The Last Shot Part 80

"Perhaps it ought to be Galland Day rather than Lanstron Day," remarked the vice-chief. "The crowds at the capital when they know her part might cheer her more frenziedly than you, general."

"No, no--please, no!" Marta was hectic in alarm and protest.

"Your secret is ours! It's in the family!" the vice-chief hastened to a.s.sure her. Where could a secret be safe if not in the keeping of an army staff?

"That was almost like teasing!" she exclaimed with a laugh of relief.

"We're all in pretty good humor," remarked the vice-chief. He seemed to have a pleasant taste in his mouth that would last him for life.

Then Marta saw their faces grow businesslike and keen, as they gathered around the table, with Lanstron at the head. They were oblivious of her presence, immured in a man's world of war.

"Your orders were obeyed. We have not pa.s.sed a single white post yet!"

said the vice-chief impatiently. "As the Grays never expected to take the defensive, their fortresses are inferior. Every hour we wait means more time for them to fortify, more time to recover from their demoralization. Our dirigibles having command of the air--we had a wireless from one reporting all clear half-way to the Gray capital--why, we shall know their concentrations while they are ignorant of ours. It's the nation's great opportunity to gain enough provinces to even the balance of population with the Grays. With the unremitting offensive, blow on blow, using the spirit of our men to drive in ma.s.s attacks at the right points, the Gray range is ours!"

Marta scanned the faces of the staff for some sign of dissent only to find nothing but the ardor of victory calling for more victory, which reflected the feeling of the coursing crowds in the capital. Though Lanny wished to stop the war, he was only a chip on the crest of a wave.

Public opinion, which had made him an idol, would discard him as soon as he ceased to be a hero in the likeness of its desires. She saw him aloof as the others, in preoccupation, bent over the map outlining the plan of attack that they had worked out while awaiting their chief's return from the charge. He was taking a paper from his pocket and looking from one to another of his colleagues studiously; and she was conscious of that determination in his smile which she had first seen when he rose from the wreck of his plane.

"This is from Partow: a message for you and the nation!" he announced, as he spread a few thin, typewritten pages out on the table. "I was under promise never to reveal its contents unless our army drove the Grays back across the frontier. The original is in the staff vaults. I have carried this copy with me."

At the mention in an arresting tone of that name of the dead chief, to which the day's events had given the prestige of one of the heroes of old, there was grave attention.

"I think we have practically agreed that the two individuals who were invaluable to our cause were Partow and Miss Galland," Lanstron remarked tentatively. He waited for a reply. It was apparent that he was laying a foundation before he went any further.

"Certainly!" said the vice-chief.

"And you!" put in another officer, which brought a chorus of a.s.sent.

"No, not I--only these two!" Lanstron replied. "Or, I, too, if you prefer. It little matters. The thing is that I am under a promise to both, which I shall respect. He organized and labored for the same purpose that she played the spy. When we sent the troops forward in a counter-attack and pursuit to clear our soil of the Grays; when I stopped them at the frontier--both were according to Partow's plan. He had a plan and a dream, this wonderful old man who made us all seem primary pupils in the art of war."

Could this be that terrible Partow, a stroke of whose pencil had made the Galland house an inferno? Marta wondered as Lanstron read his message--the message out of the real heart of the man, throbbing with the power of his great brain. His plan was to hold the Grays to stalemate; to force them to desist after they had battered their battalions to pieces against the Brown fortifications. His dream was the thing that had happened--that an opportunity would come to pursue a broken machine in a bold stroke of the offensive.

"I would want to be a hero of our people for only one aim, to be able to stop our army at the frontier," he had written. "Then they might drive me forth heaped with obloquy, if they chose. I should like to see the Grays demoralized, beaten, ready to sue for peace, the better to prove my point that we should ask only for what is ours and that our strength was only for the purpose of holding what is ours. Then we should lay up no legacy of revenge in their hearts. They could never have cause to attack again. Civilization would have advanced another step."

Lanstron continued to read to the amazed staff, for Partow's message had looked far into the future. Then there was a P.S., written after the war had begun, on the evening of the day that Marta had gone from tea on the veranda with Westerling to the telephone, in the impulse of her new purpose.

"I begin to believe in that dream," he wrote. "I begin to believe that the chance for the offensive will come, now that my colleague, Miss Galland, in the name of peace has turned practical. There is nothing like mixing a little practice in your dreams while the world is still well this side of Utopia, as the head on my old behemoth of a body well knows. She had the right idea with her school. The oath so completely expressed my ideas--the result of all my thinking--that I had a twinge of literary jealousy. My boy, if you do reach the frontier, in pursuit of a broken army, and you do not keep faith with my dream and with her ideals, then you will get a lesson that will last you forever at the foot of the Gray range. But I do not think so badly as that of you or of my judgment of men."

"Lanny! Lanny!"

The dignity of a staff council could not restrain Marta. Her emotion must have action. She sprang to his side and seized his hand, her exultation mixed with penitence over the why she had wronged him and Partow. Their self-contained purpose had been the same as hers and they had worked with a soldier's fort.i.tude, while she had worked with whims and impulses. She bent over him with grat.i.tude and praise and a plea for forgiveness in her eyes, submerging the thing which he sought in them.

He flushed boyishly in happy embarra.s.sment, incapable of words for an instant; and silently the staff looked on.

"And I agree with Partow," Lanstron went on, "that we cannot take the range. The Grays still have numbers equal to ours. It is they, now, who will be singing 'G.o.d with us!' with their backs against the wall. With Partow's goes my own appeal to the army and the nation; and I shall keep faith with Partow, with Miss Galland, and with my own ideas, if the government orders the army to advance, by resigning as chief of staff--my work finished."

Westerling and his aide and valet, inquiring their way as strangers, found the new staff headquarters of the Grays established in an army building, where Bouchard had been a.s.signed to trivial duties, back of the Gray range. As their former chief entered a room in the disorder of maps and packing-cases, the staff-officers rose from their work to stand at salute like stone images, in respect to a field-marshal's rank. There was no word of greeting but a telling silence before Turcas spoke. His voice had lost its parchment crinkle and become natural. The blue veins on his bulging temples were a little more p.r.o.nounced, his thin features a little more pinched, but otherwise he was unchanged and he seemed equal to another strain as heavy as the one he had undergone.

"We have a new government, a new premier," he said. "The old premier was killed by a shot from a crowd that he was addressing from the balcony of the palace. After this, the capital became quieter. As we get in touch with the divisions, we find the army in better shape than we had feared it would be. There is a recovery of spirit, owing to our being on our own soil."

"Yes," replied Westerling, drowning in their stares and grasping at a straw. "Only a panic, as I said. If--" his voice rising hoa.r.s.ely and catching in rage.

"We have a new government, a new premier!" Turcas repeated, with firm, methodical politeness. Westerling looking from one face to another with filmy eyes, lowered them before Bouchard. "There's a room ready for Your Excellency up-stairs," Turcas continued. "The orderly will show you the way."

Now Westerling grasped the fact that he was no longer chief of staff. He drew himself up in a desperate attempt at dignity; the staff saluted again, and, uncertainly, he followed the orderly, with the aide and valet still in loyal attendance.

Meanwhile, the aerial scouts of the Grays were puzzled by a moving cloud on the landscape several miles away. It filled the highway and overflowed into the fields, without military form: women and men of every age except the fighting age, marching together in a sinister militancy of purpose.

"Bring the children, too!" cried the leaders. "They've more right to be heard than any of us."

From such a nucleus it seemed that the whole population of the land might be set in motion by a common pa.s.sion. Neither the coming of darkness nor a chill rain kept recruits from village and farmhouse from dropping their tasks and leaving meals unfinished to swell the ranks.

What Westerling had called the bovine public with a parrot's head had become a lion.

"There's no use of giving any orders, to stop this flood," said an officer who had ridden fast to warn the Gray staff. "The police simply watch it go by. Soldiers ready to lay down their lives to hold the range give it G.o.dspeed when they learn what it wants. Both are citizens before they are soldiers or policemen. The thing is as elemental as an earthquake or a tidal wave."

"Public opinion! Unanimous public opinion! Nothing can stop that!"

exclaimed Turcas in dry fatalism. "You will inform His Excellency," he said to Westerling's aide, "that they are coming for him--all the people are coming, and we are powerless. And--" Even Turcas's calmness failed him and his voice caught in a convulsive swallow.

"I--I understand!" the aide said thickly, and went up-stairs.

He had suffered worse than in seeing his chief beaten; but even in disillusion he was loyal. He was back immediately, and paused at the foot of the stairs stonily, in the att.i.tude of one who listens for something; while the tramp of thousands of feet came pressing in upon all sides.

As one great, high-pitched voice, the crowd shouted its merciless demand; and eyes eager with the hunt as those of soldiers in pursuit gleamed through the windows out of the darkness. Bouchard, hawk-eyed, stern, was standing by the street door. His mediaeval spirit revolted at the thought of any kind of a mob. For such demonstrations he had a single simple prescription--cold lead.

"We cannot strike the overwhelming spirit which we would forge into the nation's defence," said Turcas.

The door was flung open and Bouchard drew back abruptly at the sight; he drew back in fear of his own nature. If any one should so much as lay hands on him when he was in uniform, a sword thrust would resent the insult to his officer's honor; and even he did not want to strike grandfathers and children and mothers.

Two figures were in the doorway: a heavy-set market woman with a fringe of down on her lip and a cadaverous, tidily dressed old man, who might have been a superannuated schoolmaster, with a bronze cross won in the war of forty years ago on his breast and his eyes burning with the youthful fire of Grandfather Fragini's.

"They got the premier in the capital. We've come for Westerling! We want to know what he did with our sons! We want to know why he was beaten!"

cried the market woman.

"Yes," said the veteran. "We want him to explain his lies. Why did he keep the truth from us? We were ready to fight, but not to be treated like babies. This is the twentieth century!"

"We want Westerling! Tell Westerling to come out!" rose the impatient shouts behind the two figures in the doorway.

"You are sure that he has one?" whispered Turcas to Westerling's aide.

"Yes," was the choking answer--"yes. It is better than that"--with a glance toward the mob. "I left my own on the table."

"We can't save him! We shall have to let them--"

Turcas's voice was drowned by a great roar of cries, with no word except "Westerling" distinguishable, that pierced every crack of the house. A wave of movement starting from the rear drove the veteran and the market woman and a dozen others through the doorway toward the stairs. Then the sound of a shot was heard overhead.

"The man you seek is dead!" said Turcas, stepping in front of the crowd, his features unrelenting in authority. "Now, go back to your work and leave us to ours."

"I understand, sir," said the veteran. "We've no argument with you."

"Yes!" agreed the market woman. "But if you ever leave this range alive we shall have one. So, you stay!"