A few moments later he and the two battered ones left the hotel hastily in a taxicab, joined the man at the railroad station, and drove rapidly eastward.
And before forty-eight hours had elapsed, each one of these four men operating in pairs, had attempted to kill the young man named Halkett. Twice he got away. The third time two of them succeeded in locating him in the little town of Diekirch, a town which Halkett was becoming more and more anxious to leave, as he finally began to realize what a hornet's nest he and his friend Gray had succeeded in stirring up.
And all the while the invisible net of destiny in which he now found himself entangled was every minute enmeshing in its widening spread new people whose fate was to be linked with his, and who had never even heard of him. Among them was the girl Philippa.
*PROLOGUE*
A narrow-gauge railroad track runs through the woods from Diekirch, connecting the two main lines; and on the deserted wooden platform beside this track stood Halkett, his suitcase in one hand, the other hand in his side pocket, awaiting the shuttle train with an impatience born of deepest anxiety.
The young man's anxiety was presently justified, for, as he sauntered to and fro, uneasily scanning the track and the unbroken woods around him, always keeping his right hand in his coat pocket, two men crept out from behind separate trees in the forest directly behind the platform, and he turned around only in time to obtain a foreshortened and disquieting view of the muzzle of a revolver.
"Hands up--" began the man behind the weapon; but as he was in the very act of saying it, a jet of ammonia entered his mouth through the second button of Halkett's waistcoat, and he reeled backward off the platform, his revolver exploding toward the sky, and fell into the grass, jerking and kicking about like an unhealthy cat in a spasm.
Already Halkett and the other man had clinched; the former raining blows on the latter's Teutonic countenance, which proceeding so dazed, diverted, and bewildered him that he could not seem to find the revolver bulging in his side pocket.
It was an automatic, and Halkett finally got hold of it and hurled it into the woods.
Then he continued the terrible beating which he was administering.
"Get out!" he said in German to the battered man, still battering him. "Get out, or I'll kill you!"
He hit him another cracking blow, turned and wrested the other pistol from the writhing man on the grass, whirled around, and went at the battered one again.
"I've had enough of this!" he breathed, heavily. "I tell you I'll kill you if you bother me again! I could do it now--but it's too much like murder if you're not in uniform!"
The man on the grass had managed to evade suffocation; he got up now and staggered off toward the woods, and Halkett drove his companion after him at the point of his own revolver.
"Keep clear of me!" he said. "If you do any more telephoning or telegraphing it will end in murder. I've had just about enough, and if any more of your friends continue to push this matter after I enter France, just as surely as I warn you now, I'll defend my own life by taking theirs. You can telephone that to them if you want to!"
As he stood on the edge of the wooden platform, revolver lifted, facing the woods where his two assailants had already disappeared, the toy-like whistle of an approaching train broke the hot, July stillness.
Before it stopped, he hurled the remaining revolver into the woods across the track, then, as the train drew up and a guard descended to open a compartment door for him, he cast a last keen glance at the forest behind him.
Nothing stirred there, not even a leaf.
But before the train had been under way five minutes a bullet shattered the glass of the window beside which he had been seated; and he spent the remainder of the journey flat on his back smoking cigarettes and wondering whether he was going to win through to the French frontier, to Paris, to Calais, to London, or whether they'd get him at last and, what was of infinitely greater importance, a long, thin envelope which he carried stitched inside his undershirt.
That was really what mattered, not what might become of a stray Englishman. He knew it; he realized it without any illusion whatever. It was the contents of this envelope that mattered, not his life.
Yet, so far, he had managed to avoid taking life in defense of his envelope. In fact, he traveled unarmed. Now, if matters continued during his journey through France as they had begun and continued while he was crossing Holland and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, he would be obliged to take life or lose his own.
And yet, if he did kill somebody, that meant arrest and investigation by the police of France. And such an investigation might be fatal to the success of his undertaking--quite as fatal, in fact, as though he himself were killed.
The main thing was to get that envelope and its contents to London.
His instructions were not to mail it, but to take it in person, or to send it, if necessary, by another messenger through other channels.
One thing became more and more evident to him; the time had now arrived when certain people unknown to him by sight had decided to kill him as the only way out of the affair.
Would they actually go so far as to kill him in France, with the chance of the French police seizing that envelope before they could seize it and clear out with it to Berlin? Would they hazard the risk of France obtaining cognizance of a matter which so vitally concerned Germany, rather than permit that information to reach England?
Halkett lay on his back and smoked and did not know.
But he was slowly coming to the conclusion that one thing was now imperative: the envelope must not be found upon his person if he were killed.
But what on earth to do with it until it could be safely transferred to the proper person he had not the slightest idea.
That evening, as he changed trains at the frontier, in the lamp-lit dimness of the station platform he was fired at twice, and not hit.
A loud outcry naturally ensued; a stampede of passengers who tried to escape, a rush of others who desired to see what had happened--much hubbub and confusion, much shouting in several languages.
But nobody could be found who had fired two shots from a revolver, and nobody admitted that they had been shot at.
And so, as nobody had been hit, the gendarmes, guards, and railway officials were in a quandary.
And the train rolled out of the station with Halkett aboard, a prey to deepest anxiety concerning his long thin envelope.
*CHAPTER I*
Somebody at Warner's elbow spoke to him in French. He turned his head leisurely: a well-dressed young fellow, evidently an Englishman, was striving to maintain a place beside him in the noisy, market day crowd.
"Pardon, Monsieur, are you English?"
"American," replied Warner briefly, and without enthusiasm.
"My name is Halkett," said the other, with a quick smile. "I'm English, and I'm in trouble. Could you spare me a moment?"
To Warner the man did not look the typical British dead-beat, nor had he any of the earmarks and mannerisms of the Continental beach-comber. Yet he was, probably, some species or other of that wearisome and itinerant genus.
"I'm listening," said the young American resignedly. "Continue your story."
"There's such a row going on here--couldn't we find a quieter place?"
"I can hear you perfectly well, I tell you!"
Halkett said:
"If I try to talk to you here I'll be overheard, and that won't do. I'm very sorry to inconvenience you, but really I'm in a fix. What a noise these people are making! Do you mind coming somewhere else?"
"Say what you desire to say here," returned Warner bluntly. "And perhaps it might save time if you begin with the last chapter; I think I can guess the rest of the story."
The features of the American expressed boredom to the point of unfriendly indifference. The Englishman looked at him, perplexed for a moment, then his sun-bronzed face lighted up with another quick smile.
"You're quite mistaken," he said. "I don't expect the classic remittance from England, and I don't require the celebrated twenty-franc loan until it arrives. You take me for that sort, I see, but I'm not. I don't need money. May I tell you what I do need--rather desperately?"
"Yes, if you choose."
"I need a friend."
"Money is easier to pick up," remarked Warner drily.
"I know that. May I ask my favor of you all the same?"
"Go ahead."
"Thanks, I will. But can't we get out of this crowd? What is going on in this town anyway?"
"Market day. It's like this once a month in Ausone. Otherwise the town is as dead as any other French provincial town."
Shoulder to shoulder they threaded their way through the crowded market square, amid the clatter of sabots, the lowing of cattle, the incessant bleating of sheep. Ducks quacked from crates in wagons, geese craned white necks and hissed above the heads of the moving throngs; hogs squealed and grunted; fowls hanging by their legs from the red fists of sturdy peasant women squawked and flapped.