Part 4

Later, Gray cautiously opened the door and drew in the luggage.

Ten minutes later both young men came leisurely out of the room, locking the door on the outside. They each carried hand luggage. Halkett lighted a cigarette.

At the desk Gray requested that the gentlemen in No. 23 should not be disturbed that night, as they were lying down and in need of repose. Which was true.

Then both young men departed in a cab. At the railroad station, however, an unusually generous stranger offered Gray a motor cycle for nothing. So he strapped his bag to it, nodded a smiling adieu to Halkett, and departed.

Halkett bought a ticket to Maastricht, Holland, which he had no idea of using, and presently came out of the station and walked eastward rather rapidly. A man who also had bought a ticket for Maastricht rose from his seat in the waiting room and walked stealthily after him, making a signal to another man.

This second man immediately stepped into a station telephone booth and called up room 23 at the Hotel St. Antoine, where two German gentlemen, badly battered, were now conferring with a third German gentleman who had paid no attention to instructions from the hotel office but had gone to room 23, knocked until out of patience, and had then summoned the maitre d'hotel, who unlocked the door with a master-key.

Which operation revealed two Teutons flat on their backs, very carefully tied up with rope and artistically gagged.

This unbattered gentleman now conversed over the telephone with the man at the railroad station.

A few moments later he and the two battered ones left the hotel hastily in a taxicab, joined the man at the railroad station, and drove rapidly eastward.

And before forty-eight hours had elapsed, each one of these four men operating in pairs, had attempted to kill the young man named Halkett. Twice he got away. The third time two of them succeeded in locating him in the little town of Diekirch, a town which Halkett was becoming more and more anxious to leave, as he finally began to realize what a hornet's nest he and his friend Gray had succeeded in stirring up.

And all the while the invisible net of destiny in which he now found himself entangled was every minute enmeshing in its widening spread new people whose fate was to be linked with his, and who had never even heard of him. Among them was the girl Philippa.

*PROLOGUE*

A narrow-gauge railroad track runs through the woods from Diekirch, connecting the two main lines; and on the deserted wooden platform beside this track stood Halkett, his suitcase in one hand, the other hand in his side pocket, awaiting the shuttle train with an impatience born of deepest anxiety.

The young man's anxiety was presently justified, for, as he sauntered to and fro, uneasily scanning the track and the unbroken woods around him, always keeping his right hand in his coat pocket, two men crept out from behind separate trees in the forest directly behind the platform, and he turned around only in time to obtain a foreshortened and disquieting view of the muzzle of a revolver.

"Hands up--" began the man behind the weapon; but as he was in the very act of saying it, a jet of ammonia entered his mouth through the second button of Halkett's waistcoat, and he reeled backward off the platform, his revolver exploding toward the sky, and fell into the grass, jerking and kicking about like an unhealthy cat in a spasm.

Already Halkett and the other man had clinched; the former raining blows on the latter's Teutonic countenance, which proceeding so dazed, diverted, and bewildered him that he could not seem to find the revolver bulging in his side pocket.

It was an automatic, and Halkett finally got hold of it and hurled it into the woods.

Then he continued the terrible beating which he was administering.

"Get out!" he said in German to the battered man, still battering him. "Get out, or I'll kill you!"

He hit him another cracking blow, turned and wrested the other pistol from the writhing man on the grass, whirled around, and went at the battered one again.

"I've had enough of this!" he breathed, heavily. "I tell you I'll kill you if you bother me again! I could do it now--but it's too much like murder if you're not in uniform!"

The man on the grass had managed to evade suffocation; he got up now and staggered off toward the woods, and Halkett drove his companion after him at the point of his own revolver.

"Keep clear of me!" he said. "If you do any more telephoning or telegraphing it will end in murder. I've had just about enough, and if any more of your friends continue to push this matter after I enter France, just as surely as I warn you now, I'll defend my own life by taking theirs. You can telephone that to them if you want to!"

As he stood on the edge of the wooden platform, revolver lifted, facing the woods where his two assailants had already disappeared, the toy-like whistle of an approaching train broke the hot, July stillness.

Before it stopped, he hurled the remaining revolver into the woods across the track, then, as the train drew up and a guard descended to open a compartment door for him, he cast a last keen glance at the forest behind him.

Nothing stirred there, not even a leaf.

But before the train had been under way five minutes a bullet shattered the glass of the window beside which he had been seated; and he spent the remainder of the journey flat on his back smoking cigarettes and wondering whether he was going to win through to the French frontier, to Paris, to Calais, to London, or whether they'd get him at last and, what was of infinitely greater importance, a long, thin envelope which he carried stitched inside his undershirt.

That was really what mattered, not what might become of a stray Englishman. He knew it; he realized it without any illusion whatever. It was the contents of this envelope that mattered, not his life.