The Red Cross Girl Part 13

"My pay--my month's pay?" he stammered. "Can I take It?"

The expression on the face of the conqueror relaxed.

"Take it and get out," Ford commanded.

With eyes still fixed in fascinated terror upon the invader, the boy pulled open the drawer of the table before him and fumbled with the papers inside.

"Quick!" cried Ford.

The boy was very quick. His hand leaped from the drawer like a snake, and Ford found himself looking into a revolver of the largest calibre issued by a civilized people. Birrell fell upon the boy's shoulders, Herbert twisted the gun from his fingers and hurled it through the window, and almost as quickly hurled himself down the steps of the tower. Birrell leaped after him. Ford remained only long enough to shout: "Don't touch that instrument! If you attempt to send a message through, we will shoot. We go to cut the wires!"

For a minute, the boy in the tower sat rigid, his ears strained, his heart beating in sharp, suffocating stabs. Then, with his left arm raised to guard his face, he sank to his knees and, leaning forward across the table, inviting as he believed his death, he opened the circuit and through the night flashed out a warning to his people.

When they had taken their places in the car, Herbert touched Ford on the shoulder.

"Your last remark," he said, "was that what we wanted was a live one."

"Don't mention it!" said Ford. "He jammed that gun half down my throat.

I can taste it still. Where do we go from here?"

"According to the route we mapped out this afternoon," said Herbert, "We are now scheduled to give exhibitions at the coast towns of Salthouse and Weybourne, but--"

"Not with me!" exclaimed Birrell fiercely. "Those towns have been tipped off by now by Blakeney and Cley, and the Boy Scouts would club us to death. I vote we take the back roads to Morston, and drop in on a lonely Coast Guard. If a Coast Guard sees us, the authorities will have to believe him, and they'll call out the navy."

Herbert consulted his map.

"There is a Coast Guard," he said, "stationed just the other side of Morston. And," he added fervently, "let us hope he's lonely."

They lost their way in the back roads, and when they again reached the coast an hour had pa.s.sed. It was now quite dark. There were no stars, nor moon, but after they had left the car in a side lane and had stepped out upon the cliff, they saw for miles along the coast great beacon fires burning fiercely.

Herbert came to an abrupt halt.

"Since seeing those fires," he explained, "I feel a strange reluctance about showing myself in this uniform to a Coast Guard."

"Coast Guards don't shoot!" mocked Birrell. "They only look at the clouds through a telescope. Three Germans with rifles ought to be able to frighten one Coast Guard with a telescope."

The whitewashed cabin of the Coast Guard was perched on the edge of the cliff. Behind it the downs ran back to meet the road. The door of the cabin was open and from it a shaft of light cut across a tiny garden and showed the white fence and the walk of sh.e.l.ls.

"We must pa.s.s in single file in front of that light," whispered Ford, "And then, after we are sure he has seen us, we must run like the devil!"

"I'm on in that last scene," growled Herbert.

"Only," repeated Ford with emphasis, "We must be sure he has seen us."

Not twenty feet from them came a bursting roar, a flash, many roars, many flashes, many bullets.

"He's seen us!" yelled Birrell.

After the light from his open door had shown him one German soldier fully armed, the Coast Guard had seen nothing further. But judging from the shrieks of terror and the sounds of falling bodies that followed his first shot, he was convinced he was hemmed in by an army, and he proceeded to sell his life dearly. Clip after clip of cartridges he emptied into the night, now to the front, now to the rear, now out to sea, now at his own shadow in the lamp-light. To the people a quarter of a mile away at Morston it sounded like a battle.

After running half a mile, Ford, bruised and breathless, fell at full length on the gra.s.s beside the car. Near it, tearing from his person the last vestiges of a German uniform, he found Birrell. He also was puffing painfully.

"What happened to Herbert?" panted Ford.

"I don't know," gasped Birrell, "When I saw him last he was diving over the cliff into the sea. How many times did you die?"

"About twenty!" groaned the American, "And, besides being dead, I am severely wounded. Every time he fired, I fell on my face, and each time I hit a rock!"

A scarecrow of a figure appeared suddenly in the rays of the head-lights. It was Herbert, scratched, bleeding, dripping with water, and clad simply in a s.h.i.+rt and trousers. He dragged out his kit bag and fell into his golf clothes.

"Anybody who wants a perfectly good German uniform," he cried, "can have mine. I left it in the first row of breakers. It didn't fit me, anyway."

The other two uniforms were hidden in the seat of the car. The rifles and helmets, to lend color to the invasion, were dropped in the open road, and five minutes later three gentlemen in inconspicuous Harris tweeds, and with golf clubs protruding from every part of their car, turned into the sh.o.r.e road to Cromer. What they saw brought swift terror to their guilty souls and the car to an abrupt halt. Before them was a regiment of regulars advancing in column of fours, at the "double." An officer sprang to the front of the car and seated himself beside Ford.

"I'll have to commandeer this," he said. "Run back to Cromer. Don't crush my men, but go like the devil!"

"We heard firing here," explained the officer at the Coast Guard station. "The Guard drove them back to the sea. He counted over a dozen.

They made pretty poor practice, for he isn't wounded, but his gravel walk looks as though some one had drawn a harrow over it. I wonder,"

exclaimed the officer suddenly, "if you are the three gentlemen who first gave the alarm to Colonel Raglan and then went on to warn the other coast towns. Because, if you are, he wants your names."

Ford considered rapidly. If he gave false names and that fact were discovered, they would be suspected and investigated, and the worst might happen. So he replied that his friends and himself probably were the men to whom the officer referred. He explained they had been returning from Cromer, where they had gone to play golf, when they had been held up by the Germans.

"You were lucky to escape," said the officer "And in keeping on to give warning you were taking chances. If I may say so, we think you behaved extremely well."

Ford could not answer. His guilty conscience shamed him into silence.

With his siren shrieking and his horn tooting, he was forcing the car through lanes of armed men. They packed each side of the road. They were banked behind the hedges. Their camp-fires blazed from every hill-top.

"Your regiment seems to have turned out to a man!" exclaimed Ford admiringly.

"MY regiment!" snorted the officer. "You've pa.s.sed through five regiments already, and there are as many more in the dark places.

They're everywhere!" he cried jubilantly.

"And I thought they were only where you see the camp-fires," exclaimed Ford.

"That's what the Germans think," said the officer. "It's working like a clock," he cried happily. "There hasn't been a hitch. As soon as they got your warning to Colonel Raglan, they came down to the coast like a wave, on foot, by trains, by motors, and at nine o'clock the Government took over all the railroads. The county regiments, regulars, yeomanry, territorials, have been spread along this sh.o.r.e for thirty miles. Down in London the Guards started to Dover and Brighton two hours ago. The Automobile Club in the first hour collected two hundred cars and turned them over to the Guards in Bird Cage Walk. Cody and Grahame-White and eight of his air men left Hendon an hour ago to reconnoitre the south coast. Admiral Beatty has started with the Channel Squadron to head off the German convoy in the North Sea, and the torpedo destroyers have been sent to lie outside of Heligoland. We'll get that back by daylight. And on land every one of the three services is under arms. On this coast alone before sunrise we'll have one hundred thousand men, and from Colchester the brigade division of artillery, from Ipswich the R. H.

A.'s with siege-guns, field-guns, quick-firing-guns, all kinds of guns spread out over every foot of ground from here to Hunstanton. They thought they'd give us a surprise party. They will never give us another surprise party!"

On the top of the hill at Overstrand, the headwaiter of the East Cliff Hotel and the bearded German stood in the garden back of the house with the forbidding walls. From the road in front came unceasingly the tramp and shuffle of thousands of marching feet, the rumble of heavy cannon, the clanking of their chains, the voices of men trained to command raised in sharp, confident orders. The sky was illuminated by countless fires. Every window of every cottage and hotel blazed with lights. The night had been turned into day. The eyes of the two Germans were like the eyes of those who had pa.s.sed through an earthquake, of those who looked upon the burning of San Francisco, upon the destruction of Messina.

"We were betrayed, general," whispered the head-waiter.

"We were betrayed, baron," replied the bearded one.

"But you were in time to warn the flotilla."

With a sigh, the older man nodded.

"The last message I received over the wireless," he said, "before I destroyed it, read, 'Your message understood. We are returning. Our movements will be explained as manoeuvres. And," added the general, "The English, having driven us back, will be willing to officially accept that explanation. As manoeuvres, this night will go down into history.