Adventure Tales, Volume 6

by John Gregory Betancourt

  From this, too, but without removing it from the outer casing, Pierre pried off the top—and behold! Before them lay the late colonel of the Young Guard in a surprisingly good state of preservation, although his face was swollen and nearly black. Still, one might trace a hint of the likeness to the great Napoleon, so sedulously cultivated by the old soldier.

  He was dressed in full uniform: blue, swallow-tailed coat with broad revers and tarnished brass buttons and epaulets, gloved hands crossed over his sheathed sword, cocked hat by his side, long-spurred cavalry boots upon his bandy legs. A row of medals was strung across his breast.

  The three men stared at him in breathless silence. The curé and Pierre crossed themselves; Pelletier gravely touched his forehead in respectful salute. Whatever their various ideas, in one particular they felt alike. Here before them, visible to the naked eye, lay one of the officers of a famous and unbeaten regiment of the great military genius of their beloved country.

  So absorbed were they, Pierre with his hopes, Father Jean with his apprehensions, the mayor with his respectful interest, that they failed to hear upon the cobbled street above the faint clatter of the advance force of Uhlans, riding cautiously into Breaux; failed to hear them as, having dismounted, they followed the tiny candle gleam down into the crypt, and were shocked into a numb terror only when the captain of Uhlans, in excellent French, addressed them mockingly as he advanced through the stairway door.

  “So! It is that Frenchmen rifle the graves of their own dead, that they may afterward cry out upon the German ghouls! The good pastor, too!”

  His teeth showing in a wolfish smile, his monocle fixed, one hand at the automatic in his belt, the officer advanced within the circle of light, followed by several of his staff, and, craning forward, gazed upon that which had so riveted the attention of the three Frenchmen.

  “You are wrong, my son,” Père Jean replied with dignity. “There are no valuables in these, our poor tombs, save the honored dead they hold!”

  The Uhlan stared insolently upon him.

  “Perhaps you will then explain the trouble to which you put yourself in opening this casket?”

  “I will do so,” Père Jean responded with quiet nobility of demeanor. “Tradition in our little town has it that this son of the Church and of France, and one-time officer of the great Napoleon, would, if brought from his sepulcher, save Breaux in its day of need from impious hands, even, as his ancestors did in ancient times.”

  The officer laughed harshly.

  “And your theology swallows these children’s’ fairy tales, worthy pastor?”

  The mayor, Pelletier, answered him.

  “Neither he nor I, but this descendant of De Voulx’s orderly. To humor a good and faithful citizen we assented. That is all.”

  The German rubbed his hands gleefully.

  “Well, well! And why not? Let us see if there be any truth in it. Come forth, my Gallic Lazarus! Save thy ugly hamlet of Breaux! Many prettier towns have gone up in smoke this past week.”

  Then began a scene such as no other war but this could match. The Uhlan’s Teutonic sense of humor rose to the surface. After an orgy of blood and rapine the surfeited beast chose to be good-naturedly facetious for the moment.

  Obeying a curt command, two big cavalrymen laid hold upon Dc Voulx, and twitched him from the wooden bed where he had slept so long. They held him erect, clapped his cocked hat upon his head; then, their captain catching the travesty of the emperor in the bloated features, he bent one arm—the brittle bone cracking sharply—and thrust the hand within his breast. His sword was buckled on; the officer saluted him mockingly, hailed him as “kamerad!” and, entering into the spirit of the occasion, the gruesome figure was pushed and pulled about, complimented upon his winning so many medals as colonel of so distinguished a regiment, and then kicked and buffeted for failing to reply to the queries or to return the salutes.

  It was to be noted that throughout the incredible buffoonery the little figure of De Voulx seemed to maintain an unshaken dignity which no insult could degrade. Dead this century and more, the deathless panoply of birth and character never for an instant failed to make cheap and bestial his living mockers!

  Meanwhile Père Jean had been twitching at the sleeves of his two companions, and step by stealthy step, moving backward toward the little door, they slipped up the crooked stairs, and through the sacristy, and out into the black night, sick at heart, and with the uncouth shouts of the Uhlans sounding fainter and fainter in their horrified ears.

  This was the story that Lieutenant Paradis told me as we rode away from Breaux; and at this point we reined up for a final back-flung look at it.

  The moon was riding high in the heavens now; and beneath its rays the little town seemed a fragile toy, fabricated of beaten silver.

  “Yet you have not told me,” I complained, “what really saved Breaux?”

  “Colonel Eugen Etienne Ste. Marie de Voulx saved it!” replied my guide.

  “But—but how—”

  He turned and looked me in the eye.

  “A miracle, so they are already saying. So say I—for of such stuff are dreams and miracles made! De Voulx, as has been learned by painstaking investigation of contemporary records, died of the black death, the germs of which he brought home with him from Asia. His orderly, who had served long in the East, recognized the symptoms, and warned the physician who attended De Voulx and the priest who shrived him.

  “He was able to prevent them from contracting the plague, and it was by his advice that the body was hermetically sealed in lead and the secret kept from the village.

  “When the casket was opened the germs were still virulent, still lying in wait. None of the three Frenchmen touched the body; but the Uhlans, who did, contracted the black death by contagion; and when the German Medical Staff learned the truth, and had cremated their numerous victims, they drew a circle about Breaux, forbidding, under severest penalties, any crossing of the dead line. And as this order was not countermanded, De Voulx kept his promise, and Breaux stands inviolate today!”

  WEARINESS OF WAR, translated by Poul Anderson

  In 1064 A.D., King Harald Hardrede of Norway and King Svein Ulfsson of Denmark met to see if their long struggle for the Danish crown could be settled. Both brought great armies. None knew if the truce would end in peace being made, or in a battle which would resume the destructive war. It was the former which happened. Harald abdicated his claims—perhaps, in part, because of this verse, whose composer is unknown but which was heard in both camps.

  Many folk their mouth use at meeting, in each army;

  Haughtiness breeds hatred in hosts of Dane and Norseman.

  None will wish to nod his neck unto another;

  And the kings are angry, egging on the trouble.

  Warlike royal wills give warning of ill tidings;

  Men who’d act as makepeace measure into scalepans.

  Fearlessly and freely folks should say their wishes:

  Evil is this hour if enemies go homeward.

  —From the Original Norse

  MUSTERED OUT, by H. Bedford-Jones

  I.

  Sergeant Aloysius Larrigan inspected the houses ahead—and hesitated. Before he found name and wealth and fame in California film fields, Aloysius Larrigan had been born and raised in New York. Hence, he knew the metropolis. He knew that behind him on Fifth Avenue were the false jewels; and that here ahead of him was the real thing. Here, half a block off Fifth Avenue, was the house of Jim Bleeker, bunky of Sergeant Aloysius Larrigan.

  But the sergeant hesitated, gripping the package a little harder in his hand. Then, mustering up courage, he approached the doorway and rang.

  The outer door opened, and a stolid butler gazed at him.

  “I—I’ve come to see Mrs. Bleeker,” said the sergeant nervously.

  “It’s quite early, sir,” answered the butler, somehow stifling his first instinct of blank rejection. “I hardly think, sir, that Mrs. Bleeker is—
”

  “Look here!” snapped Larrigan, flushing. “I’ve just landed from France. My name is Larrigan. Jim Bleeker was my bunky—”

  “If you’ll step inside, sir,” hastened the butler, changing countenance abruptly. “I’m sure that Mrs. Bleeker will wish to see you.”

  Aloysius Larrigan sat himself down between a mounted piece of fifteenth-century armor and a dull-gleaming Rubens. All this, he knew, was the real thing. He had guessed that Jim Bleeker was an aristocrat; but—well, all this was a bit crushing. Before he quite realized it, Mrs. Bleeker, in her widow’s black, was upon him and holding his hand.

  “Jim wrote me so much of you!” she was saying quietly. “I’m very, very glad to know you, Mr. Larrigan. I received your letter from Bordeaux, telling me of the final days—I cannot tell you how I appreciated the sweetness of that letter.”

  Aloysius Larrigan blushed fearfully. He stammered something and fell silent.

  “You must stay for luncheon—but how long shall you have in the city?”

  “No time at all, ma’am,” returned Aloysius. He displayed his package. “We’re going through town to be mustered out, and then I have to hit for California. I’ve got important business there, you see—a lady I’ve not seen for a year, and also business. I just got permission to run up here with this.”

  He thrust forward the package, all his carefully rehearsed speech and actions gone to the winds.

  “You see, Mrs. Bleeker, Jim made me promise to bring these things here myself. They are just the little things; well, you’ll see. He thought maybe you would like to have them. I have to be back in half an hour.”

  Mrs. Bleeker took the package, bit her lip very hard, and then threw back her shoulders and looked Aloysius Larrigan in the eye. He realized that hers was a peculiar bravery—the courage of deep things, of rare blood, of a sensitive, inner grief that was tearing her very soul before his eyes.

  He felt tongue-tied and extremely uncomfortable, far different from the easy assurance habitual to him.

  “Wait just a minute, please,” she said, and left him.

  He waited, gazing at the velvet hangings, the deep softness of everything around him, feeling himself frightfully out of place. The knowledge that he was an American soldier, and as good as any man alive, did not help him.

  Then he smiled grimly at the thought of how little the studio directors knew about the furnishings of an aristocratic home! All the studio men knew about was the flashy emptiness of the newly rich and the professional decorator.

  Mrs. Bleeker was before him again.

  “I’m more sorry than I can tell you, Mr. Larrigan, that you have to run away so quickly. When you get settled in California, will you please send me your address? One does not know what unforeseen emergencies may arise.”

  Aloysius promised.

  Mrs. Bleeker produced a little morocco case.

  “I would like you to have this,” she said quietly, very steadily. “I brought it to Jim once; he always wore it. There’s no other man I could give it to, Mr. Larrigan—but if you would accept it, you would give me great pleasure.”

  Larrigan gazed at the scarf-pin, an abalone blister mounted in gold.

  It came to him that this was a very precious tribute, a tribute from the woman’s heart, meaning more than words could say.

  Jim Bleeker had other friends, of course—wealthy friends, college friends, all that a man of his standing would have. But he, Larrigan, had been Bleeker’s bunky in France, had watched Jim Bleeker die, had been more to Jim Bleeker than any man alive.

  And this was a tribute, the most precious heart-gift he would ever know.

  “I—I’d be very glad,” he said, stumbling over the words, cursing himself because he could not express the thing that was in him, the feeling that gripped him in that moment of revelation. “ I’ll be wearing cits in a couple of days. I—I sure appreciate this very deeply, Mrs. Bleeker.”

  “There’s no other man I could give it to,” she said again very softly.

  This was all. He was thankful that his face seemed quite unknown to her.

  II.

  Reever Keene was home again—Reever Keene, the great; Reever Keene, the man who had snapped asunder his fabulous contract a year ago in order to enlist as a private; Reever Keene, whose pictures were the greatest drawing-card in every theater of the country!

  He had sent no notice of his coming, but the studio knew of it and was ready. As the Overland drew in, sixteen automobiles were waiting, and these automobiles were the cream of motion-picture motordom. All Los Angeles knew that the aluminum car with purple trimmings was Reever Keene’s; that his director owned the pea-green Twin Duplex striped with canary; that his leading lady had paid eleven thousand dollars for the screaming blue-and-gold roadster, and so forth.

  But a terrible thing happened at the station—a thing which, fortunately, was kept out of the papers by influence. As one of the lesser lights of filmdom grasped the hand of the great Keene he gave a raucous laugh.

  “For Heaven’s sake, Reever! Where’d you get the abalone sparkler? Wow! Look at it, folks; pipe the—”

  Reever Keene’s fist smashed him square in the mouth.

  The press-agent wanted to use the story, of course; but Reever Keene took the press-agent by the nape of the neck and kicked him hard. Influence did the rest—advertising influence. The story was killed.

  “I can’t understand what’s got into Keene,” said the director, riding back to the studios with the president of the company. “And look at the face of him! We’ll have to paint him an inch deep to disguise that brick-red tan and make him come out like the old screen idol! Fortunately his profile is all right still.”

  The president grunted. He was a wise man, or he would not have been in his present position.

  “Keene takes up his contract where he left off,” he returned. “That’s all I’m worrying about! Let Keene run the whole damned place if he wants. If you’d gone into the army, my son, instead of sitting on your draft-proof job, the Lord knows you’d be a damned sight better director!”

  The director looked at his leather puttees and said no more.

  “Where’s Lola?” asked Reever Keene, driving to the studios in his own car once more, his leading lady and chief supports gathered around him. “Thought she might be around?”

  “She’ll turn up at the studios,” was the response. “Working on a location near Santa Monica to-day. They’ll be back for dinner. We’re having a real celebration, old boy!”

  “Lola’s awful proud of that sparkler you gave her,” simpered the leading lady. “Heaven knows it was a beaut!”

  Reever Keene shivered a little. He was not sure why he shivered; nor was he sure why the warmth and cordiality of his reception at the studio left him cold and hard.

  He had not thought it would be this way. He had looked forward to falling right back into the old rut, among the old friends, and he had anticipated swaggering like a good one—all kinds of publicity in it! But, somehow, he found himself landing with a horrible jar. He was damned glad, he reflected, to be done with the bare simplicity of the soldier’s life, with the saluting and uniforms and general prophylaxis; and yet—

  Homesickness had glamoured all the old life, but now that he was back in it, the glamour seemed unaccountably like tinsel. The directors, for instance, even his own director and old crony, with their puttees and riding-breeches, general superiority, and bustling business—well, maybe it was the puttees that grated. Keene had saluted leather puttees until he was heartily sick of it; but that was another story altogether.

  He wondered inwardly if he had ever been like the men now around him—good fellows, of course, but abominably artificial. These fancy tailored garments, these amber cigarette-holders and sodden cigarettes without a bite, these flashing jewels, and, worst of all, this breezy talk that moved in perpetual high lights—

  What the devil was the matter with him, anyhow? Maybe it was because Lola had not come yet.

>   Well, Lola came, with a stifled shriek and a tiny Peke, and flung herself at him. Good Heaven! Keene had been away from studio paint so long that her appearance frightened him. And had he really picked that engagement ring, that diamond like a walnut? Yes. He remembered hideously the glee with which he had nonchalantly signed that five-thousand-dollar check, and the delight with which he had seen the check pictured in the papers.

  “You’ve been away a hell of a long time, old sport!” and his director clapped him on the back. “But now you’re back to the life—the only life, boy!”

  “Right you are!” cried Reever Keene, bracing his shoulders. “Let’s have a drink!”

  III.

  The fact that Reever Keene, home from the army, insisted on working with an abalone blister in his scarf, was an idiosyncrasy good for three-day comment in the press. And the press-agent sighed for the lost opportunities that were closed to him simply by the stubborn deviltry of Keene. Nobody knew what had got into the screen star. He had changed. The abalone pin, for instance, was a sore subject with him.

  He never wore any of his former loud attire, and had discarded all his jewelry, which formerly flashed in the cabaret lights of Los. He even wore that abalone pin stuck in the front of his dress shirt, for a society picture; and when the director expostulated, Keene bluntly told him to go to hell—which was no way to treat a famous director.

  Then somebody in the scenario department—that is, somebody in the orange-hued flivver class—had an inspiration. He wrote a story about that abalone pin. Keene, according to his contract, had the say about what film stories were to be accepted for his use; and he went into closed session with the scenario department, and there was evolved a scenario which made the director gasp. But the scenario went through; it had to go through, with Keene backing it.