Chapter 10

A hand flew up above the crowd. The Unspeakable Perk ducked sharply and just in time, as a knife struck the wall above him and clattered to the pavement. Instantly he caught it up, but the blade had snapped off short. As he stooped, one bold spirit rushed in. Perkins met him with a straight lance-thrust of the staff, which sent him reeling and shrieking with pain back to his fellows. But now another knife, and another, struck and fell from the wall at his back; badly aimed both, but presumably the forerunners of missiles, some of which would show better marksmanship. The assailed man cast a swift, desperate look about him; the crowd closed in a little. Obviously he must keep “eyes front.”

“To your left! To your left!” The voice came to him clear and sweet above the swelling growl of the rabble. “The doorway! Get into the doorway, Mr. Beetle Man.”

A few paces away, how far Perkins could only guess, was the entrance to the house. He surmised that, like many of the better-class houses, it had a small set-in door, at right angles to the main entrance, that would serve as a shallow shelter. Without raising his eyes, he nodded comprehension, and began to edge along the wall, swinging his stout weapon. As he went, he wondered what was keeping the others. At that moment the others were frantically wrestling with the all-too-adequate bars with which Sherwen had reinforced the wide door.

Perkins, feeling with a cautious heel, found himself opposite the entry indicated by the voice. Turning, he darted into the narrow embrasure. Here he was comparatively safe from the missiles that were now coming from all directions. On the other hand, he now lacked room to swing his formidable club. The peons, with a shout, closed in to arm’s length. Alone on her balcony, the girl turned her head away and cried aloud, hopelessly, for help. She wanted to close her ears against the bestial shouts of a mob trampling to death a defenseless man, but her arms were of lead. She listened and shivered.

Instead of the sound that she dreaded there came the ringing of hoofs on stones, followed by yells of alarm. She opened her eyes to see Von Plaanden, bent forward in his saddle at the exact angle proper to the charge, urging his great horse down upon the mass of people as ruthlessly as if they had been so many insects. Through the circle he broke, swinging his mount around beside the shallow doorway before which three Caracuñans already lay sprawled, attesting the vigor of the defender’s final resistance. Back of the horseman lay half a dozen other figures. The Hochwaldian jerked out his sword and stood, a splendid spectacle. Very possibly he was not wholly unmindful of his own pictorial quality or of the lovely American witness thereto.

His intervention gave a few seconds’ respite, one of those checks that save battles and make history. Now, in the further making of this particular history, sounded a lusty whoop from the opposite direction; such a battle slogan as only the Anglo-Saxon gives. It emanated from Galpy the bounder, bounding now, indeed, at full speed up the slope, followed by two of his fellow railroad men, flannel-clad and still perspiring from their afternoon’s cricket. Against bare legs a cricket bat is a highly dissuasive argument. The Britons swung low and hard for the ancient right of the breed to break into a row wherever white men are in the minority against other races. The downhill wing of the mob being much the weakest, opened up for them with little resistance, leaving them a free path to the cavalryman, to whose side Perkins, with staff ready brandished, had advanced from his shelter.

“Wot’s the merry game?” inquired the cockney cheerfully.

Before them the crowd swayed and parted, and there appeared, lifted by many arms, a figure with a dead-white face streaked with blood, running from a great gash in the scalp.

“He went down in front of my horse,” explained the Hochwald secretary coolly.

At the sight, there rose from the crowd a wailing cry, quite different from its former voice. Galpy’s teeth set and his cricket bat went up in the air.

“There’ll be killing for this,” he said. “I know these blightehs. That yell means blood. We must make a bolt for it. Is this all there is of us?”

At the moment of his asking, it was. One half a second later, it wasn’t, as the last of the legation’s stubborn bars yielded, the door burst open, and the four Americans tumbled out at the charge, Cluff yelling insanely, Carroll in deadly quiet, Sherwen alertly scanning the adversaries for identifiable faces, and Elder Brewster still imperiling his soul by the fervor of his language. Each was armed with such casual weapons as he had been able to catch up. Carroll, a leap in advance of the rest, encountered an Indian drover, half-dodged a swinging blow from his whip, and sent him down with a broken shoulder from a chop with a baseball club that he had found in the hallway. A bull-like charge had carried Cluff deep among the Caracuñans, where he encountered a huge peon, whom he seized and flung bodily over the iron guard of a _samon_ tree, where the man hung, yelling dismally. Two other peons, who had seized the athlete around the knees, were all but brained by a stoneware gin bottle in the hands of Sherwen. Meanwhile, Mr. Brewster was performing prodigies with a niblick which he had extracted, at full run, from a bag opportunely resting against the hat-rack. Almost before they knew it, the rescue party had broken the intercepting wing of the mob, and had joined the others.

Cluff threw a gorilla-like arm across the Unspeakable Perk’s shoulder,

“Hurt, boy?” he cried anxiously.

“No, I’m all right. Who’s left with Miss Brewster?”

“Nobody. We must get back.”

Sherwen’s cool voice cut in:—

“Close together, now. Keep well up. Herr von Plaanden, will you cover us at the end?”

“It is the post of honor,” said the Hochwaldian.

“You’ve earned it. But for you, they’d have got our colors.”

The foreigner bowed, and swung his horse toward a Caracuñan who had pressed forward a little too near. But, for the moment the fight had oozed out of the mob.

Without mishap the group got across the street, Perkins still clinging to the flag.

Suddenly, from the rear rank, came a shower of stones, followed by the final rush. Galpy and Perkins went down. Von Plaanden tottered in his saddle, but quickly recovered. Instantly Perkins was up again, the blood streaming from the side of his head. He was conscious of brown hands clutching at the cricketer, to drag him away. He himself seized the cockney’s legs and braced for that absurd and deadly tug of war. Then Von Plaanden’s saber descended, and he was able to haul Galpy back into safety.

The situation was desperate now. Mr. Brewster was pinned against the wall and disarmed, but still fighting with fist and foot. Half a dozen peons were struggling with Cluff across the bodies of as many more whom he had knocked down. Sherwen, almost under the cavalryman’s mount, was protecting his rear with the fallen Galpy’s cricket bat, and the two other cricketers were fighting back to back on the other side. Carroll was clubbing his way toward Mr. Brewster, but his weapon was now in his left hand. Matters looked dark indeed, when there shrilled fiercely from above them the whirring peal of a silver whistle.

Polly Brewster had remembered Raimonda. It seemed a futile signal, for as she ran to the railing and gazed across at the Club Amicitia, she saw all its windows and doors tight closed, as befits an aristocratic club that has no concern with the affairs of the rabble. But there is no way of closing a _patio_ from the top, and sounds can enter readily that way, when all other apertures are shut. Long and loud Miss Polly blew the signal on the silver hunting-whistle.

In the club _patio_, Raimonda was chafing and wondering, and a score of his friends were drinking and waiting. That signal released their activities and terminated the battle of the American Legation most ingloriously for the forces of Urgante. For the gilded youth of Caracuña bears a heavy cane of fashion, and carries a ready revolver, also, although not so admittedly as a matter of fashion. Furthermore, he has a profound contempt for the peon class; a contempt extending to life and limb. Therefore, when some two dozen young patricians sallied abruptly forth with their canes, and the mob caught sight, here and there, of a glint of nickel against the black, it gave back promptly. Some desultory stones rattled against the walls. There were answering reports a few, and sundry yells of pain. The army of Urgante broke and fled down the side streets, leaving behind its broken and its wounded. Most of the bullet casualties were below the knee. The Caracuñan aristocrat always fires low—the first time.

Shortly thereafter, Miss Polly Brewster appeared upon the balcony of the American Legation, and performed an illegal act. Upon a day not designated as a Caracuñan national holiday, she raised the flag of an alien nation and fixed it, and the gilded youth of Caracuña in the street below cheered, not the flag, which would have been unpatriotic, but the flag-raiser, which was but gallant, until they were hoarse and parched of throat.

XI. PRESTO CHANGE

After the battle, Miss Brewster reviewed her troops, and took stock of casualties, in the _patio_. None of the allied forces had come off scatheless. Galpy, whose injuries had at first seemed the most severe, responded to a stiff dose of brandy. A cut across the scientist’s head had been hastily bandaged in a towel, giving him, as he observed, the appearance of a dissipated Hindu. To Von Plaanden’s indignant disgust, his military splendor was seriously impaired by a huge “hickey” over his left eye, the memento of a well-aimed rock. Cluff had broken a finger and sprained his wrist. Mr. Brewster was anxious to know if any one had seen two teeth of his on the pavement or whether he was to look for later digestive indications of their whereabouts. Both of the young cricketers had been battered and bruised, though it was nothing, they gleefully averred, to what they had meted out. And Carroll had a nasty-looking knife-thrust in his shoulder.

All of them were disheveled, dilapidated, and grimy to the last degree, except the Hochwaldian, who still sat his horse, which he had ridden into the _patio_. But Miss Polly said to herself, with a thrill of pride, that no woman need wish a more gallant and devoted band of defenders. Leaning over them from the inner railing of the balcony, she surveyed them with sparkling eyes.

“It was magnificent!” she cried. “Oh, I’m so proud of you all! I could hug you, every one!”

“Better come down from there, Polly,” said her father anxiously. “Some of those ruffians might come back.”

“Not to-day,” said Sherwen grimly. “They’ve had enough.”

“That is correct,” confirmed Von Plaanden. “Nevertheless, there may be disorder later. Would it not be better that you go to the British Legation, Fräulein?”

“Not I!” she returned. “I stay by my colors. And now I’m going to disband my army.”

Stretching out her hand to a vase near her, she drew out a rose of deepest red and held it above Von Plaanden.

“The color of my country,” said Von Plaanden gravely. “May I take it for a sign that I am forgiven?”

“Fully, freely, and gladly,” said the girl. “You have put a debt upon us all that I—that we can never repay.”

“It is I who pay. You will not think of me too hardly, for my one breach?”

“I shall think of you as a hero,” said the girl impetuously. “And I shall never forget. Catch, O knight.”

The rose fell, and was caught. Von Plaanden bowed low over it. Then he straightened to the military salute, and so rode out of the door and out of the girl’s life.

“Men are strange creatures,” mused the philosopher of twenty. “You think they are perfectly horrid, and suddenly they show their other side to you, and you think they are perfectly splendid. I wish I knew a little more about real people.”

She confessed to no more specific thought, but as she descended the stairs to bid farewell to the blushing and deprecatory Britons, she was eager to have it over with, and to come to speech with her beetle man, who had so strangely flamed into action. The Unspeakable Perk! As the name formed on her lips, she smiled tenderly. With sad lack of logic, she was ready to discard every suspicion of him that she had harbored, merely on the strength of his reckless outbreak of patriotism. She looked about the _patio_, but he was not there. Sherwen came out of a side door, his face puckered with anxiety.

“Where is Mr. Perkins?” she asked.

“In there.” He nodded back over his shoulder. “Your father is with him. Perhaps you’d better go in.”

With a chill at her heart, Polly entered the room, where Mr. Brewster bent a troubled face over a head swathed in reddened bandages.

Very crumpled and limp looked the Unspeakable Perk, bunched humpily upon the little sofa. His goggles had fallen off, and lay on the floor beside him, contriving somehow to look momentously solemn and important all by themselves. His face was turned half away, and, as Polly’s gaze fell upon it, she felt again that queer catch at her heart.

“Wouldn’t know it was the same chap, would you?” whispered Mr. Brewster.

The girl picked up the grotesque spectacles, cradling them for an instant in her hands before she put them aside and leaned over the quiet form.

“Came staggering in, and just collapsed down there,” continued her father huskily. “Lord, I wouldn’t lose that boy after this for a million dollars!”

“Why do you talk that way?” she demanded sharply. “What has happened? Did he faint?”

“Just collapsed. When I tried to rouse him, he kicked me in the chest,” replied the magnate, with somber seriousness.

“Oh, you goose of a dad!” There was a tremulous note in Polly’s low laughter. “That’s all right, then. Can’t you see he’s dead for sleep, poor beetle man?”

“Do you think so?” said Mr. Brewster, vastly relieved. “Hadn’t I better go out for a doctor, and make sure?”

She shook her head.

“Let him rest. Hand me that pillow, please, dad.”

With soft little pushes and wedges she worked it under the scientist’s head. “What a dreadful botch of bandaging! He looks so pale! I wonder if I couldn’t get those cloths off. Lend me your knife, dad.”

Gently as she worked, the head on the pillow began to sway, and the lips to move.

“Oh, let me alone!” they muttered querulously.

The eyes opened. The Unspeakable Perk gazed up into the faces above him, but saw only one, a face whose tender concern softened it to a loveliness greater even than when he had last seen it. He tried to rise, but the hands that pressed him back were firm and quick.

“Lie still!” bade their owner.

A thin film of color mounted to his cheeks.

“I—I—beg your pardon,” he stammered. “I—I—d-didn’t know—”

“Don’t be a goose!” she adjured him. “It’s only me.”

“Yes, that’s the trouble.” He closed his eyes again, and began to murmur.

“What does he say?” asked Mr. Brewster, lowering his head and almost falling over backward as his astonished ears were greeted by the slowly intoned rhythm:—

“Scarab, tarantula, doodle-bug, flea.”

“Delirious!” exclaimed the magnate. “Clean off his head! How does one find a doctor in this town?”

“No need, dad,” his daughter reassured him. “It’s just a—a sort of game.”

“Game! Did you hear what he said?”

“Well, a kind of password. It’s all right, Dad. It is, really.”

Still undecided, Mr. Brewster stared at the injured man.

“I don’t know—” he began, when the eyes opened again.

“Feeling better?” inquired Polly briskly.

“Yes. The charm works perfectly.”

“Anything I can do, or get, for you, my boy?” inquired Mr. Brewster, stepping forward.

“What’s in the ice-box?” asked the other anxiously.

“Oh!” cried the girl in distress. “He’s starving! When did you eat last?”

“I can’t exactly remember. It was about five this morning, I think. A banana, and, as I recall it, a small one.”

“Dad!” cried the girl, but that prompt and efficient gentleman was already halfway to the cook, dragging Sherwen along as interpreter.

“He’ll get whatever there is in the shortest known time,” the girl assured her patient. “Trust dad. Now, you lie back and let me fix up a fresh bandage.”

“You’d have made a great trained nurse,” he murmured, as she adjusted the clean strips that Sherwen had sent in. “Don’t pin my ear down. It’s got to help hold my goggles on.”

“The dear funny goggles!” Picking them up, she patted them with dainty fingers, before setting them aside. He watched her uneasily, much in the manner of a dog whose bone has been taken away.

“Do you mind giving them back?” he said.

“But you’re not going to wear them here,” she protested.

“I’ve got so used to them,” he explained apologetically, “that I don’t feel really dressed without them.”

She handed them back and he adjusted them to the bandages. “For the present, rest is prescribed you know,” said she.

“Oh, no!” he declared. “As soon as I’ve had something to eat, I’ll go. There are a hundred things to be done. Where are my gloves?”

“What gloves? Oh, those white abominations? Why on earth do you wear them?” Her glance fell upon his right hand, which lay half-open beside him. “Oh—oh—oh!” she cried in a rising scale of distress. “What have you done to your hands?”

He reddened perceptibly.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing, indeed! Tell me at once!”

“I’ve been rowing.”

“Where to?”

“Oh, out to a ship.”

“There aren’t any ships, except the Dutch warship. Was it to her?”

“Yes.”

“To carry our message—_my_ message?”

He squirmed.

“I’m awfully sleepy,” he protested. “It isn’t fair to cross-examine a witness—”

“When was it?” his ruthless interrogator broke in.

“Night before last.”

“How far?”

“How can I tell? Not far. A few miles.”

“And back. And it took you all night,” she accused.

“What if it did?” he cried peevishly. “A man’s got to have some relief from work, hasn’t he? It was livelier than sitting all night with one’s eye glued to a microscope barrel!”

“Oh, beetle man, beetle man! I don’t know about you at all. What kind of a strange queer creature are you? Have you wings, Mr. Beetle Man?”

Suddenly she bent over and laid her soft lips upon the scarified palm. The Unspeakable Perk sat up, with a half-cry.

“Now the other one,” said the girl. Her face was a mantle of rose-color, but her eyes shone.

“I won’t! You shan’t!”

“The other one!” she commanded imperiously.

“Please, Miss Brewster—”

A noise at the door saved him. There stood Thatcher Brewster, magnate, multi-millionaire, and master of men, a huge tray in his hands.

“Beefsteak, fried potatoes, alligator pear, fresh bread, _real_ butter, coffee, _and_ cake,” he proclaimed jovially. “Not to mention a cocktail, which I compounded with my own skilled hands. Are you ready, my boy? Go!”

The Unspeakable Perk leaped from his couch.

“Food!” he cried. “Real American food! The perfume of it is a square meal.”

“You’re much gladder to see it than you were me,” pouted Miss Polly.

“I’m not half as afraid of it,” he admitted. “Mr. Brewster, your health.”

“Here’s to you, my boy. Now I’ll leave you with your nurse, and make my final arrangements. We’re off by special in the morning.”

“That’s fine!” said the scientist.

But Miss Polly Brewster caught the turn of his head in her direction, and saw that his fork had slackened in his hand. Something tightened around her heart.

As he went, her father considered her for a moment, and wondered. Never before had he seen such a look in her eyes as that which she had turned on the queer, vivid stranger so busily engaged at the tray. Polly, and this obscure scientist! After the kind of men whom the girl had known, enslaved, and eluded! Absurd! Yet if it were to be—Mr. Brewster reviewed the events of the afternoon—well, it might be worse.

“By the Lord Harry, he’s a _man_, anyway!” decided Thatcher Brewster.

Meanwhile, the subject of his musings began to feel like a man once more, instead of like a lath. Having wrought havoc among the edibles, he rose with a sigh.

“If I could have one hour’s sleep,” he said mournfully, “I’d be fit as a cricket.”

“You shall,” said the girl. “Mr. Sherwen says he won’t let you out of the house until it’s dark. And that’s fully an hour.”

“I ought to be on my way back now.”

“Back where? To your mountains?”

“Yes.”

“You’d be recognized and attacked before you could get out of the city. I won’t let you.”

“That wouldn’t do, for a fact. Perhaps it would be safer to wait. I’ve made enough trouble for one day by my blunder-headed thoughtlessness.”

“Is that what you call rescuing the flag?”

“Oh, rescuing!” he said slightingly. “What difference does it make what vermin like that mob do? Just for a whim, to endanger all of you.”

She stared at him in amaze and suspicion. But he was quite honest.

“_My_ whim,” she reminded him.

“Yes; I suppose it was,” he admitted thoughtfully. “When I saw you crying, I lost my head, and acted like a child.”

“Then it was all my fault?”

“Oh, I don’t say that. Certainly not. I’m master of my own actions. If I hadn’t wanted—”

“But it was my fault this much, anyway, that you wouldn’t have done it except for me.”

“Yes; it was your fault to that extent,” he said honestly. “I hope you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Oh, beetle man, beetle man!” She leaned forward, her eyes deep-lit pools of mirth and mockery and some more occult feeling that he could not interpret. “Would it scare you quite out of your poor, queer wits if I were to _hug_ you? Don’t call for help. I’m not really going to do it.”

“I know you’re not,” said he dolefully. “But about that row, I want to set myself right. I’m no fool. I know it took a certain amount of nerve to go down there. And I was even proud of it, in a way. And when Von Plaanden turned and gave me the salute before he went away, I liked it quite a good deal.”

“Did he do that? I love him for it!” cried the girl.

“But my point is this, that what I did wasn’t sound common sense. Now if Carroll had done it, it would have been all right.”

“Why for him and not for you?”

“Because those are his principles. They’re not mine.”

“I wish you weren’t quite so contemptuous of poor Fitz. It seems hardly fair.”

“Contemptuous of him? I’d give half my life to be in his place after to-morrow.”

“Why?” There was a flutter in her throat as she put the question.

“Because he’s going with you, isn’t he?”

“So are you, if you will.”

“I can’t.”

“Father won’t go without you, I believe. Won’t you come, if I ask you?”

“No.”

“Work, I suppose,” said the girl; “the work that you love better than anything in the world.”

“You’re wrong there.” His voice was not quite steady now. “But it’s work that has to have my first consideration now. And there is one special responsibility that I can’t evade, for the present, anyway.”

“And afterward?” She dared not look at him as she spoke.

“Ah, afterward. There’s too much ‘perhaps’ in the afterward down here. We science grubbers on the outposts enlist for the term of the war,” he said, smiling wanly.

“How can I—can we go and leave you here?” she demanded obstinately.

“Oh, give me a square meal once in a while, and a night’s rest here and there, and I’ll do well enough.”

“Oh, dear! I forgot your sleep. Here I’ve been chattering like a magpie. Take off your coat and lie down on that sofa at once.”

“Where shall I find you when I wake up?”

“Right where you leave me when you fall asleep.”

“Oh, no! You mustn’t wear yourself out watching over me.”

“Hush! You’re under orders. Give me the coat.” She hung it on the back of a chair. “Not another word now. And I’ll call you when time is up.”