Burned Bridges Part 24

He finished his business there. Other things occupied his attention until noon. He lunched. After that he drove to Coal Harbor where the yachts lie and motor boats find mooring, and having a little time to spare before Tommy's arrival, walked about the slips looking over the pleasure craft berthed thereat. Boats appealed to Thompson. He had taken some pleasant cruises with friends along the coast. Some day he intended to have a cruising launch. Tommy had already attained that distinction.

He owned a trim forty-footer, the _Alert_. Thompson's wanderings presently brought him to this packet.

A man sat under the awning over the after deck. Thompson recognized in him the same individual upon whom the recruiting sergeant's eloquence had been wasted that morning. He was in clean overalls, a seaman's peaked cap on his head. Thompson had felt an impulse to speak to the man that morning. If any legitimate excuse had offered he would have done so. To find the man apparently at home on the boat in which he himself was taking brief pa.s.sage was a coincidence of which Thompson proceeded to take immediate advantage. He climbed into the c.o.c.kpit. The man looked at him questioningly.

"I'm going across the Inlet with Mr. Ashe," Thompson explained. "Are you on the _Alert_?"

"Engineer, skipper, and bo'sun too," the man responded whimsically.

"Cook, captain, and the whole d.a.m.n crew."

They fell into talk. The man was intelligent, but there was a queer abstraction sometimes in his manner. Once the motor of a near-by craft fired with a staccato roar, and he jumped violently. He looked at Thompson unsmiling.

"I'm pretty jumpy yet," he said--but he did not explain why. He did not say he had been overseas. He did not mention the war. He talked of the coast, and timber, and fis.h.i.+ng, and the adjacent islands, with all of which he seemed to be fairly familiar.

"I heard that recruiting sergeant tackle you this morning," Thompson said at last. "You were standing almost beside my machine. What was it like over there?"

"What was it like?" the man repeated. He shook his head. "That's a big order. I couldn't tell you in six months. It wasn't nice."

He seemed to reflect a second or two.

"I suppose some one has to do it. It has to be done. But it's a tough game. You don't know where you're going nor what you're up against most of the time. The racket gets a man, as well as seeing fellows you know getting b.u.mped off now and then. Some of the boys get hardened to it. I never did. I try to forget it now, mostly. But I dream things sometimes, and any sudden noise makes me jump. A fellow had better finish over there than come home crippled. I'm lucky to hold down a job like this, lucky that I happen to know gas engines and boats. I look all right, but I'm not much good. All chewed up with shrapnel. And my nerve's gone. I wouldn't have got my discharge if they could have used me any more. Aw, h.e.l.l, if you haven't been in it you can't imagine what it's like. I couldn't tell you."

"Tell me one thing," Thompson asked quickly, spurred by an impulse for light upon certain matters which had troubled him. He wanted the word of an eye-witness. "Did you ever see, personally, any of those atrocities that have been laid to the Germans in Belgium?"

"Well, I don't know," the man replied. "The papers have printed a lot of stuff. Mind you, over there you hear about a lot of things you never see. The only thing _I_ saw was children with their hands hacked off at the wrist."

"Good G.o.d," Thompson uttered. "You actually saw that with your own eyes."

"Sure," the man responded. "Nine of 'em in one village.

"Why, in the name of G.o.d, would men do such a thing?" Thompson demanded.

"Was any reason ever given?"

"No. I suppose they were drunk or something. Fritz was pretty bad in spots, all right. Maybe they just wanted to put the fear of G.o.d in their hearts. A pal of mine in Flanders told me of a woman--in a place they took by a night raid--she had her breast slashed open. She said a Boche officer did it with his sword."

The man spoke of these things in a detached, impersonal manner, as one who states commonplace facts. He had not particularly desired to speak of them. For him those gruesome incidents of war and invasion held no special horror. They might have rested heavily enough on his mind once.

But he had come apparently to accept them as the grim collateral of war, without reacting emotionally to their terrible significance. And when Thompson ceased to question him he ceased to talk.

But in Thompson these calmly recounted horrors worked profound distress.

His imagination became immediately shot with sinister pictures. All these things which he had read and doubted, which had left him unmoved, now took on a terrible reality. He could see these things about which the returned soldier spoke, and seeing them believed. Believing, there rose within him a protest that choked him with its force as he sat in the c.o.c.kpit beside this veteran of Flanders.

The man had fallen silent, staring into the green depths overside.

Thompson sat silent beside him. But there was in Thompson none of the other's pa.s.sivity. Unlike the returned soldier, who had seen blood and death until he was surfeited with it, until he wanted nothing but peace and quietness, and a chance to rest his shrapnel-torn body and sh.e.l.l-shocked nerves, Thompson quivered with a swift, hot desire to kill and destroy, to inflict vengeance. He burned for reprisal. For a pa.s.sionate moment he felt as if he could rend with his bare hands a man or men who could wantonly mutilate women and children. He could find no fit name for such deeds.

And, responding so surely to that unexpected stimulus, he had no stomach for crossing the Inlet as Tommy's guest, to view the scene of Tommy's industrial triumph-to-be. He wasn't interested in that now.

Sitting under the awning, brooding over these things, he remembered how Sophie Carr had reacted to the story of the Belgian refugee that afternoon a year and a half ago. He understood at last. He divined how Sophie felt that day. And he had blandly discounted those things. He had gone about his individual concerns insulated against any call to right wrongs, to fight oppression, to abolish that terror which loomed over Europe--and which might very well lay its sinister hand on America, if the Germans were capable of these things, and if the German's military power prevailed over France and England. When he envisaged Canada as another Belgium his teeth came together with a little click.

He clambered out of the _Alert's_ c.o.c.kpit to the float.

"Tell Mr. Ashe I changed my mind about going over with him," he said abruptly, and walked off the float, up the sloping bank to the street, got in his car and drove away.

As he drove he felt that he had failed to keep faith with something or other. He felt bewildered. Those little children, shorn of their hands--so that they could never lift a sword against Germany--cried aloud to him. They held up their b.l.o.o.d.y stumps for him to see.

CHAPTER XXV

--AND THE BOMB THE FUSE FIRED

It took Thompson approximately forty-eight hours to arrange his affairs.

He managed things with a precipitancy that would have shocked a sound, practical business man, for he put out no anchors to windward nor troubled himself about the future. He paid his bills, transferred the Summit agency to his head salesman--who had ama.s.sed sufficient capital to purchase the stock of cars and parts at cost. Thus, having deliberately sacrificed a number of sound a.s.sets for the sake of being free of them without delay, Thompson found himself upon the morning of the third day without a tie to bind him to Vancouver, and a cash balance of twenty thousand dollars to his credit in the bank.

He did not know how, or in what capacity he was going to the front, but he was going, and the manner of his going did not concern him greatly.

It mattered little how he went, so long as he went in the service of his country. A little of his haste was born of the sudden realization that he had a country which needed his services--and that he desired to serve. It had pa.s.sed an emotional phase with him. He saw it very clearly as a duty. He did not foresee or antic.i.p.ate either pleasure or glory in the undertaking. He had no illusions about war. It was quite on the cards that he might never come back. But he had to go.

So then he had only to determine how he should go.

That problem, which was less a problem than a matter of making choice, was solved that very day at luncheon. As he sat at a table in a downtown cafe there came to him a figure in khaki, wearing a short, close-fitting jacket with an odd emblem on the left sleeve--a young fellow who hailed Thompson with a hearty grip and a friendly grin. He sat himself in a chair vis-a-vis, laying his funny, wedge-shaped cap on the table.

"I've been wondering what had become of you, Jimmie," Thompson said. "I see now. Where have you been keeping yourself?"

"East," the other returned tersely. "Training. Got my wings. Off to England day after to-morrow. How's everything with you, these days?"

Thompson looked his man over thoroughly. Jimmie Wells was the youngest of the four sons of a wealthy man. The other three were at the front, one of them already taking his long rest under a white, wooden cross somewhere in France. Jimmie looked brown and fit. A momentary pang of regret stung Thompson. He wished he too were standing in uniform, ready for overseas.

"I've just wound up my business," he said. "I'm going to the front myself, Jimmie."

"Good," Wells approved. "What branch?"

"I don't know yet," Thompson replied. "I made up my mind in a hurry. I'm just setting out to find where I'll fit in best."

"Why don't you try aviation?" Jimmie Wells suggested. "You ought to make good in that. There are a lot of good fellows flying. If you want action, the R.F.C. is the sportiest lot of all."

"I might. I didn't think of that," Thompson returned slowly. "Yes, I believe I could fly."

"If you can fly like you drive, you'll be the goods," Jimmie a.s.serted cheerfully. "Tell you what, Thompson. Come on around to the Flying Corps headquarters with me. I know a fellow there rather well, and I'll introduce you. Not that that will get you anything, only Holmes will give you a lot of unofficial information."

Thompson rose from the table.

"Lead me to it," said he. "I'm your man."

Getting accepted as a cadet in the Royal Flying Corps was not so simple a matter as enlisting in the infantry. The requirements were infinitely more rigid. The R.F.C. took only the cream of the country's manhood.

They told Thompson his age was against him--and he was only twenty-eight. It was true. Ninety per cent. of the winged men were five years younger. But he pa.s.sed all their tests by grace of a magnificent body that housed an active brain and steady nerves.

All this did not transpire overnight. It took days. He told no one of his plans in the meantime, no one but Tommy Ashe, who was a trifle disappointed when Thompson declined to handle Tommy's exceedingly profitable motor business. Tommy seemed hurt. To make it clear that he had a vital reason, Thompson explained tersely.

"I can't do it because I'm going to the front."