smokers, threw himself into a chair, lighted a cigar and stared at a picture that had no interest for him whatever. He put down his cigar after a few whiffs, and his hand went to the pocket in which he had usually carried his cigarette case.

“Ah, Mr. Armitage, may I offer you a cigarette?”

He turned to find Chauvenet close at his side. He had not heard the man enter, but Chauvenet had been in his thoughts and he started slightly at finding him so near. Chauvenet held in his white-gloved hand a gold cigarette case, which he opened with a deliberate care that displayed its embellished side. The smooth golden surface gleamed in the light, the helmet in blue, and the white falcon flashed in Armitage’s eyes. The meeting was clearly by intention, and a slight smile played about Chauvenet’s lips in his enjoyment of the situation. Armitage smiled up at him in amiable acknowledgment of his courtesy, and rose.

“You are very considerate, Monsieur. I was just at the moment regretting our distinguished host’s oversight in providing cigars alone. Allow me!”

He bent forward, took the outstretched open case into his own hands, removed a cigarette, snapped the case shut and thrust it into his trousers pocket,—all, as it seemed, at a single stroke.

“My dear sir,” began Chauvenet, white with rage.

“My dear Monsieur Chauvenet,” said Armitage, striking a match, “I am indebted to you for returning a trinket that I value highly.”

The flame crept half the length of the stick while they regarded each other; then Armitage raised it to the tip of his cigarette, lifted his head and blew a cloud of smoke.

“Are you able to prove your property, Mr. Armitage?” demanded Chauvenet furiously.

“My dear sir, they have a saying in this country that possession is nine points of the law. You had it—now I have it—wherefore it must be mine!”

Chauvenet’s rigid figure suddenly relaxed; he leaned against a chair with a return of his habitual nonchalant air, and waved his hand carelessly.

“Between gentlemen—so small a matter!”

“To be sure—the merest trifle,” laughed Armitage with entire good humor.

“And where a gentleman has the predatory habits of a burglar and housebreaker—”

“Then lesser affairs, such as picking up trinkets—”

“Come naturally—quite so!” and Chauvenet twisted his mustache with an air of immense satisfaction.

“But the genial art of assassination—there’s a business that requires a calculating hand, my dear Monsieur Chauvenet!”

Chauvenet’s hand went again to his lip.

“To be sure!” he ejaculated with zest.

“But alone—alone one can do little. For larger operations one requires—I should say—courageous associates. Now in my affairs—would you believe me?—I am obliged to manage quite alone.”

“How melancholy!” exclaimed Chauvenet.

“It is indeed very sad!” and Armitage sighed, tossed his cigarette into the smoldering grate and bade Chauvenet a ceremonious good night.

“Ah, we shall meet again, I dare say!”

“The thought does credit to a generous nature!” responded Armitage, and passed out into the house.

CHAPTER IX

“THIS IS AMERICA, ME. ARMITAGE”

Lo! as I came to the crest of the hill, the sun on the heights had
arisen,
The dew on the grass was shining, and white was the mist on the vale;
Like a lark on the wing of the dawn I sang; like a guiltless one freed
from his prison, As backward I gazed through the valley, and saw no one on my trail.

—L. Frank Tooker.

Spring, planting green and gold banners on old Virginia battle-fields, crossed the Potomac and occupied Washington.

Shirley Claiborne called for her horse and rode forth to greet the conqueror. The afternoon was keen and sunny, and she had turned impatiently from a tea, to which she was committed, to seek the open. The call of the outdoor gods sang in her blood. Daffodils and crocuses lifted yellow flames and ruddy torches from every dooryard. She had pinned a spray of arbutus to the lapel of her tan riding-coat; it spoke to her of the blue horizons of the near Virginia hills. The young buds in the maples hovered like a mist in the tree-tops. Towering over all, the incomparable gray obelisk climbed to the blue arch and brought it nearer earth. Washington, the center of man’s hope, is also, in spring, the capital of the land of heart’s desire.

With a groom trailing after her, Shirley rode toward Rock Creek,—that rippling, murmuring, singing trifle of water that laughs day and night at the margin of the beautiful city, as though politics and statesmanship were the hugest joke in the world. The flag on the Austro-Hungarian embassy hung at half-mast and symbols of mourning fluttered from the entire front of the house. Shirley lifted her eyes gravely as she passed. Her thoughts flew at once to the scene at the house of the Secretary of State a week before, when Baron von Marhof had learned of the death of his sovereign; and by association she thought, too, of Armitage, and of his, look and voice as he said:

“Long live the Emperor and King! God save Austria!”

Emperors and kings! They were as impossible to-day as a snowstorm. The grave ambassadors as they appeared at great Washington functions, wearing their decorations, always struck her as being particularly distinguished. It just now occurred to her that they were all linked to the crown and scepter; but she dismissed the whole matter and bowed to two dark ladies in a passing victoria with the quick little nod and bright smile that were the same for these titled members of the Spanish Ambassador’s household as for the young daughters of a western senator, who democratically waved their hands to her from a doorstep.

Armitage came again to her mind. He had called at the Claiborne house twice since the Secretary’s ball, and she had been surprised to find how fully she accepted him as an American, now that he was on her own soil. He derived, too, a certain stability from the fact that the Sandersons knew him; he was, indeed, an entirely different person since the Montana Senator definitely connected him with an American landscape. She had kept her own counsel touching the scene on the dark deck of the King Edward, but it was not a thing lightly to be forgotten. She was half angry with herself this mellow afternoon to find how persistently Armitage came into her thoughts, and how the knife-thrust on the steamer deck kept recurring in her mind and quickening her sympathy for a man of whom she knew so little; and she touched her horse impatiently with the crop and rode into the park at a gait that roused the groom to attention.

At a bend of the road Chauvenet and Franzel, the attaché, swung into view, mounted, and as they met, Chauvenet turned his horse and rode beside her.

“Ah, these American airs! This spring! Is it not good to be alive, Miss Claiborne?”

“It is all of that!” she replied. It seemed to her that the day had not needed Chauvenet’s praise.

“I had hoped to see you later at the Wallingford tea!” he continued.

“No teas for me on a day like this! The thought of being indoors is tragic!”

She wished that he would leave her, for she had ridden out into the spring sunshine to be alone. He somehow did not appear to advantage in his riding-coat,—his belongings were too perfect. She had really enjoyed his talk when they had met here and there abroad; but she was in no mood for him now; and she wondered what he had lost by the transfer to America. He ran on airily in French, speaking of the rush of great and small social affairs that marked the end of the season.

“Poor Franzel is indeed triste. He is taking the death of Johann Wilhelm quite hard. But here in America the death of an emperor seems less important. A king or a peasant, what does it matter!”

“Better ask the robin in yonder budding chestnut tree, Monsieur. This is not an hour for hard questions!”

“Ah, you are very cruel! You drive me back to poor, melancholy Franzel, who is indeed a funeral in himself.”

“That is very sad, Monsieur,”—and she smiled at him with mischief in her eyes. “My heart goes out to any one who is left to mourn—alone.”

He gathered his reins and drew up his horse, lifting his hat with a perfect gesture.

“There are sadder blows than losing one’s sovereign, Mademoiselle!” and he shook his bared head mournfully and rode back to find his friend.

She sought now her favorite bridle-paths and her heart was light with the sweetness and peace of the spring as she heard the rush and splash of the creek, saw the flash of wings and felt the mystery of awakened life throbbing about her. The heart of a girl in spring is the home of dreams, and Shirley’s heart overflowed with them, until her pulse thrilled and sang in quickening cadences. The wistfulness of April, the dream of unfathomable things, shone in her brown eyes; and a girl with dreams in her eyes is the divinest work of the gods. Into this twentieth century, into the iron heart of cities, she still comes, and the clear, high stars of April nights and the pensive moon of September are glad because of her.

The groom marveled at the sudden changes of gait, the gallops that fell abruptly to a walk with the alterations of mood in the girl’s heart, the pauses that marked a moment of meditation as she watched some green curving bank, or a plunge of the mad little creek that sent a glory of spray whitely into the sunlight. It grew late and the shadows of waning afternoon crept through the park. The crowd had hurried home to escape the chill of the spring dusk, but she lingered on, reluctant to leave, and presently left her horse with the groom that she might walk alone beside the creek in a place that was beautifully wild. About her lay a narrow strip of young maples and beyond this the wide park road wound at the foot of a steep wooded cliff. The place was perfectly quiet save for the splash and babble of the creek.

Several minutes passed. Once she heard her groom speak to the horses, though she could not see him, but the charm of the place held her. She raised her eyes from the tumbling water before her and looked off through the maple tangle. Then she drew back quickly, and clasped her riding-crop tightly. Some one had paused at the farther edge of the maple brake and dismounted, as she had, for a more intimate enjoyment of the place. It was John Armitage, tapping his riding-boot idly with his crop as he leaned against a tree and viewed the miniature valley.

He was a little below her, so that she saw him quite distinctly, and caught a glimpse of his horse pawing, with arched neck, in the bridle-path behind him. She had no wish to meet him there and turned to steal back to her horse when a movement in the maples below caught her eye. She paused, fascinated and alarmed by the cautious stir of the undergrowth. The air was perfectly quiet; the disturbance was not caused by the wind. Then the head and shoulders of a man were disclosed as he crouched on hands and knees, watching Armitage. His small head and big body as he crept forward suggested to Shirley some fantastic monster of legend, and her heart beat fast with terror as a knife flashed in his hand. He moved more rapidly toward the silent figure by the tree, and still Shirley watched wide-eyed, her figure tense and trembling, the hand that held the crop half raised to her lips, while the dark form rose and poised for a spring.

Then she cried out, her voice ringing clear and high across the little vale and sounding back from the cliff.

“Oh! Oh!” and Armitage leaped forward and turned. His crop fell first upon the raised hand, knocking the knife far into the trees, then upon the face and shoulders of the Servian. The fellow turned and fled through the maple tangle, Armitage after him, and Shirley ran back toward the bridge where she had left her groom and met him half-way hurrying toward her.

“What is it, Miss? Did you call?”

“No; it was nothing, Thomas—nothing at all,” and she mounted and turned toward home.

Her heart was still pounding with excitement and she walked her horse to gain composure. Twice, in circumstances most unusual and disquieting, she had witnessed an attack on John Armitage by an unknown enemy. She recalled now a certain pathos of his figure as she first saw him leaning against the tree watching the turbulent little stream, and she was impatient to find how her sympathy went out to him. It made no difference who John Armitage was; his enemy was a coward, and the horror of such a menace to a man’s life appalled her. She passed a mounted policeman, who recognized her and raised his hand in salute, but the idea of reporting the strange affair in the strip of woodland occurred to her only to be dismissed. She felt that here was an ugly business that was not within the grasp of a park patrolman, and, moreover, John Armitage was entitled to pursue his own course in matters that touched his life so closely. The thought of him reassured her; he was no simple boy to suffer such attacks to pass unchallenged; and so, dismissing him, she raised her head and saw him gallop forth from a by-path and rein his horse beside her.

“Miss Claiborne!”

The suppressed feeling in his tone made the moment tense and she saw that his lips trembled. It was a situation that must have its quick relief, so she said instantly, in a mockery of his own tone:

“Mr. Armitage!” She laughed. “I am almost caught in the dark. The blandishments of spring have beguiled me.”

He looked at her with a quick scrutiny. It did not seem possible that this could be the girl who had called to him in warning scarce five minutes before; but he knew it had been she,—he would have known her voice anywhere in the world. They rode silent beside the creek, which was like a laughing companion seeking to mock them into a cheerier mood. At an opening through the hills they saw the western horizon aglow in tints of lemon deepening into gold and purple. Save for the riot of the brook the world was at peace. She met his eyes for an instant, and their gravity, and the firm lines in which his lips were set, showed that the shock of his encounter had not yet passed.

“You must think me a strange person, Miss Claiborne. It seems inexplicable that a man’s life should be so menaced in a place like this. If you had not called to me—”

“Please don’t speak of that! It was so terrible!”

“But I must speak of it! Once before the same attempt was made—that night on the King Edward.”

“Yes; I have not forgotten.”

“And to-day I have reason to believe that the same man watched his chance, for I have ridden here every day since I came, and he must have kept track of me.”

“But this is America, Mr. Armitage!”

“That does not help me with you. You have every reason to resent my bringing you into such dangers,—it is unpardonable—indefensible!”

She saw that he was greatly troubled.

“But you couldn’t help my being in the park to-day! I have often stopped just there before. It’s a favorite place for meditations. If you know the man—”

“I know the man.”

“Then the law will certainly protect you, as you know very well. He was a dreadful-looking person. The police can undoubtedly find and lock him up.”

She was seeking to minimize the matter,—to pass it off as a commonplace affair of every day. They were walking their horses; the groom followed stolidly behind.

Armitage was silent, a look of great perplexity on his face. When he spoke he was quite calm.

“Miss Claiborne, I must tell you that this is an affair in which I can’t ask help in the usual channels. You will pardon me if I seem to make a mystery of what should be ordinarily a bit of business between myself and the police; but to give publicity to these attempts to injure me just now would be a mistake. I could have caught that man there in the wood; but I let him go, for the reason—for the reason that I want the men back of him to show themselves before I act. But if it isn’t presuming—”

He was quite himself again. His voice was steady and deep with the ease and assurance that she liked in him. She had marked to-day in his earnestness, more than at any other time, a slight, an almost indistinguishable trace of another tongue in his English.

“How am I to know whether it would be presuming?” she asked.

“But I was going to say—”

“When rudely interrupted!” She was trying to make it easy for him to say whatever he wished.

“—that these troubles of mine are really personal. I have committed no crime and am not fleeing from justice.”

She laughed and urged her horse into a gallop for a last stretch of road near the park limits.

“How uninteresting! We expect a Montana ranchman to have a spectacular past.”

“But not to carry it, I hope, to Washington. On the range I might become a lawless bandit in the interest of picturesqueness; but here—”

“Here in the world of frock-coated statesmen nothing really interesting is to be expected.”

She walked her horse again. It occurred to her that he might wish an assurance of silence from her. What she had seen would make a capital bit of gossip, to say nothing of being material for the newspapers, and her conscience, as she reflected, grew uneasy at the thought of shielding him. She knew that her father and mother, and, even more strictly, her brother, would close their doors on a man whose enemies followed him over seas and lay in wait for him in a peaceful park; but here she tested him. A man of breeding would not ask protection of a woman on whom he had no claim, and it was certainly not for her to establish an understanding with him in so strange and grave a matter.

“It must be fun having a ranch with cattle on a thousand hills. I always wished my father would go in for a western place, but he can’t travel so far from home. Our ranch is in Virginia.”

“You have a Virginia farm? That is very interesting.”

“Yes; at Storm Springs. It’s really beautiful down there,” she said simply.

It was on his tongue to tell her that he, too, owned a bit of Virginia soil, but he had just established himself as a Montana ranchman, and it seemed best not to multiply his places of residence. He had, moreover, forgotten the name of the county in which his preserve lay. He said, with truth:

“I know nothing of Virginia or the South; but I have viewed the landscape from Arlington and some day I hope to go adventuring in the Virginia hills.”

“Then you should not overlook our valley. I am sure there must be adventures waiting for somebody down there. You can tell our place by the spring lamb on the hillside. There’s a huge inn that offers the long-distance telephone and market reports and golf links and very good horses, and lots of people stop there as a matter of course in their flight between Florida and Newport. They go up and down the coast like the mercury in a thermometer—up when it’s warm, down when it’s cold. There’s the secret of our mercurial temperament.”

A passing automobile frightened her horse, and he watched her perfect coolness in quieting the animal with rein and voice.

“He’s just up from the farm and doesn’t like town very much. But he shall go home again soon,” she said as they rode on.

“Oh, you go down to shepherd those spring lambs!” he exclaimed, with misgiving in his heart. He had followed her across the sea and now she was about to take flight again!

“Yes; and to escape from the tiresome business of trying to remember people’s names.”

“Then you reverse the usual fashionable process—you go south to meet the rising mercury.”

“I hadn’t thought of it, but that is so. I dearly love a hillside, with pines and cedars, and sloping meadows with sheep—and rides over mountain roads to the gate of dreams, where Spottswood’s golden horseshoe knights ride out at you with a grand sweep of their plumed hats. Now what have you to say to that?”

“Nothing, but my entire approval,” he said.

He dimly understood, as he left her in this gay mood, at the Claiborne house, that she had sought to make him forget the lurking figure in the park thicket and the dark deed thwarted there. It was her way of conveying to him her dismissal of the incident, and it implied a greater kindness than any pledge of secrecy. He rode away with grave eyes, and a new hope filled his heart.

CHAPTER X

JOHN ARMITAGE IS SHADOWED

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

—Walt Whitman.

Armitage dined alone that evening and left the hotel at nine o’clock for a walk. He unaffectedly enjoyed paved ground and the sights and ways of cities, and he walked aimlessly about the lighted thoroughfares of the capital with conscious pleasure in the movement and color of life. He let his eyes follow the Washington Monument’s gray line starward; and he stopped to enjoy the high-poised equestrian statue of Sherman, to which the starry dusk gave something of legendary and Old World charm.

Coming out upon Pennsylvania Avenue he strolled past the White House, and, at the wide-flung gates, paused while a carriage swept by him at the driveway. He saw within the grim face of Baron von Marhof and unconsciously lifted his hat, though the Ambassador was deep in thought and did not see him. Armitage struck the pavement smartly with his stick as he walked slowly on, pondering; but he was conscious a moment later that some one was loitering persistently in his wake. Armitage was at once on the alert with all his faculties sharpened. He turned and gradually slackened his pace, and the person behind him immediately did likewise.

The sensation of being followed is at first annoying; then a pleasant zest creeps into it, and in Armitage’s case the reaction was immediate. He was even amused to reflect that the shadow had chosen for his exploit what is probably the most conspicuous and the best-guarded spot in America. It was not yet ten o’clock, but the streets were comparatively free of people. He slackened his pace gradually, and threw open his overcoat, for the night was warm, to give an impression of ease, and when he had reached the somber facade of the Treasury Building he paused and studied it in the glare of the electric lights, as though he were a chance traveler taking a preliminary view of the sights of the capital. A man still lingered behind him, drawing nearer now, at a moment when they had the sidewalk comparatively free to themselves. The fellow was short, but of soldierly erectness, and even in his loitering pace lifted his feet with the quick precision of the drilled man. Armitage walked to the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fifteenth Street, then turned and retraced his steps slowly past the Treasury Building. The man who had been following faced about and walked slowly in the opposite direction, and Armitage, quickening his own pace, amused himself by dogging the fellow’s steps closely for twenty yards, then passed him.

When he had gained the advantage of a few feet, Armitage stopped suddenly and spoke to the man in the casual tone he might have used in addressing a passing acquaintance.

“My friend,” he said, “there are two policemen across the street; if you continue to follow me I shall call their attention to you.”

“Pardon me—”

“You are watching me; and the thing won’t do.”

“Yes, I’m watching you; but—”

“But the thing won’t do! If you are hired—”

“Nein! Nein! You do me a wrong, sir.”

“Then if you are not hired you are your own master, and you serve yourself ill when you take the trouble to follow me. Now I’m going to finish my walk, and I beg you to keep out of my way. This is not a place where liberties may be infringed with impunity. Good evening, sir.”

Armitage wheeled about sharply, and as his face came into the full light of the street lamps the stranger stared at him intently.

Armitage was fumbling in his pocket for a coin, but this impertinence caused him to change his mind. Two policemen were walking slowly toward them, and Armitage, annoyed by the whole incident, walked quickly away.

He was not wholly at ease over the meeting. The fact that Chauvenet had so promptly put a spy as well as the Servian assassin on his trail quickened his pulse with anger for an instant and then sobered him.

He continued his walk, and paused presently before an array of books in a shop window. Then some one stopped at his side and he looked up to find the same man he had accosted at the Treasury Building lifting his hat,—an American soldier’s campaign hat. The fellow was an extreme blond, with a smooth-shaven, weather-beaten face, blue eyes and light hair.

“Pardon me! You are mistaken; I am not a spy. But it is wonderful; it is quite wonderful—”

The man’s face was alight with discovery, with an alert pleasure that awaited recognition.

“My dear fellow, you really become annoying,” and Armitage again thrust his hand into his trousers pocket. “I should hate awfully to appeal to the police; but you must not crowd me too far.”

The man seemed moved by deep feeling, and his eyes were bright with excitement. His hands clasped tightly the railing that protected the glass window of the book shop. As Armitage turned away impatiently the man ejaculated huskily, as though some over-mastering influence wrung the words from him:

“Don’t you know me? I am Oscar—don’t you remember me, and the great forest, where I taught you to shoot and fish? You are—”

He bent toward Armitage with a fierce insistence, his eyes blazing in his eagerness to be understood.

John Armitage turned again to the window, leaned lightly upon the iron railing and studied the title of a book attentively. He was silently absorbed for a full minute, in which the man who had followed him waited. Taking his cue from Armitage’s manner he appeared to be deeply interested in the bookseller’s display; but the excitement still glittered in his eyes.

Armitage was thinking swiftly, and his thoughts covered a very wide range of time and place as he stood there. Then he spoke very deliberately and coolly, but with a certain peremptory sharpness.

“Go ahead of me to the New American and wait in the office until I come.”

The man’s hand went to his hat.

“None of that!”

Armitage arrested him with a gesture. “My name is Armitage,—John Armitage,” he said. “I advise you to remember it. Now go!”

The man hurried away, and Armitage slowly followed.

It occurred to him that the man might be of use, and with this in mind he returned to the New American, got his key from the office, nodded to his acquaintance of the street and led the way to the elevator.

Armitage put aside his coat and hat, locked the hall door, and then, when the two stood face to face in his little sitting-room, he surveyed the man carefully.

“What do you want?” he demanded bluntly.

He took a cigarette from a box on the table, lighted it, and then, with an air of finality, fixed his gaze upon the man, who eyed him with a kind of stupefied wonder. Then there flashed into the fellow’s bronzed face something of dignity and resentment. He stood perfectly erect with his felt hat clasped in his hand. His clothes were cheap, but clean, and his short coat was buttoned trimly about him.

“I want nothing, Mr. Armitage,” he replied humbly, speaking slowly and with a marked German accent.

“Then you will be easily satisfied,” said Armitage. “You said your name was—?”

“Oscar—Oscar Breunig.”

Armitage sat down and scrutinized the man again without relaxing his severity.

“You think you have seen me somewhere, so you have followed me in the streets to make sure. When did this idea first occur to you?”

“I saw you at Fort Myer at the drill last Friday. I have been looking for you since, and saw you leave your horse at the hotel this afternoon. You ride at Rock Creek—yes?”

“What do you do for a living, Mr. Breunig?” asked Armitage.

“I was in the army, but served out my time and was discharged a few months ago and came to Washington to see where they make the government—yes? I am going to South America. Is it Peru? Yes; there will be a revolution.”

He paused, and Armitage met his eyes; they were very blue and kind,—eyes that spoke of sincerity and fidelity, such eyes as a leader of forlorn hopes would like to know were behind him when he gave the order to charge. Then a curious thing happened. It may have been the contact of eye with eye that awoke question and response between them; it may have been a need in one that touched a chord of helplessness in the other; but suddenly Armitage leaped to his feet and grasped the outstretched hands of the little soldier.

“Oscar!” he said; and repeated, very softly, “Oscar!”

The man was deeply moved and the tears sprang into his eyes. Armitage laughed, holding him at arm’s length.

“None of that nonsense! Sit down!” He turned to the door, opened it, and peered into the hall, locked the door again, then motioned the man to a chair.

“So you deserted your mother country, did you, and have borne arms for the glorious republic?”

“I served in the Philippines,—yes?”

“Rank, titles, emoluments, Oscar?”

“I was a sergeant; and the surgeon could not find the bullet after Big
Bend, Luzon; so they were sorry and gave me a certificate and two dollars a month to my pay,” said the man, so succinctly and colorlessly that Armitage laughed.

“Yon have done well, Oscar; honor me by accepting a cigar.”

The man took a cigar from the box which Armitage extended, but would not light it. He held it rather absent-mindedly in his hand and continued to stare.

“You are not dead,—Mr.—Armitage; but your father—?”

“My father is dead, Oscar.”

“He was a good man,” said the soldier.

“Yes; he was a good man,” repeated Armitage gravely. “I am alive, and yet I am dead, Oscar; do you grasp the idea? You were a good friend when we were lads together in the great forest. If I should want you to help me now—”

The man jumped to his feet and stood at attention so gravely that Armitage laughed and slapped his knee.

“You are well taught, Sergeant Oscar! Sit down. I am going to trust you. My affairs just now are not without their trifling dangers.”

“There are enemies—yes?” and Oscar nodded his head solemnly in acceptance of the situation.

“I am going to trust you absolutely. You have no confidants—you are not married?”

“How should a man be married who is a soldier? I have no friends; they are unprofitable,” declared Oscar solemnly.

“I fear you are a pessimist, Oscar; but a pessimist who keeps his mouth shut is a good ally. Now, if you are not afraid of being shot or struck with a knife, and if you are willing to obey my orders for a few weeks we may be able to do some business. First, remember that I am Mr. Armitage; you must learn that now, and remember it for all time. And if any one should ever suggest anything else—”

The man nodded his comprehension.

“That will be the time for Oscar to be dumb. I understand, Mr. Armitage.”

Armitage smiled. The man presented so vigorous a picture of health, his simple character was so transparently reflected in his eyes and face that he did not in the least question him.

“You are an intelligent person, Sergeant. If you are equally discreet—able to be deaf when troublesome questions are asked, then I think we shall get on.”

“You should remember—” began Oscar.

“I remember nothing,” observed Armitage sharply; and Oscar was quite humble again. Armitage opened a trunk and took out an envelope from which he drew several papers and a small map, which he unfolded and spread on the table. He marked a spot with his lead-pencil and passed the map to Oscar.

“Do you think you could find that place?”

The man breathed hard over it for several minutes.

“Yes; it would be easy,” and he nodded his head several times as he named the railroad stations nearest the point indicated by Armitage. The place was in one of the mountainous counties of Virginia, fifteen miles from an east and west railway line. Armitage opened a duly recorded deed which conveyed to himself the title to two thousand acres of land; also a curiously complicated abstract of title showing the successive transfers of ownership from colonial days down through the years of Virginia’s splendor to the dread time when battle shook the world. The title had passed from the receiver of a defunct shooting-club to Armitage, who had been charmed by the description of the property as set forth in an advertisement, and lured, moreover, by the amazingly small price at which the preserve was offered.

“It is a farm—yes?”

“It is a wilderness, I fancy,” said Armitage. “I have never seen it; I may never see it, for that matter; but you will find your way there—going first to this town, Lamar, studying the country, keeping your mouth shut, and seeing what the improvements on the ground amount to. There’s some sort of a bungalow there, built by the shooting-club. Here’s a description of the place, on the strength of which I bought it. You may take these papers along to judge the size of the swindle.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And a couple of good horses; plenty of commissary stores—plain military necessities, you understand—and some bedding should be provided. I want you to take full charge of this matter and get to work as quickly as possible. It may be a trifle lonesome down there among the hills, but if you serve me well you shall not regret it.”

“Yes, I am quite satisfied with the job,” said Oscar.

“And after you have reached the place and settled yourself you will tell the postmaster and telegraph operator who you are and where you may be found, so that messages may reach you promptly. If you get an unsigned message advising you of—let me consider—a shipment of steers, you may expect me any hour. On the other hand, you may not see me at all. We’ll consider that our agreement lasts until the first snow flies next winter. You are a soldier. There need be no further discussion of this matter, Oscar.”

The man nodded gravely.

“And it is well for you not to reappear in this hotel. If you should be questioned on leaving here—”

“I have not been, here—is it not?”

“It is,” replied Armitage, smiling. “You read and write English?”

“Yes; one must, to serve in the army.”

“If you should see a big Servian with a neck like a bull and a head the size of a pea, who speaks very bad German, you will do well to keep out of his way,—unless you find a good place to tie him up. I advise you not to commit murder without special orders,—do you understand?”

“It is the custom of the country,” assented Oscar, in a tone of deep regret.

“To be sure,” laughed Armitage; “and now I am going to give you money enough to carry out the project I have indicated.”

He took from his trunk a long bill-book, counted out twenty new one-hundred-dollar bills and threw them on the table.

“It is much money,” observed Oscar, counting the bills laboriously.

“It will be enough for your purposes. You can’t spend much money up there if you try. Bacon—perhaps eggs; a cow may be necessary,—who can tell without trying it? Don’t write me any letters or telegrams, and forget that you have seen me if you don’t hear from me again.”

He went to the elevator and rode down to the office with Oscar and dismissed him carelessly. Then John Armitage bought an armful of magazines and newspapers and returned to his room, quite like any traveler taking the comforts of his inn.

CHAPTER XI

THE TOSS OF A NAPKIN

As music and splendor
Survive not the lamp and the lute,
The heart’s echoes render
No song when the spirit is mute—
No songs but sad dirges,
Like the wind through a ruined cell,
Or the mournful surges
That ring the dead seaman’s knell. —Shelley.

Captain Richard Claiborne gave a supper at the Army and Navy Club for ten men in honor of the newly-arrived military attaché of the Spanish legation. He had drawn his guests largely from his foreign acquaintances in Washington because the Spaniard spoke little English; and Dick knew Washington well enough to understand that while a girl and a man who speak different languages may sit comfortably together at table, men in like predicament grow morose and are likely to quarrel with their eyes before the cigars are passed. It was Friday, and the whole party had witnessed the drill at Fort Myer that afternoon, with nine girls to listen to their explanation of the manoeuvers and the earliest spring bride for chaperon. Shirley had been of the party, and somewhat the heroine of it, too, for it was Dick who sat on his horse out in the tanbark with the little whistle to his lips and manipulated the troop.

“Here’s a confusion of tongues; I may need you to interpret,” laughed
Dick, indicating a chair at his left; and when Armitage sat down he faced Chauvenet across the round table.

With the first filling of glasses it was found that every one could speak French, and the talk went forward spiritedly. The discussion of military matters naturally occupied first place, and all were anxious to steer clear of anything that might be offensive to the Spaniard, who had lost a brother at San Juan. Claiborne thought it wisest to discuss nations that were not represented at the table, and this made it very simple for all to unite in rejecting the impertinent claims of Japan to be reckoned among world powers, and to declare, for the benefit of the Russian attaché, that Slav and Saxon must ultimately contend for the earth’s dominion.

Then they fell to talking about individuals, chiefly men in the public eye; and as the Austro-Hungarian embassy was in mourning and unrepresented at the table, the new Emperor-king was discussed with considerable frankness.

“He has not old Stroebel’s right hand to hold him up,” remarked a young German officer.

“Thereby hangs a dark tale,” remarked Claiborne. “Somebody stuck a knife into Count von Stroebel at a singularly inopportune moment. I saw him in Geneva two days before he was assassinated, and he was very feeble and seemed harassed. It gives a man the shudders to think of what might happen if his Majesty, Charles Louis, should go by the board. His only child died a year ago—after him his cousin Francis, and then the deluge.”

“Bah! Francis is not as dark as he’s painted. He’s the most lied-about prince in Europe,” remarked Chauvenet. “He would most certainly be an improvement on Charles Louis. But alas! Charles Louis will undoubtedly live on forever, like his lamented father. The King is dead: long live the King!”

“Nothing can happen,” remarked the German sadly. “I have lost much money betting on upheavals in that direction. If there were a man in Hungary it would be different; but riots are not revolutions.”

“That is quite true,” said Armitage quietly.

“But,” observed the Spaniard, “if the Archduke Karl had not gone out of his head and died in two or three dozen places, so that no one is sure he is dead at all, things at Vienna might be rather more interesting. Karl took a son with him into exile. Suppose one or the other of them should reappear, stir up strife and incite rebellion—?”

“Such speculations are quite idle,” commented Chauvenet. “There is no doubt whatever that Karl is dead, or we should hear of him.”

“Of course,” said the German. “If he were not, the death of the old Emperor would have brought him to life again.”

“The same applies to the boy he carried away with him—undoubtedly dead—or we should hear of him. Karl disappeared soon after his son Francis was born. It was said—”

“A pretty tale it is!” commented the German—“that the child wasn’t exactly Karl’s own. He took it quite hard—went away to hide his shame in exile, taking his son Frederick Augustus with him.”

“He was surely mad,” remarked Chauvenet, sipping a cordial. “He is much better dead and out of the way for the good of Austria. Francis, as I say, is a good fellow. We have hunted together, and I know him well.”

They fell to talking about the lost sons of royal houses—and a goodly number there have been, even in these later centuries—and then of the latest marriages between American women and titled foreigners. Chauvenet was now leading the conversation; it might even have seemed to a critical listener that he was guiding it with a certain intention.

He laughed as though at the remembrance of something amusing, and held the little company while he bent over a candle to light a cigar.

“With all due respect to our American host, I must say that a title in America goes further than anywhere else in the world. I was at Bar Harbor three years ago when the Baron von Kissel devastated that region. He made sad havoc among the ladies that summer; the rest of us simply had no place to stand. You remember, gentlemen,”—and Chauvenet looked slowly around the listening circle,—“that the unexpected arrival of the excellent Ambassador of Austria-Hungary caused the Baron to leave Bar Harbor between dark and daylight. The story was that he got off in a sail-boat; and the next we heard of him he was masquerading under some title in San Francisco, where he proved to be a dangerous forger. You all remember that the papers were full of his performances for a while, but he was a lucky rascal, and always disappeared at the proper psychological moment. He had, as you may say, the cosmopolitan accent, and was the most plausible fellow alive.”

Chauvenet held his audience well in hand, for nearly every one remembered the brilliant exploits of the fraudulent baron, and all were interested in what promised to be some new information about him. Armitage, listening intently to Chauvenet’s recital, felt his blood quicken, and his face flushed for a moment. His cigarette case lay upon the edge of the table, and he snapped it shut and fingered it nervously as he listened.

“It’s my experience,” continued Chauvenet, “that we never meet a person once only—there’s always a second meeting somewhere; and I was not at all surprised when I ran upon my old friend the baron in Germany last fall.”

“At his old tricks, I suppose,” observed some one.

“No; that was the strangest part of it. He’s struck a deeper game—though I’m blessed if I can make it out—he’s dropped the title altogether, and now calls himself Mister—I’ve forgotten for the moment the rest of it, but it is an English name. He’s made a stake somehow, and travels about in decent comfort. He passes now as an American—his English is excellent—and he hints at large American interests.”

“He probably has forged securities to sell,” commented the German. “I know those fellows. The business is best done quietly.”

“I dare say,” returned Chauvenet.

“Of course, you greeted him as a long-lost friend,” remarked Claiborne leadingly.

“No; I wanted to make sure of him; and, strangely enough, he assisted me in a very curious way.”

All felt that they were now to hear the dénouement of the story, and several men bent forward in their absorption with their elbows on the table. Chauvenet smiled and resumed, with a little shrug of his shoulders.

“Well, I must go back a moment to say that the man I knew at Bar Harbor had a real crest—the ladies to whom he wrote notes treasured them, I dare say, because of the pretty insignium. He had it engraved on his cigarette case, a bird of some kind tiptoeing on a helmet, and beneath there was a motto, Fide non armis.”

“The devil!” exclaimed the young German. “Why, that’s very like—”

“Very like the device of the Austrian Schomburgs. Well, I remembered the cigarette case, and one night at a concert—in Berlin, you know—I chanced to sit with some friends at a table quite near where he sat alone; I had my eye on him, trying to assure myself of his identity, when, in closing his cigarette case, it fell almost at my feet, and I bumped heads with a waiter as I picked it up—I wanted to make sure—and handed it to him, the imitation baron.”

“That was your chance to startle him a trifle, I should say,” remarked the German.

“He was the man, beyond doubt. There was no mistaking the cigarette ease. What I said was,”—continued Chauvenet,—“‘Allow me, Baron!’”

“Well spoken!” exclaimed the Spanish officer.

“Not so well, either,” laughed Chauvenet. “He had the best of it—he’s a clever man, I am obliged to admit! He said—” and Chauvenet’s mirth stifled him for a moment.

“Yes; what was it?” demanded the German impatiently.

“He said: ‘Thank you, waiter!’ and put the cigarette case back into his pocket!”

They all laughed. Then Captain Claiborne’s eyes fell upon the table and rested idly on John Armitage’s cigarette case—on the smoothly-worn gold of the surface, on the snowy falcon and the silver helmet on which the bird poised. He started slightly, then tossed his napkin carelessly on the table so that it covered the gold trinket completely.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “if we are going to show ourselves at the Darlington ball we’ll have to run along.”

Below, in the coat room, Claiborne was fastening the frogs of his military overcoat when Armitage, who had waited for the opportunity, spoke to him.

“That story is a lie, Claiborne. That man never saw me or my cigarette case in Berlin; and moreover, I was never at Bar Harbor in my life. I gave you some account of myself on the King Edward—every word of it is true.”

“You should face him—you must have it out with him!” exclaimed Claiborne, and Armitage saw the conflict and uncertainty in the officer’s eyes.

“But the time hasn’t come for that—”

“Then if there is something between you,”—began Claiborne, the doubt now clearly dominant.

“There is undoubtedly a great deal between us, and there will be more before we reach the end.”

Dick Claiborne was a perfectly frank, outspoken fellow, and this hint of mystery by a man whose character had just been boldly assailed angered him.

“Good God, man! I know as much about Chauvenet as I do about you. This thing is ugly, as you must see. I don’t like it, I tell you! You’ve got to do more than deny a circumstantial story like that by a fellow whose standing here is as good as yours! If you don’t offer some better explanation of this by to-morrow night I shall have to ask you to cut my acquaintance—and the acquaintance of my family!”

Armitage’s face was grave, but he smiled as he took his hat and stick.

“I shall not be able to satisfy you of my respectability by to-morrow night, Captain Claiborne. My own affairs must wait on larger matters.”

“Then you need never take the trouble!”

“In my own time you shall be quite fully satisfied,” said Armitage quietly, and turned away.

He was not among the others of the Claiborne party when they got into their carriages to go to the ball. He went, in fact, to the telegraph office and sent a message to Oscar Breunig, Lamar, Virginia, giving notice of a shipment of steers.

Then he returned to the New American and packed his belongings.

CHAPTER XII

A CAMP IN THE MOUNTAINS

—Who climbed the blue Virginia hills
Against embattled foes;
And planted there, in valleys fair,
The lily and the rose;
Whose fragrance lives in many lands,
Whose beauty stars the earth,
And lights the hearths of happy homes With loveliness and worth.

—Francis O. Ticknor.

The study of maps and time-tables is a far more profitable business than appears. John Armitage possessed a great store of geographical knowledge as interpreted in such literature. He could tell you, without leaving his room, and probably without opening his trunk, the quickest way out of Tokio, or St. Petersburg, or Calcutta, or Cinch Tight, Montana, if you suddenly received a cablegram calling you to Vienna or Paris or Washington from one of those places.

Such being the case, it was remarkable that he should have started for a point in the Virginia hills by way of Boston, thence to Norfolk by coastwise steamer, and on to Lamar by lines of railroad whose schedules would have been the despair of unhardened travelers. He had expressed his trunks direct, and traveled with two suitcases and an umbrella. His journey, since his boat swung out into Massachusetts Bay, had been spent in gloomy speculations, and two young women booked for Baltimore wrongly attributed his reticence and aloofness to a grievous disappointment in love.

He had wanted time to think—to ponder his affairs—to devise some way out of his difficulties, and to contrive the defeat of Chauvenet. Moreover, his relations to the Claibornes were in an ugly tangle: Chauvenet had dealt him a telling blow in a quarter where he particularly wished to appear to advantage.

He jumped out of the day coach in which he had accomplished the last stage of his journey to Lamar, just at dawn, and found Oscar with two horses waiting.

“Good morning,” said Oscar, saluting.

“You are prompt, Sergeant,” and Armitage shook hands with him.

As the train roared on through the valley, Armitage opened one of the suit-cases and took out a pair of leather leggings, which he strapped on. Then Oscar tied the cases together with a rope and hung them across his saddle-bow.

“The place—what of it?” asked Armitage.

“There may be worse—I have not decided.”

Armitage laughed aloud.

“Is it as bad as that?”

The man was busy tightening the saddle girths, and he answered Armitage’s further questions with soldierlike brevity.

“You have been here—”

“Two weeks, sir.”

“And nothing has happened? It is a good report.”

“It is good for the soul to stand on mountains and look at the world. You will like that animal—yes? He is lighter than a cavalry horse. Mine, you will notice, is a trifle heavier. I bought them at a stock farm in another valley, and rode them up to the place.”

The train sent back loud echoes. A girl in a pink sun-bonnet rode up on a mule and carried off the mail pouch. The station agent was busy inside at his telegraph instruments and paid no heed to the horsemen. Save for a few huts clustered on the hillside, there were no signs of human habitation in sight. The lights in a switch target showed yellow against the growing dawn.

“I am quite ready, sir,” reported Oscar, touching his hat. “There is nothing here but the station; the settlement is farther on our way.”

“Then let us be off,” said Armitage, swinging into the saddle.

Oscar led the way in silence along a narrow road that clung close to the base of a great pine-covered hill. The morning was sharp and the horses stepped smartly, the breath of their nostrils showing white on the air. The far roar and whistle of the train came back more and more faintly, and when it had quite ceased Armitage sighed, pushed his soft felt hat from his face, and settled himself more firmly in his saddle. The keen air was as stimulating as wine, and he put his horse to the gallop and rode ahead to shake up his blood.

“It is good,” said the stolid cavalryman, as Armitage wheeled again into line with him.

“Yes, it is good,” repeated Armitage.

A peace descended upon him that he had not known in many days. The light grew as the sun rose higher, blazing upon them like a brazen target through deep clefts in the mountains. The morning mists retreated before them to farther ridges and peaks, and the beautiful gray-blue of the Virginia hills delighted Armitage’s eyes. The region was very wild. Here and there from some mountaineer’s cabin a light penciling of smoke stole upward. They once passed a boy driving a yoke of steers. After several miles the road, that had hung midway of the rough hill, dipped down sharply, and they came out into another and broader valley, where there were tilled farms, and a little settlement, with a blacksmith shop and a country store, post-office and inn combined. The storekeeper stood in the door, smoking a cob pipe. Seeing Oscar, he went inside and brought out some letters and newspapers, which he delivered in silence.

“This is Lamar post-office,” announced Oscar.

“There must be some mail here for me,” said Armitage.

Oscar handed him several long envelopes—they bore the name of the Bronx Loan and Trust Company, whose office in New York was his permanent address, and he opened and read a number of letters and cablegrams that had been forwarded. Their contents evidently gave him satisfaction, for he whistled cheerfully as he thrust them into his pocket.

“You keep in touch with the world, do you, Oscar? It is commendable.”

“I take a Washington paper—it relieves the monotony, and I can see where the regiments are moving, and whether my old captain is yet out of the hospital, and what happened to my lieutenant in his court-martial about the pay accounts. One must observe the world—yes? At the post-office back there”—he jerked his head to indicate—“it is against the law to sell whisky in a post-office, so that storekeeper with the red nose and small yellow eyes keeps it in a brown jug in the back room.”

“To be sure,” laughed Armitage. “I hope it is a good article.”

“It is vile,” replied Oscar. “His brother makes it up in the hills, and it is as strong as wood lye.”

“Moonshine! I have heard of it. We must have some for rainy days.”

It was a new world to John Armitage, and his heart was as light as the morning air as he followed Oscar along the ruddy mountain road. He was in Virginia, and somewhere on this soil, perhaps in some valley like the one through which he rode, Shirley Claiborne had gazed upon blue distances, with ridge rising against ridge, and dark pine-covered slopes like these he saw for the first time. He had left his affairs in Washington in a sorry muddle; but he faced the new day with a buoyant spirit, and did not trouble himself to look very far ahead. He had a definite business before him; his cablegrams were reassuring on that point. The fact that he was, in a sense, a fugitive did not trouble him in the least. He had no intention of allowing Jules Chauvenet’s assassins to kill him, or of being locked up in a Washington jail as the false Baron von Kissel. If he admitted that he was not John Armitage, it would be difficult to prove that he was anybody else—a fact touching human testimony which Jules Chauvenet probably knew perfectly well.

On the whole he was satisfied that he had followed the wisest course thus far. The broad panorama of the morning hills communicated to his spirit a growing elation. He began singing in German a ballad that recited the sorrows of a pale maiden prisoner in a dark tower on the Rhine, whence her true knight rescued her, after many and fearsome adventures. On the last stave he ceased abruptly, and an exclamation of wonder broke from him.

They had been riding along a narrow trail that afforded, as Oscar said, a short cut across a long timbered ridge that lay between them and Armitage’s property. The path was rough and steep, and the low-hanging pine boughs and heavy underbrush increased the difficulties of ascent. Straining to the top, a new valley, hidden until now, was disclosed in long and beautiful vistas.

Armitage dropped the reins upon the neck of his panting horse.

“It is a fine valley—yes?” asked Oscar.

“It is a possession worthy of the noblest gods!” replied Armitage. “There is a white building with colonnades away over there—is it the house of the reigning deity?”

“It is not, sir,” answered Oscar, who spoke English with a kind of dogged precision, giving equal value to all words. “It is a vast hotel where the rich spend much money. That place at the foot of the hills—do you see?—it is there they play a foolish game with sticks and little balls—”

“Golf? Is it possible!”

“There is no doubt of it, sir. I have seen the fools myself—men and women. The place is called Storm Valley.”

Armitage slapped his thigh sharply, so that his horse started.

“Yes; you are probably right, Oscar, I have heard of the place. And those houses that lie beyond there in the valley belong to gentlemen of taste and leisure who drink the waters and ride horses and play the foolish game you describe with little white balls.”

“I could not tell it better,” responded Oscar, who had dismounted, like a good trooper, to rest his horse.

“And our place—is it below there?” demanded Armitage.

“It is not, sir. It lies to the west. But a man may come here when he is lonesome, and look at the people and the gentlemen’s houses. At night it is a pleasure to see the lights, and sometimes, when the wind is right, there is music of bands.”

“Poor Oscar!” laughed Armitage.

His mood had not often in his life been so high.

On his flight northward from Washington and southward down the Atlantic capes, the thought that Shirley Claiborne and her family must now believe him an ignoble scoundrel had wrought misgivings and pain in his heart; but at least he would soon be near her—even now she might be somewhere below in the lovely valley, and he drew off his hat and stared down upon what was glorified and enchanted ground.

“Let us go,” he said presently.

Oscar saluted, standing bridle in hand.

“You will find it easier to walk,” he said, and, leading their horses, they retraced their steps for several hundred yards along the ridge, then mounted and proceeded slowly down again until they came to a mountain road. Presently a high wire fence followed at their right, where the descent was sharply arrested, and they came to a barred wooden gate, and beside it a small cabin, evidently designed for a lodge.

“This is the place, sir,” and Oscar dismounted and threw open the gate.

The road within followed the rough contour of the hillside, that still turned downward until it broadened into a wooded plateau. The flutter of wings in the underbrush, the scamper of squirrels, the mad lope of a fox, kept the eye busy. A deer broke out of a hazel thicket, stared at the horsemen in wide-eyed amazement, then plunged into the wood and disappeared.

“There are deer, and of foxes a great plenty,” remarked Oscar.

He turned toward Armitage and added with lowered voice:

“It is different from our old hills and forests—yes? but sometimes I have been homesick.”

“But this is not so bad, Oscar; and some day you shall go back!”

“Here,” said the soldier, as they swung out of the wood and into the open, “is what they call the Port of Missing Men.”

There was a broad park-like area that tended downward almost imperceptibly to a deep defile. They dismounted and walked to the edge and looked down the steep sides. A little creek flowed out of the wood and emptied itself with a silvery rush into the vale, caught its breath below, and became a creek again. A slight suspension bridge flung across the defile had once afforded a short cut to Storm Springs, but it was now in disrepair, and at either end was posted “No Thoroughfare.” Armitage stepped upon the loose planking and felt the frail thing vibrate under his weight.

“It is a bad place,” remarked Oscar, as the bridge creaked and swung, and Armitage laughed and jumped back to solid ground.

The surface of this harbor of the hills was rough with outcropping rock. In some great stress of nature the trees had been destroyed utterly, and only a scant growth of weeds and wild flowers remained. The place suggested a battle-ground for the winds, where they might meet and struggle in wild combat; or more practically, it was large enough for the evolutions of a squadron of cavalry.

“Why the name?” asked Armitage.

“There were gray soldiers of many battles—yes?—who fought the long fight against the blue soldiers in the Valley of Virginia; and after the war was over some of them would not surrender—no; but they marched here, and stayed a long time, and kept their last flag, and so the place was called the Port of Missing Men. They built that stone wall over there beyond the patch of cedars, and camped. And a few died, and their graves are there by the cedars. Yes; they had brave hearts,” and Oscar lifted his hat as though he were saluting the lost legion.

They turned again to the road and went forward at a gallop, until, half a mile from the gate, they came upon a clearing and a low, red-roofed bungalow.

“Your house, sir,” and Oscar swung himself down at the steps of a broad veranda. He led the horses away to a barn beyond the house, while Armitage surveyed the landscape. The bungalow stood on a rough knoll, and was so placed as to afford a splendid view of a wide region. Armitage traversed the long veranda, studying the landscape, and delighting in the far-stretching pine-covered barricade of hills. He was aroused by Oscar, who appeared carrying the suit-cases.

“There shall be breakfast,” said the man.

He threw open the doors and they entered a wide, bare hall, with a fireplace, into which Oscar dropped a match.

“All one floor—plenty of sleeping-rooms, sir—a place to eat here—a kitchen beyond—a fair barracks for a common soldier; that is all.”

“It is enough. Throw these bags into the nearest bedroom, if there is no choice, and camp will be established.”

“This is yours—the baggage that came by express is there. A wagon goes with the place, and I brought the things up yesterday. There is a shower-bath beyond the rear veranda. The mountain water is off the ice, but—you will require hot water for shaving—is it not so?”

“You oppress me with luxuries, Oscar. Wind up the clock, and nothing will be wanting.”

Oscar unstrapped the trunks and then stood at attention in the door. He had expected Armitage to condemn the place in bitter language, but the proprietor of the abandoned hunting preserve was in excellent spirits, and whistled blithely as he drew out his keys.

“The place was built by fools,” declared Oscar gloomily.

“Undoubtedly! There is a saying that fools build houses and wise men live in them—you see where that leaves us, Oscar. Let us be cheerful!”

He tried the shower and changed his raiment, while Oscar prepared coffee and laid a cloth on the long table before the fire. When Armitage appeared, coffee steamed in the tin pot in which it had been made. Bacon, eggs and toast were further offered.

“You have done excellently well, Oscar. Go get your own breakfast.” Armitage dropped a lump of sugar into his coffee cup and surveyed the room.

A large map of Virginia and a series of hunting prints hung on the untinted walls, and there were racks for guns, and a work-bench at one end of the room, where guns might be taken apart and cleaned. A few novels, several three-year-old magazines and a variety of pipes remained on the shelf above the fireplace. The house offered possibilities of meager comfort, and that was about all. Armitage remembered what the agent through whom he had made the purchase had said—that the place had proved too isolated for even a hunting preserve, and that its only value was in the timber. He was satisfied with his bargain, and would not set up a lumber mill yet a while. He lighted a cigar and settled himself in an easy chair before the fire, glad of the luxury of peace and quiet after his circuitous journey and the tumult of doubt and question that had shaken him.

He slit the wrapper of the Washington newspaper that Oscar had brought from the mountain post-office and scanned the head-lines. He read with care a dispatch from London that purported to reflect the sentiment of the continental capitals toward Charles Louis, the new Emperor-king of Austria-Hungary, and the paper dropped upon his knees and he stared into the fire. Then he picked up a paper of earlier date and read all the foreign despatches and the news of Washington. He was about to toss the paper aside, when his eyes fell upon a boldly-headlined article that caused his heart to throb fiercely. It recited the sudden reappearance of the fraudulent Baron von Kissel in Washington, and described in detail the baron’s escapades at Bar Harbor and his later career in California and elsewhere. Then followed a story, veiled in careful phrases, but based, so the article recited, upon information furnished by a gentleman of extensive acquaintance on both sides of the Atlantic, that Baron von Kissel, under a new pseudonym, and with even more daring effrontery, had within a fortnight sought to intrench himself in the most exclusive circles of Washington.

Armitage’s cigar slipped from his fingers and fell upon the brick hearth as he read:

“The boldness of this clever adventurer is said to have reached a climax in this city within a few days. He had, under the name of Armitage, palmed himself off upon members of one of the most distinguished families of the capital, whom he had met abroad during the winter. A young gentleman of this family, who, it will suffice to say, bears a commission and title from the American government, entertained a small company of friends at a Washington club only a few nights ago, and this plausible adventurer was among the guests. He was recognized at once by one of the foreigners present, who, out of consideration for the host and fellow guests, held his tongue; but it is understood that this gentleman sought Armitage privately and warned him to leave Washington, which accounts for the fact that the sumptuous apartments at the New American in which Mr. John Armitage, alias Baron von Kissel, had established himself were vacated immediately. None of those present at the supper will talk of the matter, but it has been the subject of lively gossip for several days, and the German embassy is said to have laid before the Washington police all the information in its archives relating to the American adventures of this impudent scoundrel.”

Armitage rose, dropped the paper into the fire, and, with his elbow resting on the mantel-shelf, watched it burn. He laughed suddenly and faced about, his back to the flames. Oscar stood at attention in the middle of the room.

“Shall we unpack—yes?”

“It is a capital idea,” said John Armitage.

“I was striker for my captain also, who had fourteen pairs of boots and a bad disposition—and his uniforms—yes? He was very pretty to look at on a horse.”

“The ideal is high, Oscar, but I shall do my best. That one first, please.”

The contents of the two trunks were disposed of deftly by Oscar as Armitage directed. One of the bedrooms was utilized as a closet, and garments for every imaginable occasion were brought forth. There were stout English tweeds for the heaviest weather, two dress suits, and Norfolk jackets in corduroy. The owner’s taste ran to grays and browns, it seemed, and he whimsically ordered his raiment grouped by colors as he lounged about with a pipe in his mouth.

“You may hang those scarfs on the string provided by my predecessor, Sergeant. They will help our color scheme. That pale blue doesn’t blend well in our rainbow—put it in your pocket and wear it, with my compliments; and those tan shoes are not bad for the Virginia mud—drop them here. Those gray campaign hats are comfortable—give the oldest to me. And there is a riding-cloak I had forgotten I ever owned—I gave gold for it to a Madrid tailor. The mountain nights are cool, and the thing may serve me well,” he added whimsically.

He clapped on the hat and flung the cloak upon his shoulders. It fell to his heels, and he gathered it together with one hand at the waist and strutted out into the hall, whither Oscar followed, staring, as Armitage began to declaim:

“‘Give me my robe; put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me!’

“’Tis an inky cloak, as dark as Hamlet’s mind; I will go forth upon a bloody business, and who hinders me shall know the bitter taste of death. Oscar, by the faith of my body, you shall be the Horatio of the tragedy. Set me right afore the world if treason be my undoing, and while we await the trumpets, cast that silly pair of trousers as rubbish to the void, and choose of mine own raiment as thou wouldst, knave! And now—

“‘Nothing can we call our own but death,
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings.’”

Then he grew serious, tossed the cloak and hat upon a bench that ran round the room, and refilled and lighted his pipe. Oscar, soberly unpacking, saw Armitage pace the hall floor for an hour, deep in thought.

“Oscar,” he called abruptly, “how far is it down to Storm Springs?”

“A forced march, and you are there in an hour and a half, sir.”

CHAPTER XIII

THE LADY OF THE PERGOLA

April, April,
Laugh, thy girlish laughter;
Then, the moment after,
Weep thy girlish, tears!
April, that mine ears
Like a lover greetest,
If I tell thee, sweetest,
All my hopes and fears,
April, April,
Laugh thy golden laughter,
But, the moment after, Weep thy golden tears!

—William Watson.

A few photographs of foreign scenes tacked on the walls; a Roman blanket hung as a tapestry over the mantel; a portfolio and traveler’s writing materials distributed about a table produced for the purpose, and additions to the meager book-shelf—a line of Baedekers, a pocket atlas, a comprehensive American railway guide, several volumes of German and French poetry—and the place was not so bad. Armitage slept for an hour after a simple luncheon had been prepared by Oscar, studied his letters and cablegrams—made, in fact, some notes in regard to them—and wrote replies. Then, at four o’clock, he told Oscar to saddle the horses.

“It is spring, and in April a man’s blood will not be quiet. We shall go forth and taste the air.”

He had studied the map of Lamar County with care, and led the way out of his own preserve by the road over which they had entered in the morning. Oscar and his horses were a credit to the training of the American army, and would have passed inspection anywhere. Armitage watched his adjutant with approval. The man served without question, and, quicker of wit than of speech, his buff-gauntleted hand went to his hat-brim whenever Armitage addressed him.

They sought again the spot whence Armitage had first looked down upon Storm Valley, and he opened his pocket map, the better to clarify his ideas of the region.

“We shall go down into the valley, Oscar,” he said; and thereafter it was he that led.

They struck presently into an old road that had been an early highway across the mountains. Above and below the forest hung gloomily, and passing clouds darkened the slopes and occasionally spilled rain. Armitage drew on his cloak and Oscar enveloped himself in a slicker as they rode through a sharp shower. At a lower level they came into fair weather again, and, crossing a bridge, rode down into Storm Valley. The road at once bore marks of care; and they passed a number of traps that spoke unmistakably of cities, and riders whose mounts knew well the bridle-paths of Central Park. The hotel loomed massively before them, and beyond were handsome estates and ambitious mansions scattered through the valley and on the lower slopes.

Armitage paused in a clump of trees and dismounted.

“You will stay here until I come back. And remember that we don’t know any one; and at our time of life, Oscar, one should be wary of making new acquaintances.”

He tossed his cloak over the saddle and walked toward the inn. The size of the place and the great number of people going and coming surprised him, but in the numbers he saw his own security, and he walked boldly up the steps of the main hotel entrance. He stepped into the long corridor of the inn, where many people lounged about, and heard with keen satisfaction and relief the click of a telegraph instrument that seemed at once to bring him into contact with the remote world. He filed his telegrams and walked the length of the broad hall, his riding-crop under his arm. The gay banter and laughter of a group of young men and women just returned from a drive gave him a touch of heartache, for there was a girl somewhere in the valley whom he had followed across the sea, and these people were of her own world—they undoubtedly knew her; very likely she came often to this huge caravansary and mingled with them.

At the entrance he passed Baron von Marhof, who, by reason of the death of his royal chief, had taken a cottage at the Springs to emphasize his abstention from the life of the capital. The Ambassador lifted his eyes and bowed to Armitage, as he bowed to a great many young men whose names he never remembered; but, oddly enough, the Baron paused, stared after Armitage for a moment, then shook his head and walked on with knit brows. Armitage had lifted his hat and passed out, tapping his leg with his crop.

He walked toward the private houses that lay scattered over the valley and along the gradual slope of the hills as though carelessly flung from a dice box. Many of the places were handsome estates, with imposing houses set amid beautiful gardens. Half a mile from the hotel he stopped a passing negro to ask who owned a large house that stood well back from the road. The man answered; he seemed anxious to impart further information, and Armitage availed himself of the opportunity.

“How near is Judge Claiborne’s place?” he asked.

The man pointed. It was the next house, on the right-hand side; and Armitage smiled to himself and strolled on.

He looked down in a moment upon a pretty estate, distinguished by its formal garden, but with the broad acres of a practical farm stretching far out into the valley. The lawn terraces were green, broken only by plots of spring flowers; the walks were walled in box and privet; the house, of the pillared colonial type, crowned a series of terraces. A long pergola, with pillars topped by red urns, curved gradually through the garden toward the mansion. Armitage followed a side road along the brick partition wall and contemplated the inner landscape. The sharp snap of a gardener’s shears far up the slope was the only sound that reached him. It was a charming place, and he yielded to a temptation to explore it. He dropped over the wall and strolled away through the garden, the smell of warm earth, moist from the day’s light showers, and the faint odor of green things growing, sweet in his nostrils. He walked to the far end of the pergola, sat down on a wooden bench, and gave himself up to reverie. He had been denounced as an impostor; he was on Claiborne soil; and the situation required thought.

It was while he thus pondered his affairs that Shirley, walking over the soft lawn from a neighboring estate, came suddenly upon him.

Her head went up with surprise and—he was sure—with disdain. She stopped abruptly as he jumped to his feet.

“I am caught—in flagrante delicto! I can only plead guilty and pray for mercy.”

“They said—they said you had gone to Mexico?” said Shirley questioningly.

“Plague take the newspapers! How dare they so misrepresent me!” he laughed.

“Yes, I read those newspaper articles with a good deal of interest. And my brother—”

“Yes, your brother—he is the best fellow in the world!”

She mused, but a smile of real mirth now played over her face and lighted her eyes.

“Those are generous words, Mr. Armitage. My brother warned me against you in quite unequivocal language. He told me about your match-box—”

“Oh, the cigarette case!” and he held it up. “It’s really mine—and I’m going to keep it. It was very damaging evidence. It would argue strongly against me in any court of law.”

“Yes, I believe that is true.” And she looked at the trinket with frank interest.

“But I particularly do not wish to have to meet that charge in any court of law, Miss Claiborne.”

She met his gaze very steadily, and her eyes were grave. Then she asked, in much the same tone that she would have used if they had been very old friends and he had excused himself for not riding that day, or for not going upon a hunt, or to the theater:

“Why?”

“Because I have a pledge to keep and a work to do, and if I were forced to defend myself from the charge of being the false Baron von Kissel, everything would be spoiled. You see, unfortunately—most unfortunately—I am not quite without responsibilities, and I have come down into the mountains, where I hope not to be shot and tossed over a precipice until I have had time to watch certain people and certain events a little while. I tried to say as much to Captain Claiborne, but I saw that my story did not impress him. And now I have said the same thing to you—”

He waited, gravely watching her, hat in hand.

“And I have stood here and listened to you, and done exactly what Captain Claiborne would not wish me to do under any circumstances,” said Shirley.

“You are infinitely kind and generous—”

“No. I do not wish you to think me either of those things—of course not!”

Her conclusion was abrupt and pointed.

“Then—”