Part 4

Standing in the doorway of the dressing room was a tall young man. He held a brush in his hand and was still slicking down his hair.

“How are you, anyhow?” demanded the tall young man, and proceeded to shake down the leg of a pair of black trousers. “A trifle short, aren’t they?” he observed. “But they’re a darn sight better than nothing!”

“Get him, Joe,” said one of the officers casually, and walked toward the inner room.

“Oh, I’ll go along all right,” said Sergeant Gray blithely. “It’s worth the price. I’m only sorry you didn’t see it. I——”

“Joe!” called the other officer from the inner room. “Come here, will you?”

“Mind if I go along?” asked Sergeant Gray. “I’d like to look at ’em again. I want to remember how they look all the rest of my life.”

Joe nodded, and Sergeant Gray led the way to the studio. In a corner, roped tightly to a chair, sat Booth, Photographer. He was bleeding profusely from a cut on the lip and another over the eye, his head was bobbing weakly on his shoulders, and he wore, to be exact, one union suit minus two buttons on the chest and held together by a safety pin.

Joe stumbling over the Indian blanket heard it groan beneath him, and uncovered a stout gentleman in a cutaway coat and with his collar torn off.

“Pretty good, eh?” demanded Sergeant Gray. “Sorry about the collar, though. Booth’s is too small for me.”

“Want an ambulance?” inquired the elevator man with unholy joy in his eyes.

“Yes. Better have one.” And to the wreckage: “You gentlemen will be all right,” said Joe. “How’d this happen, anyhow?”

“I’ll tell you,” volunteered the sergeant. “They’re spies, that’s what they are. German spies. D’you get it? And I——”

“Aw, shut up!” said the first roundsman, wearily. “Take him along, Joe. Now, how d’you feel, Mr. Booth?”

“But I tell you——”

“You don’t tell me anything. You go. That’s all.”

“Oh, very well,” said Sergeant Gray cheerfully. “You’ll be sorry. That’s all. Come on, Joe.” He raised his voice in song.

“Where do we go from here, Joe, where do we go from here?” he sang in a very deep bass.

At the centre table he stopped, however, with Joe’s revolver very close to him, and consulted Mr. Booth’s watch which, with all of his money but car fare back to camp, lay in a heap there.

“You might hurry a bit, Joe,” he suggested “I’ve only got twenty-three and a half hours’ leave, and time’s flying. You’ll observe,” he added, “that old Booth’s money and watch are here.” He glanced significantly toward the elevator man. “Eight dollars and ninety cents, Joe,” he said. “The old boy’ll need it for a doctor.”

The general breakfasted rather late the next morning—at seven o’clock. His ordinary hour was six-thirty. He had eaten three fried eggs, some fried potatoes, a bran muffin, drunk a cup of coffee, and was trying to remember if he had made any indiscreet remarks at a dinner party the night before about Pershing or the General Staff, when an aide came in with a report. The general read it slowly, then looked up.

“You mean to say,” he inquired, “that those fellows haven’t had any clothes since yesterday morning?”

“No uniforms, sir.”

“The entire troop?”

“All except those who were on duty here yesterday, sir. I believe”—the aide hesitated—“I believe some of them went to town anyhow, sir.”

“The devil you say!” roared the general.

“I rather fancy that the men we saw in slickers, sir——”

Suddenly the general laughed. The aide laughed also. Aides always laugh when the general does. It is etiquette. When the general had stopped laughing he became very military again, and swore.

“We’ll look into it, Tommy,” he said. “It’s a damned shame. Somebody’s going to pay for it through the nose.”

This is a little-used phrase, but the general had read it somewhere and adopted it. It means copiously.

He was not aware, naturally, that Sergeant Gray was already paying for it, copiously.

It was at that precise moment that a little car drew up outside his quarters. The general smiled and rolled himself a cigarette.

“Bring me another cup of coffee,” he ordered, “and get another chair, Tommy.”

The girl came in. She kissed the general on his right cheek, and then on his chin, and then stood back and looked at him.

“I’m in trouble, Uncle Jimmy,” she said. “If a man from the Headquarters Troop overstays his leave what happens to him?”

“Court-martialed; maybe shot,” replied the general with a glance at Tommy, who did not see it as he was looking at the girl.

“But if it is my fault——”

“Then you’ll be shot,” said the general cheerily. “Now see here, Peggy, if you don’t let my young men alone—— What’s that you’re carrying?”

“It’s a slicker!” said Peggy.

The general looked at Tommy, and Tommy looked back.

Peggy told her story, and showed, toward the end, an alarming disposition to cry.

“He knew something,” she said. “That—that man Booth was a spy, Uncle Jimmy. I could hear him asking all sorts of questions, and when the sergeant came out his face was——”

“Sergeant, eh?” interrupted Uncle Jimmy. “Any sergeants from the Headquarters Troop on leave, Tommy?”

“I’ll find out, sir.”

Tommy went away.

“I had got into the car, and he was coming, when three or four other soldiers came along. They all went back into the building, and I—I thought they were going to get Mr. Booth. But pretty soon they came out without him, and one of them gave me this slicker; and—and they all went away.”

“Good Lord!” said the general suddenly. “The young devils! The—the young scamps! So that was it. Now look here, Peggy,” he said, bending forward with a twinkle. “I—well, I understand, I can’t explain, but it was just mischief. Your young man’s all right, though where he’s hiding——”

He broke off and chuckled.

“He is not at all the hiding sort.”

“Under certain circumstances, Peggy,” observed the general, “any man will hide—and should.”

Some time later, at approximately the hour when Sergeant Gray’s twenty-three and a half hours’ leave was up, the little car started for the city. It contained one anxious young lady, one general who rolled constant cigarettes and chuckled, and one aide on the folding seat in the back, rather resentful because there was no adequate place for his legs.

“I’m going along, Tommy,” the general had said. “It promises to be rather good, and I need cheering. Besides, under the circumstances, a member of Miss Peggy’s family——”

At the building on Twenty-second Street the general got out, leaving Peggy discreetly in the car. He was a large and very military figure, and he summoned the elevator man with a single commanding gesture.

“I want to know,” said the general fixing him with a cold eye, “whether you happened, yesterday afternoon, to have seen about here an enlisted man without a uniform?”

“I did,” said the elevator man unctuously.

“You did—what?”

“I did see him.”

“Say, ‘sir’,” prompted the aide.

“I did—sir.” It plainly hurt to say it.

“When and where did you see him last?”

“At one-thirty, getting into a police wagon—sir.”

“Exactly,” said the general. “You of course provided him with clothing before the—er—arrest.”

“I did not,” said the elevator man, who had by now decided that no man could bully him, even if he did wear two stars. “He stole a suit. And before he did that he like to killed two men. Mr. Booth, he’s in the hospital now; and as for the other gentleman, he was took away in a taxi last night. If he was one of your men, all I got to say is——”

“Of no importance whatever,” finished the general coldly. “Find out where he was taken,” he added to Tommy, and stalked out. The elevator man followed him with resentful eyes.

“You tell Pershing, or the Secretary of War, or whatever that is,” he said venomously, “that his pet wild cat is in the central police station. I expect he’s in a padded cell. Good-by.”

An hour later the little car stopped in front of the best restaurant in town and the general assisted his niece to get out. From the folding seat behind, two pairs of long legs, one in khaki and one in black rather too short, disentangled themselves and followed. The best restaurants in town in the morning present a dishabille appearance of sweepers, waiters without coats and general dreariness; but the general took the place by storm.

“Table for four,” he said. Now that he was doing the thing he was minded to do it magnificently. “Sit down, sergeant. Tommy, run and telephone, as I told you, to the Department of Justice. Got to nail those fellows quick.”

As one newly awakened from sleep Sergeant sat down beside Peggy. He presented, up to the neck, the appearance of a Mr. Booth suddenly elongated as to legs and arms. From the neck up he was a young man who had found one hundred and seventy-five dollars and the only girl in the world.

The general ordered breakfast for four. Then he glanced up from the menu.

“Suit you all right, Gray?”

“Splendidly, sir—unless——” He hesitated.

“Go ahead,” said the general. “You’ve earned the right to choose what you like.”

“I was going to suggest, sir, that I ordinarily have a bran muffin——”

The general put down the menu and stared at him. Then he chuckled.

“Might have known it would be you!” he observed. “But _c’est la guerre_, Gray. _C’est la guerre!_ We’ll have them.”

V

Early that afternoon the stable sergeant of the Headquarters Troop coming out of divisional headquarters saw the general approaching in a car much too small for him. Beside him sat an aide, who drove wisely but not too well. On the rumble seat were a girl, and a youth in civilian clothes and a service hat. They were in deep, absorbing conversation.

The stable sergeant came stiffly to the salute, and remained at it, the general giving no evidence of seeing him and returning it. Then—the stable sergeant went pale under his tan, for the civilian emerging from the rear of the machine, and strangely but sufficiently clad, was one Sergeant Gray of the Headquarters Troop.

As if this had not been enough he watched the same Sergeant Gray assist to alight the young lady of yesterday, and it gave no peace to the stable sergeant’s turbulent soul to behold that young lady giving the general a patronising pat and then a kiss.

“Great Scott!” said the stable sergeant feebly.

But there was more to come, for Sergeant Gray had spied his enemy and was minded to have official confirmation of a certain fact. Before the stable sergeant’s incredulous eyes he beheld Gray, of the undergarments, gauze, et cetera, advance to the general and salute, and then remark in a very distinct tone:

“It was very kind of you, sir, to ask me to breakfast.”

The general looked about under his gray eyebrows and perceived a situation.

“Not at all,” he replied in an equally distinct voice. “Glad you liked my bran muffins.”

The stable sergeant, who was carrying a saddle, dropped it. Had he not been stooping he would have observed something very like a wink on the most military countenance in America. It was directed at Tommy.

“Good-by, Sergeant Gray,” said the pretty girl, holding out her hand. “I—I think you are the bravest person! And you will write, won’t you?”

“I wish I was as sure of my commission.”

The stable sergeant swallowed hard.

“But you’ll get that now, of course. I’ll go right in and tell Uncle Jimmy.”

“Oh, I say!” protested Sergeant Gray. “You—you mustn’t do that, you know.”

“Aw, rats!” muttered the stable sergeant; and clutching the saddle furiously moved away. Up the road he met a military policeman, and stopped him.

“Better grab that fellow.” He indicated Sergeant Gray behind him, now shamelessly holding the hand of the general’s niece.

“Why?”

“Awol,” replied the stable sergeant darkly—being military brevity for absent without leave. “And you might observe,” he added, “that he isn’t in uniform.”

The girl got into the little car. Hat in hand, eyes full of many things he dared not put into words, Sergeant Gray of the Headquarters Troop of the ——th Division watched her start the car, smile into his eyes and move away. He came to at a touch on his arm.

“What’re you doing in that outfit?” demanded the M. P. sharply.

“Having an acute attack of heart trouble, if you want to know,” said the sergeant, staring after the little car.

“Have to arrest you.”

“Oh, go to it!” said the sergeant blithely. “I’m used to it now. Look here,” he added, “your name’s not Joe, by any chance?”

“You know my name,” said the M. P. sourly.

“Sorry,” reflected the sergeant. “Don’t mind if I call you Joe, do you? Always like the men who arrest me to be called Joe. It’s lucky.”

He stopped and looked back; the little car was almost out of sight.

“All right, Joe, old top!” he said blithely. And he sang in a deep bass

“_Where do we go from here, boys? Where do we go from here? All the way from Broadway to the Jersey City pier._”

His voice died away. In his eyes there was suddenly that curious blend of hope and sadness which shines from the faces of those who love and, loving, must go away to war.

“Wait a minute, Joe,” he said.

And, turning, looked back again. The little car was still in sight, and the girl, standing up in it, waved her hand.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling. 2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed. 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.