CHAPTER XX
MONSIEUR OBERNAI's ATTIC
"I can't hardly believe it," said Ginger, when Kenneth recounted thefacts and his inferences. "Never thought Stoneway had the pluck."
"A man without pluck is no good as a spy," Harry remarked.
"True. He must have had an awful time of it, always wondering if he'dbe found out, or copped by a German bullet."
"What strikes me most forcibly is the thoroughness of the Germanorganisation," said Kenneth. "You'll always find individuals ready totake their lives in their hands, for patriotism or pay; but you won'talways find things so perfectly organised. If we're right, Stonewaymust have been employed first as an anti-recruiting agent, with ordersto enlist and act as spy within our ranks if that seemed feasible."
"I see through that post-card business now," said Ginger. "He gave ouraddress to some pal in London so that the Germans should know where hewas, and make use of him. And then to put it on to me!--a dirty trick.But what can you expect when the Kaiser lets his men do dirty tricks andgives 'em Iron Crosses for it? Whatever he is, Bill is no gentleman."
"Stoneway is a German, I suppose?" said Harry.
"Steinweg--not an uncommon German name," replied Kenneth. "But now, howare we going to set about our job?"
"What was that you said about a bat?" said Harry. "I didn't pay muchheed."
Kenneth again described the curious phenomenon, adding:
"That's why I want to do something more than watch the lane. If the manI saw was Stoneway, we might catch him again, but give time for Obernaito clear away anything suspicious. It seems to me that what we have todo is to get into the house, and have a look at the back premises."
"That means we should have to get in at the back secretly?"
"Yes; if we went to the front openly we shouldn't get farther than thelobby."
"Suppose it turns out that we are quite wrong, wouldn't it be rather aserious matter to break into a French house? Obernai is popular: itmight not be easy to persuade the French authorities that we were notburglars."
"Let's chance that," said Ginger. "For any sake don't let the policeknow beforehand, or the whole thing will be messed up like it was withthat maire. Besides, if it comes to that, we've got the capting behindus."
"I quite agree," said Kenneth. "We'll risk it. Well now, judging bythe length of the side garden wall, the house is about sixty yards fromthe lane. With these mysterious comings and goings the back gate willvery likely be watched; at any rate there'll be somebody about to letvisitors in and out. I vote we get into the next garden, and clamberover the wall into Obernai's. We shall have to wait until the people inthe next house are asleep--say eleven o'clock to-night."
About half-past ten, when the village was dark and silent, the three menleft their billet and, to avoid detection, took a round-about route tothe lane. The air was rather chill, and a light mist hung low over theground. Each of the three carried a revolver, and they had agreed notto speak except in case of necessity, and then only in whispers.
Creeping along softly under cover of the trees that lined one side ofthe lane, they passed Obernai's door, and halted opposite the door ofthe next house, a few yards beyond. Here they waited, listening. Allwas silent. Then Kenneth tiptoed across the lane and quietly tried thedoor of Obernai's garden. It was bolted. The next door opened to histouch. Joined by his companions, he entered and found himself in agarden much overgrown with weeds. They stole along by the side wall, andhalted under it about fifty feet from the house.
"Give me a leg-up," Kenneth whispered.
In a few seconds he was down again. The top of the wall was spiked withglass. Stripping off his overcoat, he mounted again, laid the coat overthe glass, and dropped lightly to the ground, after listening awhile tomake sure that nobody was about. The others followed him in turn.
The back of the house was quite dark. There was no sound within orwithout. Through the mist they could just distinguish the path leadingto the back door. Kenneth crossed the grass to it, stole along, andcautiously turned the door handle. The door resisted his slightpressure: it was locked or bolted. He looked up the wall. The windowswere out of reach. It seemed that the house could only be enteredforcibly.
He was returning to consult his companions when he suddenly heard behindhim a sound like the ringing of a muffled electric bell inside thehouse. Hurrying on, he crouched with the other two at the foot of thewall and waited. In a few moments they heard a bolt drawn. They couldsee nothing, but apparently the door was being opened. Then from thedoorway came a low whisper: "Geben Sie Acht," followed, as by aninstantaneous after-thought, by the French words, "Prenez garde." Therewas no reply, but a slight rustle approached, and the three watchers,peering over the bushes, saw a woman passing in almost absolute silencedown the path to the back wall.
Had she left the door open? Kenneth was thinking of stealing up to itto find out when it occurred to him that the woman had perhaps gone tolet in a visitor. It would be well to wait a little. Very soon he wasjustified. The figure of the woman, scarcely distinguishable in thegloom, reappeared. At her heels was a man. They passed along the pathwithin twenty feet of the lurking watchers; neither spoke a word.Presently came the sound of a bolt gently shot, then all was silentagain.
It was pretty clear that the bell had been rung from an electric push inthe garden door. Kenneth had seen none; it was probably concealed.
"Shall I find it, and get the door opened?" he whispered to hiscompanions.
"That would give the whole show away," said Harry. "We don't want toraise an alarm."
"Then I don't see that we can do anything. The only thing is to tell thecaptain to-morrow, and he'll arrest the lot."
"Why not?" said Ginger. "If they're innocent, they won't mind--notmuch."
"But we shan't catch them at it. You may be sure there's nothingsuspicious to be found in the daytime. We've got very artful men todeal with."
They were still discussing their course of action when they heard thebolt drawn again. Next moment there was a perpendicular streak of dimlight, which widened rapidly. The door was open; the room or lobbybehind was now lit by a small oil lamp, turned very low. Through theilluminated rectangle of the doorway came a man and a woman. The manwas in a British uniform. They stepped down to the path.
"Stoneway!" whispered Ginger.
Pressing themselves almost flat on the ground they watched the twofigures walking down the path, the end of which, towards the gardenwall, was scarcely reached by the feeble rays from the doorway.
"Now!" murmured Kenneth.
Bending double, they hastened across the grass, and slipped in throughthe doorway. They were in a lobby. At the further end of it was aclosed door. There were doors on both sides, one of them slightly open.In the corner on the right was the staircase leading to the upper floor,and on the square-topped newel-post stood the small oil lamp.
Taking in all this at a glance, Kenneth peered through the open door onthe left. The room was dark and untenanted. He beckoned to hiscompanions. They followed him into the room. In less than a minute thewoman returned from the garden, closed and bolted the door, and wasmoving along the lobby when the stairs creaked slightly, and an old mancame tottering down.
"Bier, noch Bier," he said in low tones to the woman.
The woman muttered something, took the lamp from its place, andaccompanied by the old man went into one of the rooms off the lobby onthe opposite side from the three watchers. They were heard clumpingdown wooden steps, no doubt leading to the cellars.
"Now's our chance," Kenneth whispered.
The three stole out of the room into the dark lobby, and crept on handsand knees up the staircase. The landing above was equally dark, exceptin the far corner on the right, where light came through a door slightlyajar. The three men tiptoed to it. Kenneth peeped in. The room wasapparently Obernai's bedroom. No one was in it; the bed had not bee
ndisturbed. A candle was burning on the dressing-table. Pieces of heavyFrench furniture afforded means of concealment.
"You stay here," whispered Kenneth. "I'll go on."
He slipped off his boots, blew out the candle, and crept out. There wasno sound from below. On the opposite side of the landing was a narrowstaircase, leading, he presumed, to the attics. Up this he groped hisway. At the top there was a passage, at the end of which, on the right,was a streak of light on the floor. Feeling his way along, he felt twoother doors, the handles of which he turned in succession, hoping toslip into a dark room as he had done below. Both doors were locked. Atthis moment, hearing the footsteps of the old man coming slowly up thebottom flight of stairs, he slipped back to the dark end of the passageand stood watching there.
The old man mounted the upper flight. A can clinked against the post ashe turned to the right towards the door beneath which the light shone.He tapped on the door; it was opened; the man passed in. Kenneth hearda guttural voice say: "Zwei Batterien heute morgen----" The remainderof the sentence was cut off by the closing of the door. In a fewmoments it opened again; the old man came out, closed it behind him, andsat down on a stool at the end of the passage, either as sentry, or tobe at hand if more beer was required.
Kenneth scarcely dared to breathe. What was going on in that room?What could he do? After several uncomfortable minutes the door suddenlyopened--too wide for his comfort--and a voice said:
"Frisch auf! Die Lampe ist beinahe erloescht."
The door was shut. The old man rose wearily and hobbled downstairs, nodoubt to fetch oil or whatever was used for the lamp.
Kenneth felt that the time had come for action. The mention of the lampleft no doubt in his mind of the work on which the occupants of the roomwere engaged. Waiting until the old man had reached the foot of thelower staircase, he stole down to the room where he had left hiscompanions and told them in a few whispered words what he haddiscovered. They removed their boots and stood behind the door,prepared to follow the man when he came up again.
In a few minutes he returned. They waited until he had ascended theupper staircase, then followed him noiselessly, saw him enter the room,and crept along to the door, drawing their revolvers. From within theroom came the smell of acetylene gas. Standing back against the wall,they waited for the reopening of the door. As soon as the old manreappeared, they started forward, pointing their revolvers at him,pushed him before them and entered the room.
There was an exclamation, a moment of confusion.
"Hands up, or I fire!" cried Kenneth in German.
There were four men in the room, three seated at a table drinking beer,the fourth occupied with a steel lever operating a disc that worked fromside to side in front of a bright bull's-eye lamp. Kenneth's warninghad checked a movement on the part of two of the seated men towardstheir coat pockets. The man at the lamp, who had faced round at thesudden intrusion, was quicker than his companions, and drew his revolverat the moment of turning. But as he was raising his hand Harry fired.His revolver fell to the floor with a crash, and with a curse he claspedhis broken wrist with the other hand.
The three others had fallen back into their chairs. A stream of beerfrom an overturned mug trickled from the table to the floor, for onetense moment the only sound in the room. The men's faces were pale andcontorted with fear. They sat, limp, with no spirit for resistance,recognizing that the game was up.
Kenneth and Harry glowed with a quiet satisfaction. Ginger was moredemonstrative.
"Blest if I haven't got him at last!" he exclaimed, smiling triumphantlyat one of the prisoners. "It's the chap that downed me when I wassitting on that aeroplane."
"Monsieur Obernai is unfortunate in his friends," said Kenneth.
Obernai glared at him; it was not the expression of a blandphilanthropist. One of his companions, a big man with a wart on hisnose, did not wear the look of pious resignation that might have beenexpected from a man dressed in a cure's soutane. The features of thefourth man seemed familiar to Kenneth, though at the moment he could notrecall the time or place of his seeing him before.
"We'll just hand these men over to the captain," said Kenneth. "Thenwe'll deal with Stoneway."
After ordering the men to empty their pockets, they marched themdownstairs, and through the door connecting the back part of the housewith the officers' billets. Captain Adams, like the others, had gone tobed. He came to the door of his room in his pyjamas.
"We've caught Obernai and three others signalling with a lamp, sir,"said Kenneth.
"You don't say so! What have you done with them?"
"They are below, sir."
"Take them off to the provost-marshal: I don't want to see them."
"Stoneway is in it, sir, I am sorry to say."
"Arrest him, as quickly as you can. Then come back and tell me all aboutit."
The spies were marched off to prison. Then Ginger with a corporal'sguard went to the cottage where Stoneway was billeted. Stoneway was notthere. Enquiry and search were alike fruitless. It was not until anhour later that Ginger hit on a possible explanation of his absence.
"By jinks!" he exclaimed, with a gesture of vexation. "I forgot the oldwoman."
He hastened back to Obernai's house. The old woman had disappeared.
On returning to the house some time before, Kenneth and Harry found theofficers, all in their night attire, examining the signalling apparatusin the upper room.
"They are all safely locked up, sir," Kenneth reported.
"That's well. How did you catch them?"
Kenneth gave an account of the night's work.
"You did very well, Amory," said the captain. "The battalion is luckyin having the Three Musketeers. And the whole brigade is indebted toyou. This is a fiendishly ingenious arrangement."
He explained the working of the apparatus. The acetylene lamp faced oneend of a long tube, which pierced the outer wall of the house. By meansof a delicate mechanism the position of the tube could be altered bymillimetres. The length of the tube prevented the rays from converginglike the rays of a searchlight, so that the light, directed eastward,was not likely to be seen except by a person at an equal height.
"I have no doubt at all," said the captain, "that some miles away in theGerman lines there is an operator with a similar lamp, at the sameheight and in the same straight line with this. We have kept a look-outbut seen nothing; no doubt the cessation of the flashing gave themwarning. To them the light would appear like a star on the horizon, andthe alternate exposure and dousing of it by means of the disc made thesignals. No wonder we've got it unexpectedly hot sometimes."
Here Ginger came in.
"Stoneway's got away, sir," he reported. "I guess the old woman gave himthe tip."
"Poor wretch! He can't get far. I'll circulate the news at once andhe'll be hunted down. Now get to your billets, men; I shall want yourevidence in the morning."
As they were returning through the silent streets, talking over theexciting incidents of the night, Kenneth suddenly exclaimed:
"By George! I remember now. That fellow was the man I saw talkingFrench to Stoneway at St. Pancras station."