Thus Sherbrand, meditating on his Fate to be, while Destiny limped towards him in the person of an undersized telegraph-clerk whose complexion, previously pallid, had deteriorated to dirty green. He began, extending a shaky hand, from which dangled a slip of limp paper:
"For you, sir. Rumball 'adn't got a picklock among his tools, so 'e burst in the door with a No. 10 spanner. They rung us up about twenty times while he was at the job. And the message is important, sir!"
"I'll see! Thank you, Burgin!"
Sherbrand took the telegram from the jerky hand and read:
"_Your--German--acquaintance--suspected--agent-- robbery--documents--national--importance. At--all-- costs--keep--him--until--I--come._"
The Chief's name at the end was the nail that clinched the thing. But the cry of Macrombie's undersized assistant was the hammer-blow that drove the nail to the quick. His sharp eye, following the climbing aeroplane, had seen her flatten and swing about and leap forwards, exactly as the carrier-pigeon strikes out its line of flight for home.
"My Gawd," he yelped out. "See there! Blimy, if the --'s not done us! Bunked it by air to Kaiserland while I was spellin' out the screed. Gone with the Bird--the Bird and the 'overing gear. My Gawd! Wot's to be done?"
"Shut your head on what you know!" said Sherbrand's voice in the pale clerk's ear as Sherbrand's hand fell ungently on his shoulder. "You've done your best! It's not your fault if luck was on the other side! But--" His eyes went to the Doctor's great figure standing beside the tall white shape with the hat of twinkling silver. "But the boy!" A sickness swirled up in him and a dizziness overtopped it. He caught at and gripped the clerk's thin shoulder to keep himself upright. "My God! How shall I break it to the Doctor," Sherbrand asked himself, "if that German fellow has carried off the boy?"
"Steady-O! Ketch on to me, sir.... Nobody's looking!" said the telegraph clerk. He was a hero-worshipper on a robust scale and Sherbrand his chosen deity. "This ain't our young Boss givin' in, but just his empty inside playin' tricks on him," he assured himself. To Sherbrand he said humbly: "If you'd come over to the cabin there's hot cocoa and toke there. Grub'll steady you, if you'll excuse me taking the liberty of saying so--and you can't do nothing till he comes!"
The person to whom Burgin referred had passed the entrance-gates, almost before the sentence left the lips of the clerk. Now his alert, upright figure came in sight, briskly turning the corner of the restaurant, and wrought to the point of ironic merriment by the greatness of the blow that had fallen on him, Sherbrand shook off his dizziness and faintness, straightened his tall body, clapped both hands to his mouth, and gave the huntsman's view-halloo:
"_Stole away! Stole--awa-aay!_"
Small cause for mirth, and yet he laughed, pointing to the dwindling speck high upon the north horizon that represented the worldly prospects of Sherbrand, and a handsome sum in cash. The Bird, just then entering a broad belt of gold-white mackerel-cloud, was lost to view in another instant. But the Chief had wheeled upon the pointing gesture, and seen, and understood.
Then he was upon them, saying in accents jarred with anger:
"How was this allowed to happen? You were warned. You had my wire?"
Sherbrand's mouth was wrung awry with another spasm of mirthless laughter. He fought it back and held out the crumpled slip of paper, saying:
"I did, but luck was on _his_ side. Thanks to a relapse on Macrombie's part, I got this after the Bird had flown."
"The Bird..."
The blue-grey eyes and the keen hazel met, and struck a spark between them.
"'The Bird.' He has taken French leave--or, more appropriately, German--by the help of your machine?"
Sherbrand nodded, setting his teeth grimly. The wailing voice of the pallid clerk came in like a refrain:
"'Ooked it. Bunked--so 'elp me Jimmy Johnson! With our young guv'nor's mono', and the gyro 'overer!"
Said the Chief, moving sharply towards where the Wireless mast straddled over the telegraph-cabin:
"He has adopted the only means of exit by which it was possible for him to escape. All railways stations are being watched, all highways patrolled by our agents, travelling in high-powered motor-cars. We are on the look-out for him at every ocean shipping-port. One road we left open, not having the means to block it--and that is the road of the stork and the swan! Decidedly, I might have guessed that he would play Young Lochinvar after this fashion. But until I left the ground an hour ago I did not know of the theft of the Clanronald Plan."
"The Clanronald--" Sherbrand was beginning, when the Chief cut him short.
"I had forgotten that you are as little wise as I was an hour back. Better glance at this paragraph while I make use of your O. T. installation and Wireless, and put the fear of Heaven into Macrombie, incidentally and by the way."
He thrust a tightly-folded copy of the _Evening Wire_ upon Sherbrand and vanished into the rum-flavoured stuffiness of the cabin, with the pallid telegraph clerk close upon his heels. And upon Sherbrand, in the act of unfolding the newspaper, rushed his Fate, in a hat of silver spangles: challenging the knowledge in him with blazing eyes well upon the level of his own.
"Mr. Sherbrand.... Tell me what has happened? Why do you look so--queer and--white?"
She herself was whiter than her narrow dress, and the mouth the eager rush of words poured from was pale under its rose-tinted salve. She hurried on breathlessly:
"They show no signs of coming back--it fidgets me horribly. And--I was looking--from over there, where I was with Uncle Owen,--when you called out, 'Stole away!' and waved your arm." She glanced at the sky, shuddered and looked back at him. "Am I silly? But all the same, the General told you something! I don't ask what! But I funk--I don't know why, but it's beastly--the sensation! Tell me I've nothing to be afraid of--I swear I'll take your word!"
That she was just then a creature full of fears was written large upon her. She might have quoted Queen Constance, who I think was also a galumpher, meaning a woman of big build and sweeping gestures, and an imperious temper withal. Sherbrand feared also, and the pang of solicitude for the pretty boy so unexpectedly dragged into the vortex of a diplomatic and political felony was, to do him credit, quite as sharp as the pang caused him by the rape of the Bird.
He answered:
"Miss Saxham, I do not believe that there is any danger of an accident. But--that there will be delay--I shall not try to disguise. The fact is----"
A guttural, Teutonic voice said close at Sherbrand's shoulder.
"_Gnaediges Fraeulein_ will wish to return home? It is getting late, so very late! I haf instructions from my master to drive the _Fraeulein_ back to her address."
Sherbrand wheeled, to be confronted by the thickset figure of the moustached and uniformed attendant who had occupied the seat beside the chauffeur of the big blue F.I.A.T. car.
"Who is this?" he demanded in a look, and Patrine, her pallor drowned in a scarlet blush of horrible embarrassment, stammered:
"I really--haven't the least idea!"
"You hear!" Sherbrand's tone was not pleasant. "The lady does not know you--that ought to be enough!"
Patrine felt herself drowning in chill waves of horror. The man persisted:
"The lady is a friend of the gentleman who brought her here.... I haf my orders to drive the lady home in the yellow car!"
In his muddy eyes there flickered a leer or a menace. Patrine saw the Doctor coming and flew to his side. Sherbrand said, looking sternly at the German:
"You understand, your orders are nothing to the lady. She does not choose to be driven home by you!"
The man protested:
"But my master----"
Sherbrand demanded:
"Who is your master?" Then a sudden light dawned upon him, and he turned and knocked sharply at the cabin-door. At which the liveried attendant, as a man who finds hesitancy a double-edged weapon, wheeled in military fashion and retreated, casting a surly glance over his shoulder, and quickening his heavy footsteps to a jog-trot as the General's active person appeared at Sherbrand's side.
"That man, Sir Roland!" Sherbrand's slight gesture indicated the thickset figure now getting hurriedly into the yellow Darracq. He added, as the car swirled round the corner of the restaurant and vanished in the direction of the entrance-gates, "Ought I to have grabbed the brute, and hung on to him? He was certainly with a party of foreign-looking people, who interviewed von Herrnung just before he got away. You saw them?"
"I certainly saw them. And I agree with you that their unexpected appearance has had to do with their countryman's sudden departure," said the Chief. "But to grab an orderly of the German Embassy would be--only less risky than grabbing a Kaiser's messenger, on suspicion of his carrying stolen War Secrets in his official bag."
"A Kaiser's messenger!" Sherbrand's mouth shaped a soundless whistle, "Why, now I remember, he had a dispatch-case or valise with him. Wouldn't hear of leaving it behind!"