Part 16

He drank both the bottles, and when he had finished, he asked for more like every other Boche will do. Then he chose the front bedroom and threw himself down on the bed in a drunken sleep.

When the next morning broke the French woman went to awaken the thief and while the latter was making his toilet little Boudru entered. He regarded the Hun with gravity for at least five minutes and then delivered himself of his opinion.

"I don't like you," he said slowly, regarding the Hun, with his elfish eyes. "I don't like you. I think you may be like the man in the English soldiers' story, who turned into a pig--a baby killer perhaps. It is because of your red hair that I think you may turn ..."

The man from Stettin who had been trying to drag a comb through his horrible beard and hair, turned, and he looked like a big red devil, the sun being on his head, and red beard and all.

"What's that?" he said, as he lurched ominously across the room. He had swallowed the contents of a flask of Benedictine which he had taken from his rucksack, and the repeated drinks were taking effect.

"I'll sweep the house, so there isn't a bug in a blanket left--you damned brat!" He was bellowing like a bull, chewing his red beard and muttering to himself. As he passed a table, he knocked the empty flask on the floor. It did not break, and he viciously stamped his feet on it, smashing it to pieces. He began to go mad from that moment. As he kicked the wreckage about the room, his glance fell upon his rifle with the fixed bayonet. And then the swine-dog ran amok. Boudru stood with his back to the door: the blood froze in his veins, and his little body stiffened into absolute rigidity.

"Turn into a pig!" shrieked the Hun. "What did you say? Turn into ..."

The bayonet flashed, and little Boudru--but what followed shall not be printed. It would be passing the decent bounds of descriptive writing to put it in black and white. It is sufficient to say that some minutes later the Hun prised the floor-boards up with his bayonet, and Boudru, from that moment, without warning, or leaving any trace, disappeared from the world. He returned in the fullness of time. And this was the way of it.

For the hundredth time that day, the Hun had gone into the bedroom to look out of the bulgy bedroom window. Fear began to come over him without any warning, and he was thinking of little Boudru down there in the dark. The thing within him that served him for a heart was beating queer rhythms ... the beating sounded like a regiment of British Infantry on the march.

"Look," said he to the housewife, "look out on the road. Do you see soldiers?"

The good woman, distraught between suspense and hope for her little one, who had been missing for six long hours, blinked away a tear on her lashes and peered through the diamond panes.

No one was to be seen. But between three and four in the morning the first faint champing of marching feet could be heard and the Hun came down from the bedroom looking as pale as death. He opened the door and stood there listening. The insolent crunch, crunch, crunch of heavy nail-studded service boots came nearer, and a khaki column appeared on the winding road. The housewife, whose aching eyes had searched the road for Boudru all day, saw them too.

"Look," she cried, "look! The English soldiers are coming. Do you see?"

They were coming!

The man from Stettin rushed up to the bedroom, and jumped into the oak chest.

"Not tell the English! Not tell!"

Fifteen or twenty soldiers were to be heard grounding rifles and throwing off their equipment in front of the house.

Entered here Sergeant Stansfield, and shouted gaily to the housewife, but the moment he looked into her pale and worn face he understood that some sorrow had befallen her. Before he could hold her she had slid silently down on the floor, at his feet, and covered her face. "Ah,--ah,--ah! O God, help and pity me! They have taken my little son," she cried.

At this moment a soldier rushed in at the door. "I think there is a man who looks like a Boche trying to get out of the bedroom window!" he said. "Will you come, Sergeant? Quick!"

The sergeant went quickly, and returned with some men with fixed bayonets and led them up to the bedroom: He told them to break in. The man was on his knees, with his horrible hands lifted up in supplication. The soldiers kicked the man up and made him go downstairs into the front room.

"See!" said a soldier, who held his bayonet ready, "there is blood on his sleeve." The Hun cursed within his heart.

"It was none of my shedding," he whimpered.

"I had not said so," returned the sergeant quietly.

"We are here to find that out. Perhaps you know something about the lost child?"

"I had no hand in it, God strike me dead!" the Hun answered fervently.

At that moment there was a sort of earthquake upstairs, a clash of falling bricks and slates, a crashing pandemonium that sent everyone's heart to his mouth. A shell had struck the roof. Then the ceiling above bulged like a stuffed sack and burst in a cloud of pink-yellow dust. Something dropped with a dead thud fair and square in the centre of the fine oak refectory table. Sergeant Stansfield bent forward, looked, and then started back. He gave a cry and turned sickly white. On the table lay the little huddled form of Boudru. The morning sun that had been paling the candles in the sconces, struck the golden hair and staring eyes, that had a few hours before, held all the spring-time; struck, too, a heavy scarlet patch on the little overall, as the sergeant tenderly turned the little body over....

"Oh! God of Mercy!... How horrible! A bayonet through his heart ..." he muttered. The Hun's sleeve spotted with blood came back to his mind, and filled him with blind, unreasoning rage.

"You swine," he said. "I'll----"