“Fine!”
“Understood!”
“All right!” exclaimed Degains, in English—which he spoke rather well, and whose most current expressions he liked to employ.
And the automobile moved off.
Three quarters of an hour later, and 35 kilometers further on, the first significant incident of the great adventure occurred—a most unexpected incident, which immediately made the four boys think: “This time, we’re off!”
They had just come through the little town of Rolle and had reached the flat promontory traversed by the river Aubonne when a shout rang out in the pure and clear air: “Help!”—a vibrant cry that made Saint-Clair come to a halt in the space of three meters.
“That’s Wen’s voice!” said Croqui, excitedly.
Immediately, the voice repeated: “Help! Help!... He…lp!” Thus time, it was weaker, and the third repetition was choked off.
“Oh!” exclaimed Degains. “It came from behind that wall!”
To the right, masking the view of the lake, there was a curtain of large poplars clustered behind a white wall about two meters high. There was no opening along the entire length of the wall, but Champeau had noticed, unthinkingly, that a little by-road bordered by willows branched off from the main road at the corner of the wall, ending into large iron gate breaking the line of the wall at right-angles to the highway. Rapidly, he gave that information to the Chief.
“Bah!” said Saint-Clair. “Better to go over the wall—that’ll be quicker!” And he instructed, in a soft but imperious voice: “Out of the car! René, come and make a ladder for us, then stay and guard the car. If necessary, defend it with armed force!”
They were first-rate gymnasts. Hearts beating rapidly, but with their minds clear and their courage taut, they did what needed to be done. René Croqui braced himself, set his back to the wall and joined his hands into a supple but solid stirrup in front of his belly. Putting one foot there, the other on his shoulder and his hands on the crest of the wall, Leo Saint-Clair was the first to go up and leap down on the other side. Robert Champeau and Jean Degains followed him at one-second intervals.
Inside the vast enclosure, the trunks of the poplars were lined up two meters from the wall. Passing between them, the three young men ran straight ahead across an unkempt lawn toward an open pathway between trees of various species, at the far end of which the white walls of a house could be seen, their whiteness contrasting with the black rectangles of two windows.
They heard no more cries, nor did they see anyone or perceive any sound of flight. Moving with one accord, however, Leo, Robert and Jean went all the way to the house as if to go in like a whirlwind, for one of the visible windows was wide open. As they ran across the lawn and along the excessively sandy path, however, they had such a violent impression of isolation, solitude and impending ambush that Saint-Clair, expressing his own and his companions’ profoundest thought, ordered in a dull voice: “Brownings at the ready!”
He drew his weapon; Champeau and Degains did likewise—without relenting in their rapid pace.
Their minds were working hard, though. Saint-Clair’s was prudent, Degains’ was cunning and Champeau’s was opposed to any feverish haste. The first impulse had launched all three of them over the wall behind which Wenceslas’ voice had called for help, and, as a logical consequence, had hurled them toward the house that appeared at the end of the wooded path beyond the empty lawn—but the mental trajectory of that impulse had reached its terminus. At the same time, their material course slowed down and stopped dead at the moment when the three runners were on the point of emerging from the shady pathway into the bright light of the narrow pebble-strewn esplanade circling the house.
“Stop!” breathed the Chief.
“Yes,” said Champeau.
“Right!” approved Degains.
And with the same movement they took cover, side by side, behind one of the enormous spindle-tree bushes that bordered the esplanade at intervals, facing the house on the edge of the little wood.
With a brief smile, Leo Saint-Clair murmured; “That was a very good charge…but we risk throwing ourselves into the wolf’s jaws.”
“We don’t know how many men there are in the house,” Robert Champeau muttered, softly. “And we know that they don’t hesitate to use violence, for if Wen hadn’t been attacked he wouldn’t have called for help. An instinctive cry, of course! He didn’t know that Providence had determined that we’d be passing along the road within the range of his voice. By force of numbers and determined violence, the occupants of the house would have killed or captured us…and our mission would have been all over, pitifully!”
“Right!” said Degains. He did not add another word—but through the gaps in the bush his keen eyes were observing the house, and his ears, endowed with a great delicacy and a rare acuity, were listening…
Leo and Robert knew Cunning Jean well. They looked at him, and they waited, knowing that an idea was about to hatch in his ingenious brain—a good idea, which the Chief’s superior intelligence could not help but welcome and adapt to the circumstances for its execution.
Jean Degains’ silent observation and reflection, and his comrades’ anticipation, lasted no more than a minute. Suddenly, the Briard ceased studying the flat façade of the house with its eight windows, two of which were open, and its little perron surmounted by a closed door. After a brief glance at Champeau—who was frowning, as usual—he fixed his eyes on the gravely attentive face of Leo Saint-Clair, the Chief, and said, in a low voice: “I can hear someone talking inside the house, in a language I don’t understand. There are two voices; one’s asking questions at length, the other’s making monosyllabic replies that seemed to me to be obstinate negations. So, my idea is to get closer, even to enter the house through one of the open windows—the window of the room that isn’t the one in which the people are talking.”
“Are you sure that one of the two rooms is unoccupied?” Saint-Clair asked.
“Quite certain!” Degains replied, firmly. “The people who are talking are in the other room with the open window. It’s a hundred to one that, if there are more than two people there—which is probable, for Wen wouldn’t have been beaten down by one lone man, all those individuals are assembled in the room where the talking is going on, where the Pole is being subjected, if I’m not mistaken, to an interrogation.”
Leo was convinced and, as always, was led to give Degains the permission for which he was courageously asking. “Well then, go!” he said. “But be careful! If you’re in danger, fire a shot. We’ll come running.”
Jean smiled thinly and murmured; “You know perfectly well, Chief, that there’s no need to tell Cunning Jean to be careful!”
With his Browning in his hand, he went around the bush, bent down, and rapidly passed over the esplanade, taking care not to step on the pebbles, where his tread would have produced a disastrous sound, but using a sort of cement walkway as broad as the perron, which led from the end of the path to the door. There he turned left and inched along the wall to the first open window, which he had indicated with a gesture as being that of the room in which no one was talking.
It is easy to imagine how passionately interested Leo Saint-Clair and Robert Champeau were, behind the bush that hid them completely while permitting them to see quite well, and how fast their hearts were beating as they waited attentively.
Jean Degains came to a stop beneath the window, bent double, and slowly straightened up, leaning slightly to one side so that as little as possible of his head would show in the window-frame. At first, he only darted a glance into the room from low down on the right-hand side of the window. At the same time, he lifted his gun hand, holding it in a convenient position for aiming and firing, in case any danger surged forth so great that taking the offensive as the only means of avoiding it.
Suddenly, he froze again—although he was not confronted by any immediate peril, since he lowered his weapon and his head remained in a positi
on such that his left eye could see into the room.
That immobility only lasted a few seconds. Then Degains carefully holstered his Browing, took hold of the window-sill with both hands, braced himself with his elbows and his knees, and flexed his body, raising himself up to sit on the widow-ledge, over which he immediately slid, until his feet were doubtless touching the floor inside.
Saint-Clair and Champeau saw him vanish entirely into the room, whose depths were dark, there being no other window to light it from the far side. The Chief and his friend had no time to wonder about their comrade’s entry into the house, though, for an instant after his disappearance, they heard and recognized his voice, shouting: “Hands up! Hands up!”
“Churka!” yelped a strange shrill voice—and there was a loud bang, immediately followed by a thunderous racket, like a door being slammed on the run, with brutal violence.
Saint-Clair and Champeau lost no time in reflection or deliberation.
“Hup!” exclaimed Leo.
“Yes!” said Robert.
And they leapt forward. The noise they made running over the pebbles hardly mattered now. The two lads took the shortest route, straight toward the second window—the one on the left, the one to the room in which Degains had cried out. They reached it at the same time. Together, side by side, they hoisted themselves up and leapt in—and stopped dead.
Jean Degains was kneeling in front of them, next to an overturned table, his Browning on the carpet beside him. On that same carpet, Wenceslas Polki was lying on his back—and Degains’ agile fingers were working to free the Pole from a finely-woven cord tightened about his neck.
Jean did not turn his head at his comrades’ abrupt entrance, which he had anticipated, but he said, in a voice breathless with emotion: “The villains! One of them fired at me. The other tightened this cord, whose slip-knot was passed around Wen’s neck—pulled it so brutally that the cord has cut into the skin. Look—it’s bleeding!”
“Wait!” said Champeau.
He bent down, put his ear to Wen’s chest, listened for a few seconds, straightened up again, and looked at Saint-Clair and Degains, who were standing at the Pole’s feet, very perplexed. Rapidly, he said: “Don’t worry. He’s only lost consciousness—more from the pain of the tightening than lack of breath; the strangulation didn’t last long enough for him to be asphyxiated.”
“What about the bandits?” Saint-Clair asked.
“Two!” Degains replied. “Ran out by the back door.”
“Let’s go after them, Jean,” said the Chief, decisively. “Robert, you can look after Wen.”
“Of course,” Champeau murmured.
The door at the back of the room led to a corridor, with another facing door; then there was a large room furnished as a dining-room, which communicated with an almost treeless flower-garden by means of a wide open set of French windows. At the back of the garden, beyond a low wall surmounted by decorative railings, the waters of Lake Geneva extended, very blue beneath the clear sky, all the way to the distant French shore, where a high mountain loomed over Thonon.
As they ran across the garden toward a small gate in the wall that was still open, however, the two forwards 5 heard the sputtering racket of a powerful engine. As they came through the gate, they saw a white motor-boat, whose propeller was making an enormous wake. It had undoubtedly just cast off from the little jetty that was there. It was speeding away. There were two men in it, one standing in the middle, the other seated at the rear. Leo and Jean could only see their backs.
“Too late!” said Saint-Clair.
“That’s unlucky,” groaned Degains.
They were tempted to fire at the two fleeing men, but their wise intelligence resisted the temptation. The distance was already considerable. There are very few sharpshooters sufficiently experienced to hit a target—even a large one—with a Browning at more than 50 meters, and the two “forwards,” needless to say, were not very experienced. In any case, two fishing-boats were close at hand, and, not far away from the fleeing motor-boat, a pleasure yacht was sailing, driven by the fresh breeze of that fine March day. Gunshots, therefore, even if they had no direct effect, risked causing indirect complications that it was important to avoid, since secrecy had to be maintained with respect to their present mission.
“Let’s go back,” Saint-Clair decided. “Wen must have something interesting to tell us.”
They went back—which is to say that they went through the garden, the dining-room and the wide corridor. Degains opened the door of the room in which they had left Chapeau to look after Wen.
“Uh-oh!” he exclaimed.
“My God!” said Saint-Clair.
They saw Champeau seated on the carpet; his eyes were wild and his hesitant hands were feeling his skull.
“I’ve been attacked,” he stammered, as he recognized his two comrades. “Three men—a truncheon-blow to my head. They’ve taken Wen.”
At the same moment, though, a loud scream resounded outside: “Aah!” It was followed by a cry for help: the old rallying cry of the Lion Cub scout-troop, to which Degains, Champeau and Croqui had all belonged: “Rahioooh!”
“My God!” exclaimed Saint-Clair. “Croquignol! He’s under attack!”
He jumped out of the window with a single bound, and ran forward. Having leapt out after him, Degains was hot on his heels. Within three seconds, with prodigious skill and speed, lifting and hoisting one another up, they climbed over the wall behind the screen of poplars. Champeau had got to his feet and followed some way behind.
In the ditch at the foot of the wall, outside, they saw Croqui getting to his feet, and heard him say to them, breathlessly: “One of the three is a first-rate boxer. They came from the corner of the wall, over there. I didn’t see them until they were on top of me. Two of them were carrying Wen, who seemed to be dead. The other, who came on ahead, ran at me—that as when I shouted. I tried to fire my Browning, but a blow from a fist knocked it out of my hand, and another punch in the chest knocked me into the ditch. They’ve taken the car…”
On the highway, heading toward Lausanne, the steel-grey sports car was shrinking into the distance, moving very rapidly—carrying three mysterious spies along with the unfortunate Polki.
Suddenly, a puff of white smoke spread out above and behind the automobile, and a muffled detonation sounded in the blue air.
Leo Saint-Clair staggered, collapsed and fell—and his horrified companions saw that his face was entirely bathed in blood…
Chapter V: The Birth of the Nyctalope
That an armed combat could take place in broad daylight, on the edge of a busy road, on the shore of a lake where yachts are passing and small boats peacefully carrying fishermen, says a great deal about the impudent audacity and the decisive intent of the mysterious gang whose leader was undoubtedly the enigmatic spy Sadi Khan, alias Theodore Wallis of Chicago.
It is not uncommon, however, for young sportsmen to practice rifle-shooting in the gardens of villas, and a few gunshots were not likely to astonish the fishermen and yachtsmen. The skirmish, partly masked and muffled in any case by the house, the walls and the trees in the garden, thus passed unnoticed. If anyone saw the puff of smoke behind the grey car speeding toward Lausanne, they must have taken it for a normal product of the exhaust-pipe.
The result was that, for several minutes, there was no one but Champeau, Croqui and Degains gathered around the prostrate Saint-Clair, who was lying beside the ditch that ran along the road, near a little bridge giving access to a service-gate etched in the long wall of the tragic villa. The punches received by the second and the truncheon-blow received by the first were not serious, and for the moment, Champeau, like the good surgeon’s son he was, was entirely focused on Saint-Clair’s wound.
“Calm down!” he ordered his two comrades. “It’s only a superficial wound. Leo’s only fainted. Without touching the eye, the bullet has struck the corner of the orbit and grazed the temporal bone on the right hand side, as you c
an see. The best thing to do is to carry the Chief into the villa, since we no longer have our automobile. I noticed that there’s a telephone in the room where we found Polki initially, half-strangled. We’ll summon a doctor from Lausanne.”
“Yes,” said Degains.
“Wait!” said Croqui. “Here comes a car!”
Approaching noiselessly from the direction of Geneva, a large and handsome limousine came to a halt. Evidently, the chauffeur and the footman had noticed the singular group of three young men leaning over a fourth, who was lying on the road, from some distance away. Perhaps the footman had related that incident to the people inside the vehicle. At any rate, a door opened and an old gentleman and a young woman got out of the limousine and came over, asking what had happened.
Circumspectly, Champeau replied: “An accident. We were about to go into that villa and telephone Lausanne to ask for a doctor…”
But the gentleman, whose face, framed with short-cropped and wispy white hair, had an energetic and benevolent air about it, said: “Are you French, Messieurs?”
“Yes, Monsieur,” Champeau replied.
“So am I—and its Providence that brought me here, judiciously. I’m staying in Lausanne—where my brother-in-law, Doctor de Villiers-Pagan, has a medical practice—until May. The interior of my limousine has six seats. I’d be happy to take all three of you, and your injured friend. We can deposit him, if you wish, at my brother-in-law’s clinic. I’m retired General Le Breuil, of Tours, and this is Mademoiselle Aurora Malianova, a nurse in the Villiers-Pagan clinic.” He gestured toward the young woman who had climbed out of the limousine after him: a very serious and very beautiful blue-eyed blonde.
The best thing was to accept. Champeau did not hesitate; he saw at a glance that Croqui and Degains were in agreement. He pronounced the appropriate words of acquiescence and gratitude.
Enter the Nyctalope Page 4
