Chapter 7

THE HUT IN THE GROVE

General Marbeau bent with the interest of an expert above the rude table on which the apparatus was installed, and examined it for some moments in silence. Then he straightened up and glanced at Delcassé.

"Well?" asked the latter.

"It is, indeed, a wireless installation, sir," said Marbeau, "or, at least, part of one. Most of the instruments of transmission are here, but there are no recording instruments. In other words, wireless messages might be sent from here, but none could be received--unless this is a recorder of some sort," and he pointed to a small instrument of clock-like appearance which stood on the table.

"No," said Crochard; "that is not a recorder--that is the sender."

"The sender?" repeated Marbeau.

"Yes. You have noticed there is no key?"

"Yes, and I do not understand its absence."

"This device takes the place of it--it was by means of this that the spaced signals were sent. Listen."

He bent above the clock, and the others heard a sound as of a strong spring being wound. Then he stood erect: there were two sharp ticks; then a long white snap of electricity; two ticks and another snap; two ticks and another snap....

"Yes, that is the signal!" cried Marbeau, and bent again above the mechanism. In a moment he understood.

Before the clock-face was a single long hand, a second-hand, terminating in a thin, spring-like strip of platinum. The circumference of the face was divided into sixty spaces, and at every third space was a slender copper pin, which the end of the second-hand touched in passing. Two wires, one connected with the second-hand, the other presumably with the copper pins, ran from the clock down to the heavy batteries on the floor. Every three seconds the circuit was automatically closed, and a long flash sent along the conducting wire out into the air. Marbeau stood listening for a moment longer, then loosened one of the wires. The signals stopped.

"Now let us see the aerial," he said, and led the way outside.

But there was no aerial in sight. Then Crochard's finger pointed out a series of wires among the trees to the left of the hut. Walking directly beneath them, Marbeau saw that there were three wires parallel with each other, and that they were stretched between two trees about fifty feet apart. From each of them dropped a lead-wire, and these were gathered together into the single wire which led into the hut. An arm of wood had been secured to each of the trees, and to these the wires were fastened by means of porcelain insulators.

"But such an aerial would not be effective!" Marbeau protested. "It would be muffled and deadened by the leaves and branches all about it."

"There are no branches in front of it," said Crochard. "If you will look, you will see that they have been very carefully cleared away in that single direction. As I understand wireless, the waves released from those wires up yonder permeate the atmosphere in every direction."

"That is true."

"With equal intensity?"

"No; they would be most intense in the direction in which the wires extend."

"Ah!" said Crochard. "And, as we may perceive from the way in which the trees are trimmed, it was only in that direction that the builder of this affair desired them to penetrate. Can you not guess what that direction is? If you will climb this tree and look along the wires, you will find that they point directly toward the wreck of _La Liberté_."

For a moment, the three stared at Crochard without speaking, then Marbeau threw off his coat and started up the tree. It was not an easy climb, but he was an agile man, and at last he reached the arm to which the wires were affixed. He remained for some moments looking out along them; then he slowly descended.

"It is true," he said, in a low voice, as he resumed his coat. "The wires could hardly have been so placed by accident."

"It was not by accident," said Crochard.

"And yet," went on Marbeau, "I do not see what all this can have to do with the disaster."

"Nor I," agreed M. Delcassé. "And yet as M. Cro----as our friend here says, all this was not done by accident."

"I would suggest," said Crochard, "that we return to M. Delcassé's apartment. We can talk there without fear of being overheard--a thing that is not possible among all these trees."

Marbeau took a last look at the wireless apparatus; then Crochard locked the door of the hut, and gave the key to the Minister.

"Where did you get this key, my friend?" asked Delcassé, looking at it curiously.

"About that there is no mystery," smiled Crochard. "I purchased it, together with that lock yonder, this morning. I found it necessary to break the original lock before I could enter the hut. It may be well to station a guard here," he added, "until you are ready to dismantle the place."

Delcassé nodded, and slipped the key into his pocket; and together they made their way to the waiting carriage.

The trip back was a silent one. Delcassé and Lépine, their brains aching with the effort, were trying to understand; Marbeau, convinced that the explosion could not have been caused by wireless, was marshaling his reasons; and Crochard--Crochard sat with placid countenance gazing straight ahead of him--but that placid countenance masked supreme intellectual effort.

At last the carriage stopped.

"You will wait here," said Delcassé to the driver, and, as soon as he reached his office, summoned his secretary and directed that a guard of four marines be sent by the carriage to the hut in the grove. Then he sat down, rolled a cigarette, and passed tobacco and paper to his companions. "And now," he said, looking at Crochard, "let us hear what you have to tell us."

"There is not much to tell, sir," answered Crochard. "I learned of the existence of this hut yesterday evening. Some children, searching for mushrooms for a friend of mine, who is a restaurateur, happened to see the wires among the trees, and told him of their discovery. He thought it so curious that he at once sent word to me."

"And you, of course, sent word back that he was to tell no one else," said Delcassé, with a smile.

"Yes, I thought that best. I paid a visit to the hut as soon as it was light this morning, entered it, examined it, and convinced myself that it was really a wireless station. Then I made certain inquiries. The grove, it appears, is owned by a gentleman of Marseilles, and was once much larger than it is now. The hut was built for the use of charcoal-burners, but has not been occupied for more than two years. I would suggest that the police ascertain whether the owner was aware he had a tenant."

"We will do so," said Delcassé. "But who was this tenant?"

"There is some doubt on that point," answered Crochard slowly. "That little road is used but seldom, for a better one now leads around the base of the hill; and few people ever have occasion to enter the grove. It was, of course, for this very reason that the hut was chosen for this installation. I have found no one who saw any man at work there. On the other hand, a friend of mine, who has a cabaret on the main road just outside the city gate, has seen pass a number of times within the past week a man who, from his face and dress, was evidently not a Frenchman, and whose actions appeared to my friend to be suspicious."

Delcassé smiled.

"You seem to have many friends," he remarked; "and unusually observant ones."

"Yes," agreed Crochard; "I am fortunate in my friends; and they find it greatly to their interest to keep their eyes open."

"Did you secure a description of this stranger?"

"Yes; but there should have been much more than a mere description. Some of my friends are more intelligent than others. Still, it may be of service. This stranger was a small man, slightly built, with grey hair and bright, dark eyes. His complexion was also rather dark, and my friend hazarded the guess that he was a Spaniard. He was dressed in dark clothes, cut after a fashion not French, and wore a soft, dark hat."

"But that is a splendid description!" cried Delcassé. "What more did you want?"

"Ah, sir," replied Crochard, "if it had been some of my friends, they would have managed to meet this man; they would have engaged him in conversation, have discovered his business and place of abode; instead of which, this friend in question merely sits at the door of his cabaret and watches the man pass! He was not doing his duty--but he will not make such a mistake again!"

"His duty?" echoed Delcassé. "His duty to whom?"

"His duty to me," replied Crochard.

"But I do not understand," said the Minister, more and more amazed. "Why should your friends have any such duty to you?"

Crochard hesitated. Lépine's face was fairly saturnine.

"I cannot explain that to you now, sir," said Crochard, finally. "I can only say that it is part of a system which has existed for a very long time, and of which I now happen to be the head."

Delcassé pondered this for a moment, his eyes on Crochard's face. Then he turned to Lépine.

"You must learn more of this stranger, Lépine," he said. "You, also, are at the head of a system--and a very expensive one."

"Yes, and a good one, sir," said Lépine, quickly. "One which is worth all it costs. But men will not work for money as they do for self-interest; and then, my system is a mere infant beside that of our friend here, which must be at least two hundred years old."

"Oh, much more than that!" said Crochard, quickly, and smiled at Delcassé's astounded face. "Please understand," he added, "that I do not assert that this is the man we want. There is as yet no absolute proof, though I hope soon to have it. But there is one significant fact: when going from the city he frequently carried a heavy bundle, but never when returning."

"That is indeed significant," agreed Delcassé. "But it indicates another thing which astonishes me. If he did all this alone, it was because he had no one to assist him. But if he had no accomplice, who were the two men who watched the destruction of _La Liberté_? And, above all, who is this man who plans, alone and unaided, the destruction of our navy? What is his purpose? Whence did he come? Whither has he gone? Is he a madman--an anarchist?" Delcassé ran his fingers through his hair with a despairing gesture. "He astounds me!" he added. "My brain falters at thought of such a man!"

But Marbeau, to whom much of this talk had been incomprehensible, began at last to understand, and shook his head in violent protest.

"Whoever the man may have been," he broke out, "or whatever his business, it could have had nothing to do with the destruction of _La Liberté_."

Delcassé wheeled upon him.

"Why do you say that?" he demanded.

"Because, sir, it is absurd to suppose that the magazines of the ship could be exploded by wireless. Wireless has no such power. And, in this instance, it is quite easy to prove that they were _not_ so exploded."

"Prove it, then," said the Minister, impatiently.

"In the first place, the signals, which we now know came from that hut up yonder, were first noted on Saturday. They continued for half an hour, and yet no explosion occurred. In the second place, we caused them to be repeated to-day, and again there was no explosion."

"_La Liberté_ was no longer there to explode," Delcassé objected grimly.

"True; but there were other ships near by--_La Patrie_, _La République_, _La Vérité_. These ships and others were also there at the time of the explosion, yet they were not affected, although all of them had precisely the same sort of powder in their magazines that _La Liberté_ had in hers."

"But you have already said that the waves could be intensified in a certain direction," Delcassé pointed out.

"So they can; but they cannot be confined to a channel nor directed at a mark, as a bullet is. The hut in the grove is fully three miles away from the harbour, and I assert that every ship in the harbour felt the waves with the same intensity as _La Liberté_."

"And what is your deduction from all this?" inquired Delcassé.

"My deduction is that those signals did not and could not cause the explosion."

"Then what was their purpose? How do you explain them?"

Marbeau made a gesture of helplessness.

"I do not know what their purpose was; I cannot explain them," he said; "but I am confident that they could not have destroyed _La Liberté_."

"I agree with General Marbeau," said Crochard suddenly.

They all stared at him, astonished that he should admit himself defeated.

"But I would add one word to his deduction," he added. "The word 'alone.'"

"'Alone'?" echoed Delcassé.

"I would make the statement thus: 'Those signals _alone_ did not and could not cause the explosion.'"

Delcassé looked at him with puzzled eyes, and again ran his fingers impatiently through his hair.

"I do not understand," he said. "You are getting beyond me. What is your theory, then?"

The line in Crochard's brow deepened.

"It is a thing, sir," he answered slowly, "which I find difficult to express in words. There is, at the back of my mind, an idea, vague, misty, of which as yet I catch only the dim outlines. My process of reasoning is this: it is certain, as General Marbeau says, that the signals from the hut were, in themselves, harmless, or there would have been other explosions than that on board _La Liberté_. Wireless waves can be directed and concentrated only to a very limited extent. They can be made a little stronger in one general direction than in others, that is all. And, in this case, that general direction would have embraced all the ships at anchor in the harbour.

"There must, then, have been some other force which, at the appointed time, struck from this stream of signals a spark, so to speak, into the magazines of _La Liberté_, one after the other. That there was an appointed time we cannot doubt--we know that it was the moment of sunrise yesterday. That the magazines were fired one at a time, and at spaced intervals we also know. That they could not explode of themselves in that way seems certain.

"You will remember that the signals began more than an hour before sunrise, and continued for at least half an hour afterwards. We know that the signals were sent automatically. Why? Partly, no doubt, because it was necessary that they be absolutely regular; but also because the man who did this thing--who is himself, perhaps, the inventor of the method--chose to make no confidants, to have no accomplices, and he could not himself be in the hut to send the signals. Again you ask why. Not because of danger of discovery, since there was no such danger. I believe it was because it was necessary that he be somewhere else, directing from an angle, perhaps, that other force, so mysterious and so deadly. I seem to see two forces, travelling in converging lines, as two bullets might travel, their point of meeting the magazines of _La Liberté_. At the instant of their meeting, there is a shock, a spark--as though flint and steel met--and the magazine explodes--first the forward magazine, then the after magazine, then the main magazine--one, two, three! This is all mere guesswork, you understand, sir," Crochard added, in another tone, "but so I see it. And, after all, it is susceptible of proof."

"What proof?" demanded Delcassé.

"If my theory is the true one," Crochard explained, "there must have been, somewhere, another installation to create the intercepting force, which, of course, must also be transmitted by ether waves, as wireless is, if it is to penetrate wood and steel. It must have been within an hour's walk--probably half an hour's walk--of the hut in the grove. For remember, the mechanism there was set going an hour before sunrise, and the man had then to reach his other mechanism, and have it ready to start at sunrise. It is for us to discover the place where this second mechanism was installed--and where it probably still remains."

"Yes, that would be proof," agreed Delcassé thoughtfully; "and for myself, I will say that I believe your theory the right one. But you have not yet explained the part played by the two watchers on the quay."

"Their part was that of watchers merely," said Crochard. "They were sent there to observe and to report to their master--as they did."

"As they did?"

"Surely it is evident," Crochard explained, "that, if our theory is true, they would hasten to report. Imagine their master's anxiety until he heard from them! As a matter of fact, their report was filed within fifteen minutes after the explosion. M. Lépine has it in his pocket."

Delcassé stared, uncomprehending; but Lépine, his face suddenly illumined, snatched out his pocket-book and produced the sheets of yellow tissue.

"Ah, yes, certainly!" he cried. "I was blind not to see it! The report was in a form agreed upon: 'We continue our trip as planned. All well.' You will understand now, sir," he added, to Delcassé, "the reason for the high opinion I entertain of this gentleman!"

"But that message was sent to Brussels," objected the Minister.

"It was sent 'restante.' A man was waiting at the post-office to receive it and forward it instantly to Berlin."

Delcassé's face was a study, as he turned this over in his mind.

"What is your reading of the other message?" he asked, at last.

"My reading," answered Crochard, slowly, "is that, at the last moment, the Emperor, appalled at the possible consequences, decided to forbid the atrocity, to which he had, perhaps, been persuaded against his better judgment, or in a moment of passion."

"And if the message had not been delayed, _La Liberté_ would have been saved?"

"Precisely that, sir."

Delcassé's lips were twitching.

"You may be right," he said, thickly; "you may be right; but it seems incredible. After all, it is merely guesswork!"

"You will pardon me, sir, but it is not guesswork," protested Crochard. "M. Lépine will tell you that, in a case of this kind, it must be all or nothing. Every detail, even to the slightest, the most insignificant, must fit perfectly, or they are all worthless. If I am wrong in this detail, I am wrong in all the others; if I am right in the others, I am also right in this. They stand or fall together. And I believe they will stand!"

The great Minister was gazing fascinated at the speaker; for the first time, he caught a real glimpse of his tremendous personality.

"You mean, then," he said, finally, "that if any details we may discover hereafter fail to fit this theory, the theory must be discarded?"

"Discarded utterly and without hesitation," agreed Crochard. "More than that--"

A tap at the door interrupted him.

"Come in," said Delcassé.

His secretary entered, followed by a courier, carrying a portfolio.

"From Paris, sir," said the secretary, and the courier, with a bow, laid the portfolio on the Minister's desk.

Delcassé took from his pocket a tiny key, unlocked the portfolio, drew out a package and glanced at the superscription.

"Ah," he said; "the photographs!" and ripped the package open.

There were some two dozen of them, together with a long typewritten report, which Delcassé glanced through rapidly.

"These are the result of the first report from Berlin," he said, "of officers who are absent from their commands and whose present whereabouts is not definitely known. A supplementary report will follow."

"We can begin with these," said Lépine, and looked them over.

Crochard had risen and was looking at the photographs over the detective's shoulder.

"We shall have to shave them first," he remarked.

"Shave them?"

"Divest them of those ornaments," and he indicated the upturned moustaches, à la Kaiser, with which nearly all the pictured faces were adorned. "A brush and a tablet of watercolour will do it."

M. Delcassé arose.

"I will leave that in your hands, gentlemen," he said. "I must meet the Board of Inquiry almost at once. General Marbeau, I thank you for your assistance. You will, of course, say nothing of all this to any one. As for you, sir," he added to Crochard, "I shall thank you better another day. Till this evening, M. Lépine," and he bowed the three men out.

Half an hour later, Lépine and Crochard were closeted with Monsieur and Madame Brisson in the former's bureau at the du Nord. The little innkeeper and his wife were inarticulate with excitement, for they had guessed Lépine's identity from his resemblance to the pictures which every illustrated paper published at frequent intervals, and they suspected, from his bearing, that Crochard was a person of even greater importance. Their faces were glowing with pride, too, for their proffered refreshment had not been declined. In after days, when the sentence of silence had been lifted, they would tell the story to their admiring friends:

"Imagine it. Here we sat, I here, Gabrielle there; in that chair M. Lépine, Prefect of the Paris Service du Surété, a little thin man with eyes oh, so bright; and in the fourth chair, with eyes still brighter and an air distinguished which there could be no mistaking--whom do you think? None other than the Duc de B----"; or the Prince de R----, or the Marquis de C----; that was a detail to be filled in later; but a Great Highness, rest assured of that! And the way that both M. Lépine and the unknown Highness relished their Château Yquem was a great compliment to the house.

After these amenities, Lépine produced the demoustached photographs.

"Look well at these," he said; "have care--do not speak unless you are very sure," and he passed the photographs one by one to Madame Gabrielle, who handed them on to her husband. Some ten or twelve were examined without comment, and then Madame uttered a sudden exclamation.

"It is he!" she cried. "It is one of them!"

"One of whom?" asked Lépine.

"One of those men. Behold, Aristide!"

Brisson took the card and looked at it.

"Sacred heart! But you are right, Gabrielle!"

"You are sure?" persisted Lépine.

"Sure! But of a certainty! I would swear to him!"

Lépine put the photograph in his pocket, and turned to the others. But there was no second recognition. Brisson and his wife went through them twice, until they had convinced themselves that their other guest was not among them. Finally Lépine gathered the photographs together.

"I must warn you again, Brisson, and you, Madame," he said, severely, "that of this not a single word must be breathed--to no one. Let it pass from your minds as though it had never been. It is an affair of high diplomacy; and you might suffer much were it known that you are concerned in it. In behalf of France, I thank you, and I shall have care that your so great service is brought to the attention of the proper persons. But remember--not a word!"

Monsieur and Madame were faithful--only in the seclusion of their bedroom, with the light extinguished, and in bated whispers, did they ever discuss it. And, as at this point they pass from this story, let it be added that, some months later, a parcel was delivered at their door, which, when opened, was found to contain a handsome vase of Sèvres. Inside the vase was a card, "To Monsieur and Madame Aristide Brisson, from Théophile Delcassé, as a slight recognition of their services to France."

It would be impossible to say which this worthy couple value most highly, the vase or the card. Certain it is that, if you are ever a guest at the du Nord, you will be shown both of them, the vase in a velvet-lined case against the wall and the card, neatly framed, just below it. And, in consideration of their increased importance, Monsieur and Madame have considered themselves justified in increasing their tariff ten per cent.

* * * * *

As soon as Lépine and Crochard were alone together, the former took the photograph from his pocket, looked at the number on the back, and then consulted a typewritten list of names. Then, with a hand not wholly steady, he handed the list to his companion.

"Number eighteen," he said.

Opposite that number Crochard read, "Admiral H. Pachmann, Chief of the Wireless Service;" and then he gazed at the photograph long and earnestly, as though impressing it indelibly upon his mind.