Part 6

"Well, I was not there to see," said Captain Vandermeer, lighting a cigar, "but when the men woke they must all have tried to get out by the same way."

"And they couldn't?" asked Roy. He was watching Vandermeer with a very curious expression--almost as if he were examining an eyewitness.

"The captain was an expert engineer--ah, a magnificent engineer!--as I told you, Roy, and there was a leetle crowbar wedged under what we have been calling the lid of the conning tower."

"Good God, what an idea! You mean they couldn't close the upper lid again?"

"They might think they had closed it." Vandermeer gave a deep guttural chuckle. "Then they would open the lower lid, heh?"

"And then?"

"Why, then the sea would come running into the hull, and they would be drowned."

"Oh, but not the poor little Bavarian!" said Mimika.

"_L'état, c'est moi_," said Vandermeer with a smile.

Roy was looking at him still with the same pensive expression as of a youthful Buddha.

"I suppose he had no difficulty in getting rid of the diamonds," he said.

"Probably not," said Vandermeer. "Perhaps he would keep a few as a reserve--a kind of Landsturm. But he would buy Liberty Bonds, heh?"

"And you mean to say that a man like that is going about in the United States now?" said Mimika.

Vandermeer chuckled again.

"Who knows?" he said. "Perhaps he has come to Southern California. Perhaps he has bought a nice little ranch--a fruit ranch, just like this, heh?--where he shall live a happy and healthy life to the age of a hundred. And now, Mimika, it is getting time for little girls to go to bed."

About two o'clock in the morning Mimika was wakened by a guttural choking cry from her husband. She was so startled that she slipped out of bed and stood staring at him. The moon was flooding the room almost like a searchlight, and Captain Vandermeer lay in the full stream of it. While she watched him he rose slowly to a sitting posture, with his eyes still shut and his hands clenched above his face. He began muttering to himself, in a low voice at first, and then so loudly that it echoed through the house; and the words sounded more like German than Dutch. Then he began fighting for breath, like a man in a nightmare. He tore his pyjama jacket open over the great red hairy chest.

"Otto!" he shouted at the top of his voice. "Otto!" Then with a huge sigh he sank back on the pillows, whispering "I have opened it."

There was a tap on the door. Mimika snatched up a dressing gown, the first garment she could lay her hands on--it happened to be Vandermeer's--wrapped it round her, glided across the room and opened the door. Her brother stood there, also in a dressing gown and bare-footed. Their eyes met without a word. He took her hand, led her outside and closed the door quietly behind them.

"You heard him, Roy?" she whispered.

"Come downstairs," he said. "I want to ask you some questions about this."

They went down to the den at the back of the house, and stood there looking at each other's faces.

"He told us a tale to-night," said Roy at last.

"Yes," said Mimika faintly.

"Do you know what he was calling out in his nightmare?"

"It sounded like German," she said.

"Yes, it was German; and it gave me a good deal more local color than I expected. That was a true story all right, Mimika."

"You mean that he--"

"Yes."

"Oh, but, Roy!"

"That's his dressing gown you're wearing, isn't it?"

"Yes, I picked it up in a hurry."

"There's been too much hurry about everything, I'm afraid. Why the devil did I go to Europe! Here, Mimika, take off that thing and put mine on. I don't like to see you in it. It doesn't suit you, little sister."

She obeyed him, with a small white frightened face; but it was not the white of powder now. Roy thrust his hand into the pocket of Vandermeer's dressing gown. Something jingled. He pulled out a bunch of keys.

"Vandermeer told me I was good at following up a clue. I'm going to follow one now, Mimika," he said. "This is the key of the safe."

He opened the safe, looked hastily at the bundles of papers and then pulled out the chamois leather bag. "Look here, Mimika!" he said and poured a glittering river of diamonds, several hundred of them, on to the table. The moonlight played over them with an uncanny brilliance.

"That's his Landsturm," said Roy; "and that settles it."

He took Mimika's hand, and she made no protest as he withdrew the wedding ring from her finger and added it to the glittering heap on the table.

There was a heavy footstep in the room above. Vandermeer was awake and moving about upstairs. The boards creaked over their heads, then they heard his bedroom door open, and the heavy footsteps began to descend the stairs.

Mimika shrank behind her brother and both stood motionless, waiting. They could hear the heavy breathing of Vandermeer, the breathing of a man roused from a dyspeptic sleep. He came down with an intolerable precision, making the twelve steps of that short descent seem almost interminable. At every step Mimika felt the edges of her heart freezing. At last that ugly rhythm reached the foot of the stairs; and with three more shuffling steps, as of a gigantic ape, the hairy bulk of Vandermeer stood in the doorway, facing them across the glittering mound of gems. The sharp searchlight of the moon made his face corpselike, showing up the puffy blue pouches under his eyes and picking out the coarse red hairs of his bushy beard like strands of copper wire. His eyes protruded, his mouth opened twice without any sound but the soft smacking of his tongue as he tried to moisten his lips.

"What are you doing here?" he said at last.

"Looking at your Landsturm," said Roy with all the deadly calm of his nation.

Vandermeer swayed a little on his feet, like a drunken man. Then he moved forward to the table and blinked at the diamonds and the gold ring crowning them.

"I don't understand," he said at last.

"You'd better get dressed, Mimika," said Roy. "Our train goes at a quarter after four." He led her to the door, watched her pathetic little figure mounting the stairs and turned to Vandermeer again.

Mimika never knew what passed between the two men. When she came out of her room, ten minutes later, Roy was waiting, fully dressed, at the foot of the stairs, with his suit case in his hand. She heard the heavy breathing of Vandermeer in his den; and out of the corner of her eye as they passed the door she saw that glowing mass on the table, as if a fragment of the moon had been dropped there.

They walked down the long avenue of palms in silence. In the waiting-room at the station neither of them spoke till they heard the long hoot of the approaching train, and the clangor of the bell on the transcontinental locomotive.

Six months later Mimika and her mother were sitting up for Roy, in their fourth-floor flat near the offices of the Copley-Willard Publishing Company, in Philadelphia.

"I wish he didn't have to keep these late hours," said her mother. "I thought that everything was turning out for the best when you were married to Julius. I have never been able to understand why you got your divorce so quickly. It was all kept so quiet, and you and Roy are so mysterious about it. You've never even told me the real grounds, I'm sure."

"Yes, I did. It was desertion," said Mimika grimly.

"Does nobody know what became of him? It seems so strange that he should have gone away and left all the furniture in that house. He had some lovely things too. I think you might at least have claimed the furniture."

"Please, mother, don't talk about that or we shall be making the same mistake again. I expect he's shaved his beard by now."

"Mimika, child, what do you mean? Are you crazy?"

"I think we were both crazy, mother, a year ago."

"Well, I thought it was all for your happiness, my pet," said her mother, dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief. "I'm afraid it will be a long time before you can marry this other young man, that Roy likes so much. He isn't earning half so good a salary as Roy."

"I don't know that I'm going to marry any one, mother. But listen! I feel like marrying the first good American that comes to me with a piece of the original _Mayflower_ in his buttonhole."

And, this time, her mother almost listened.

IV

THE MAN FROM BUFFALO

The patrol boats had been buffeting their way all night against wind and weather, and before daybreak the long line had lost its order. It was broken up now into little wandering loops and sections, busily comparing notes by Morse flashes and wireless. Last evening the _Morning Glory_, a converted yacht of American ownership, had been working with forty British trawlers; and her owner, Matthew Hudson, who had obtained permission to go out with her on this trip, had watched with admiration the way in which they strung themselves over twenty miles of confused sea, keeping their exact distances till nightfall. This morning, as he lurched in gleaming oilskins up and down the monkey house--irreverent name for his canvas-screened bridge--he could see only three of his companions--the _Dusty Miller_, the _Christmas Day_ and the _Betsey Barton_.

They were all having a lively time. They swooped like herring gulls into the broad troughs of the swell, where the black water looked like liquid marble with white veins of foam in it. Morning-colored rainbows dripped from their bows as they rose again through the green sunlit crests. But the _Morning Glory_ was the brightest and the liveliest of them all. The seas had been washing her decks all night. Little pools of color shone in the wet, crumpled oilskins of the crew, and the tarpaulin that covered the gun in her bow gleamed like a cloak dropped there by the Angel of the Dawn.

_When like the morning mist in early day Rose from the foam the daughter of the sea----_

Matthew Hudson quoted to himself. He was full of poetry this morning while he waited for his breakfast; and the radiant aspect of the weapon in the bow reminded him of something else--if the smell of the frying bacon would not blow his way and distract his mind--something about "celestial armories." Was it Tennyson or Milton who had written it? There was a passage about guns in "Paradise Lost." He must look it up.

Like many Americans, Matthew Hudson was quicker to perceive the true romance of the Old Country than many of its own inhabitants. He had been particularly interested in the names of the British trawlers. "It's like seeing Shakespeare's Sonnets or Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry going out to fight," he had written to his son, who had just left Princeton to join the Mosquito Fleet; and the youngster had replied with a sonnet of his own.

Matthew Hudson had carried it about with him and read it to English statesmen, greatly to their embarrassment--most of them looked as if they were receiving a proposal of marriage--and he had found a huge secret joy in their embarrassment, which, as he said, "tickled him to death." But he murmured the verses to himself now, with paternal pride, thinking that the boy had really gone to the heart of the matter:

_Out of Old England's inmost heart they go, A little fleet of ships, whose every name-- Daffodil, Sea Lark, Rose, and Surf, and Snow-- Burns in this blackness like an altar flame._

_Out of her past they sail, three thousand strong-- The people's fleet, that never knew its worth; And every name is a broken phrase of song To some remembered loveliness on earth._

_There's Barbara Cowie, Comely Bank and May, Christened at home, in worlds of dawn and dew. There's Ruth, and Kindly Light, and Robin Gray, With Mizpah. May that simple prayer come true!_

_Out of Old England's inmost heart they sail, A fleet of memories that can never fail._

At this moment the _Morning Glory_ ran into a bank of white mist, which left him nothing to see from the bridge. The engines were slowed down and he decided that it was time for breakfast.

The cabin where he breakfasted with the skipper was very little changed, except that it seemed by contrast a little more palatial than in peace time. There had been many changes on the exterior of the ship. Her white and gold had been washed over with service gray, and many beautiful fittings had been removed to make way for grimmer work. But within there were still some corners of the yacht that shone like gems in a setting of lead.

The _Morning Glory_ had been a very beautiful boat. She had been built for summer cruising among the pine-clad islands off the coast of Maine, or to carry her master down to the palms of his own little island off the coast of Florida, where he basked for a month or so among the ripening oranges, the semitropical blossoms and the cardinal birds, while Buffalo cleared the worst of the snow from her streets. For Matthew Hudson was a man of many millions, which he had made in almost the only country where millions can be made honestly and directly out of its enormous natural resources.

His own method had been a very simple one, though it required great organizing ability and a keen eye and brain at the outset. All he had done was to harness a river at the right place and make it drive a light-and-power plant. But he had done it on a scale that enabled him, from this one central station, to drive all the electric trolleys and light all the lamps in more than a hundred cities. He could supply all the light and all the power they wanted to cities a hundred miles away from his plant, and he talked of sending it three hundred miles farther.

Now that the system was established, it worked as easily as the river flowed; and his power house was a compact little miracle of efficiency. All that the casual visitor could see was a long, quiet room, in which it seemed that a dozen clocks were slumbrously ticking. These were the indicators, from the dials of which the amount of power distributed over a district as big as England could be read by the two leisurely men on duty. In the meantime, night and day, the river poured power of another kind into the treasury of Matthew Hudson.

But his life was as unlike that of the millionaires of fiction as could be imagined. It reminded one of the room with the slumbrous clocks.

He was, indeed, as his own men described it, preeminently the "man behind the gun." When the _Morning Glory_ had been accepted by the naval authorities he had obtained permission to equip her for her own work in European waters at his own cost, and to make certain experiments in the equipment.

The Admiralty had not looked with favor on some of his ideas, which were by no means suitable for general use in the patrol fleet. But Matthew Hudson had too many weapons at work against Germany for them to deny him a sentimental pleasure in his own yacht. He seemed to have some particular purpose of his own in carrying out his ideas; and so it came about that the _Morning Glory_ was regarded among her companions as a mystery-ship.

The two men breakfasted in silence. They were both drowsy, for there had been a U-boat alarm during the night, which had kept them very much awake; but Hudson was roused from his reverie over the second rasher by a loud report, followed by a confused shouting above and the stoppage of the engines.

"That's not a submarine!" said the skipper. "What the devil is it?" And the two men rushed on deck.

The mist had lifted a little; and, looming out of it, a few hundred yards away, there was something that looked, at first glance, like a great gray reef. For a fraction of a moment Hudson thought they had run into Heligoland in the mist. At the second glance he knew that the gray, mist-wreathed monster before him was an armored ship, and the skipper enlightened him further by saying, in a matter-of-fact voice:

"That settles it--enemy cruiser! We're stopped, broadside on. They've got a couple of guns trained on us and they're sending a boat. What's the next move?"

Matthew Hudson's face was a curious study at this moment. It suggested a leopard endowed with a sense of humor. His mouth twitched at the corners and his amazingly clear eyes were lit with an almost boyish jubilation. It was a somewhat fierce jubilation; but it undoubtedly twinkled with the humor of the New World. Then he asked the skipper a mysterious question:

"Is it impossible?"

"Impossible! We're in the wrong position; and if we try to get right they'll blow us to bits. Besides, they'll be aboard in half a minute. We're drifting a little in the right direction; but it will be too late. They'll search the ship."

"How long will it take us to drift into the right position?"

"If we go on like this, about four minutes. But it will be all over by then."

"Look here, Davis; I'll try and detain them on deck. You know Americans have a reputation for oratory. You'd better go through my room. And--look here--I'll be the skipper for the time being. I'm afraid they'll want to take Matthew Hudson prisoner; so I'll be the kind of American they'll recognize--Commander Jefferson B. Thrash, out of the best British fiction. You don't happen to have a lasso in your pocket, do you? I lent mine to ex-President Eliot of Harvard, and he hasn't returned it. Tell the men there. That's right! I don't want to be playing the fool in Ruhleben for the next three years."

A few moments later, a step at a time, Davis disappeared into Hudson's cabin, which lay in the fore part of the ship. Two other men prepared to slip after him by lounging casually in the companionway, while the men in front moved a little closer to screen them.

They seized their chance as the German boat stopped, twenty yards away from the _Morning Glory_, and the officer in command announced through a megaphone, in very good English, that he was in a great hurry. They were friends, he said; and there was no need for alarm, so long as the _Morning Glory_ carried out all instructions. All they wanted was the confidential chart of the British mine fields, which the _Morning Glory_, of course, possessed, and all other confidential papers of a similar kind. If the _Morning Glory_ did not carry out his instructions in every detail the guns of the cruiser would sink her. He was now coming aboard to secure the papers.

"I guess that's all right, captain!" bawled Matthew Hudson in an entirely new voice and the accent that Europe accepts as American, with about as much reason as America would have for accepting the Lancashire, Yorkshire and Glasgow dialects, all rolled into one, as English.

The quiet member of the Century Club had disappeared, and the golden, remote Wild Westerner, almost unknown in America itself, had risen. In half a minute more the German officer and half a dozen armed sailors were standing on the deck of the _Morning Glory_.

"So you see England does not completely rule the waves," was the opening remark of the officer, who had not yet received the full benefit of Hudson's adopted accent.

"Been finding it stormy in the canal, cap?" drawled Hudson. "Don't blame it on me, anyway. I'm a good Amurrican--Jefferson B. Thrash, of Buffalo."

"Is this an American ship? I much regret to find an American ship fighting her best friends."

"Well, cap, I confess I haven't much use for the British, myself; not since their press talked about my picture-postcard smile--an ill-considered phrase, by which they unconsciously meant that, among the effete aristocracies of Europe, they were not used to seeing good teeth. They lack humor, sir. To regard good teeth as abnormal shows a lack of humor on the part of the British press.

"However, as George Bernard Shaw says, President Wilson has put it up to the German people in this way: 'Become a republic and we'll let up on you. Go on Kaisering and we'll smash you!'"

"I am in a great hurry," the German officer replied. "I must ask you at once for your confidential papers."

"That's all right, admiral!" said Hudson. "I've sent a man down below to get them out of my steamer trunk. They'll be here right away."

He looked reflectively at the guns of the destroyer and added ingratiatingly:

"Of course I disapprove of George Bernard Shaw's vulgarizing the language of diplomacy in that way. I would rather interpret President Wilson's message as saying to the German people, in courteous phrase: 'Emerge from twelfth-century despotism into twentieth-century democracy. Send the imperial liar who misrules you to join Nick Romanoff on his ranch. Give the furniture-stealing Crown Prince a long term in any Sing Sing you like to choose; and we will again buy dyestuffs and toys of you, and sell you our beans and bacon.'"

"Are you aware that you endanger your life by this language? Do you see those guns?"

Matthew Hudson looked at the guns and spat over the side of the ship meditatively. Then he looked the questioner squarely in the eye. He had taken the measure of his man and he only needed three and a half minutes more. Any question that could be raised was clear gain; and the cruiser would probably not use her guns while members of the German crew were aboard the _Morning Glory_.

"Yes," he said; "and you'd better not use your guns till you get those confidential papers, for there's not a chance that you'll find them without my help. They're worth having, and I've no objection to handing them over, though I don't lay much store by your promise not to shoot afterward. When you've got them, how am I to know that you won't shoot, anyway, and--what's the latest language of your diplomacy?--'leave no traces'? By cripes, there's no mushy sentiment about your officials! No, sir! Leave no traces!--and they said it about neutrals, remember! Leave no traces! That's virile! That's red-blooded stuff! The effete humanitarianism of our democracy, sir, would call that murder. In England they would call it bloody murder! I don't agree. I think that war is war. Of course it's awkward for non-combatants--"

"With regard to the crews, it has been announced in Germany that they would be saved and kept prisoners in the submarines. Your man is taking too long to find your papers. I can allow you only one minute more."

"He'll be right back, captain, with all the confidential goods you want. But, say, between one sailorman and another, that story about planning to hide crews and passengers aboard the submarines must have been meant for our Middle West. Last time I was on a submarine I had to sleep behind the cookstove; and then the commander had to sit up all night. It's the right stuff for the prairies, though. Ever hear of our senator, cap, who wanted to know why the women and kids on the _Lusitania_ weren't put into the water-tight compartments? They cussed the Cunard Company from hell to breakfast out Kalamazoo way for that scandalous oversight. Wonder what's keeping that son of a gun!"

At this moment the son of a gun announced from the companionway that he was unable to find the confidential papers.

"I can wait no longer. The ship must be searched by my own men," said the German peremptorily. "Are the papers in your cabin?"

"Sure! But I can save you a lot of time, captain. I'll lead you right to them."

The _Morning Glory_ had drifted round till her nose was now pointing towards that of the cruiser. In a minute or two more she would be pointing directly amidships if the drifting continued. Matthew Hudson took a long, affectionate look at the guns and the guns' crews that kept watch over his behavior from the gray monster ahead; then he led the way below to his cabin.

The Hamburg-Amerika Line had many a less imposing room than this, the only part of the yacht that retained all its old aspect. It ran the whole breadth of the ship and had two portholes on each side. There was a brass bedstead, with a telephone beside it and an electric reading lamp. There were half a dozen other electric bulbs overhead.