Barbarians

But the girl needed no more evidence. The wretched youth in the room overhead had already sealed his own doom with any one of these tissue cylinders. Better for him if the hemorrhage had slain him. Now a firing squad must do that much for him.

Yet, even still, the girl hesitated, almost incredulous, trying to comprehend the monstrous grotesquerie of the abominable plot.

Intuition pointed to the truth; logic proved it; somewhere in the German trenches a comrade of this spy was awaiting these messages with a caged Death's Head female as the bait—a living loadstone wearing the terrific emblems of death—an unfailing magnet to draw the skull-bearing messengers for miles—had it not been that a nearer magnet deflected them in their flight!

That was it! That was what the miserable youth upstairs had not counted on. Chance had ruined him; destiny had sent Madam Death into the room below him to draw, with her macabre charms, every ardent winged messenger which he liberated from his bedroom window.

The subtle effluvia permeating the night air for miles around might have guided these messengers into the German trenches had not a nearer and more imperious perfume annihilated it. Headlong, amorous, impatient they had whirled toward the embraces of Madam Death; the nearer and more powerful perfume had drawn the half-maddened, half-drugged messengers. The spy in the room upstairs, like many Germans, had reasoned wrongly on sound premises. His logic had broken down, not his amazing scientific foundation. His theory was correct; his application stupid.

And now this young man was about to die. Maryette understood that. She comprehended that his death was necessary; that it was the unavoidable sequence of what he had attempted to do. Trapped rats must be drowned; vermin exterminated by easiest and quickest methods; spies who betray one's native land pass naturally the same route.

But this thing, this grotesque, incredible, terrible attempt to engraft treachery on one of nature's most amazing laws—this secret, cunning Teutonic reasoning, this scientific scoundrelism, this criminal enterprise based on patient, plodding and German efficiency, still bewildered the girl.

And yet she vaguely realized how science had been already prostituted to Prussian malignancy and fury; she had heard of flame jets, of tear-bombs, of bombs containing deadly germs; she herself had beheld the poison gas rolling back into the trenches at Nivelle under the town tower. Dimly she began to understand that the Hun, in his cunning savagery, had tricked, betrayed and polluted civilization itself into lending him her own secrets with which she was ultimately to be destroyed.

The very process of human thinking had been imitated by these monkeys of Europe—apes with the ferocity of hogs—and no souls, none—nothing to lift them inside the pale where dwells the human race.

There came a rapping on the café door. The girl rose wearily; an immense weight seemed to crush her shoulders so that her knees had become unsteady.

She opened the café door; it was Sticky Smith, come for his nightcap before turning in.

"The man upstairs is a German spy," she said listlessly. "Had you not better go over and get a gendarme?"

"Who's a spy? That Dutch shrimp you had in your garden?"

"Yes."

"Where is he?" demanded the muleteer with an oath.

She placed her lighted candle on the bar.

"Wait," she said. "Read these first—we must be quite certain about what we do."

She laid the squares of tissue paper out on the bar.

"Do you read Flemish?" she whispered.

"No, ma'am–"

"Then I will translate into French for you. And first of all I must tell you how I came to possess these little letters written upon tissue. Please listen attentively."

He rested his palm on the butt of his dangling automatic.

"Go on," he said.

She told him the circumstances.

As she commenced to translate the tissue paper messages in a low, tremulous voice, the sound of a door being closed and locked in the room overhead silenced her.

The next instant she had stepped out to the stairs and called:

"Karl!"

There was no reply. Smith came out to the stair-well and listened.

"It is his custom," she whispered, "to lock his door before retiring. That is what we heard."

"Call again."

"He can't hear me. He is in bed."

"Call, all the same."

"Karl!" she cried out in an unsteady voice.

CHAPTER XXIII

MADAM DEATH

There was no reply, because the young man was hanging out over his window sill in the darkness trying to switch away, from her closed window below, the big, clattering Death's Head moth which obstinately and persistently fluttered there.

What possessed the moth to continue battering its wings at the window of the room below? Had the other moths which he released done so, too? They had darted out of his room into the night, each garnished with a tissue robe. He supposed they had flown north; he had not looked out to see.

What had gone wrong with this moth, then?

He took his emaciated blond head between his bony fingers and pondered, probing for reason with German thoroughness—that celebrated thoroughness which is invariably riddled with flaws.

Of all contingencies he had thought—or so it seemed to him. He could not recollect any precaution neglected. He had come to Sainte Lesse for a clearly defined object and to make certain reports concerning matters of interest to the German military authorities north of Nivelle.

The idea, inspired by the experiments of Henri Fabre, was original with him. Patiently, during the previous year, he had worked it out—had proved his theory by a series of experiments with moths of this species.

He had arranged with his staff comrade, Dr. Glück, for a forced hatching of the pupæ which the latter had patiently bred from the enormous green and violet-banded caterpillars.

At least one female Death's Head must be ready, caged in the trenches beyond Nivelle. Hundreds of pupæ could not have died. Where, then, was his error—if, indeed, he had made any?

Leaning from the window, he looked down at the frantic moth, perplexed, a little uneasy now.

"Swine!" he muttered. "What, then, ails you that you do not fly to the mistress awaiting you over yonder?"

He could see the cylinder of white tissue shining on the creature's body, where it fluttered against the pane, illuminated by the rays of the candle from within the young girl's room.

Could it be possible that the candle-light was proving the greater attraction?

Even as the possibility entered his mind, he saw another Death's Head dart at the window below and join the first one. But this newcomer wore no tissue jacket.

Then, out of the darkness the Death's Heads began to come to the window below, swarms of them, startling him with the racket of their wings.

From where did they arrive? They could not be the moths he liberated. But.... Were they? Had some accident robbed their bodies of the tissue missives? Had they blundered into somebody's room and been robbed?