Tom Slade, Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer Part 21

"Prob'ly. You see, he means to desert or get captured. It's a long way round, but about the best one--for him. Think of that snake wearing Uncle Sam's uniform!"

"It makes me mad, too--kind of," said Tom.

"So he's probably got some secret means of identification about him, and probably the new code key in actual form--somewhere else than just in his head. Then there'd be a chance of getting it across even if he fell.

We'll give him an acid bath and look in his shoes if we can find him.

The whole thing hangs on a pretty thin thread. They used to have invisible writing on their backs till we started the acid bath."

He whistled reflectively for a few moments, while Tom struggled to muster the courage to say something that he wished to say.

"Could I tell you about that other idea of mine?" he blurted finally.

"You sure can, Tommy. That's about all we're likely to get--ideas." And he glanced at Tom again with that funny, sideways look. "Shoot, my boy."

"It's only this," said Tom, still not without some trepidation, "and maybe you'll say it's no good. You told me once not to be thinking of things that's none of my business."

"Uncle Sam's business is our business now, Tommy boy."

"Well, then, it's just this, and I was thinking about it while I was riding just after I started away from Cantigny. Mostly I was thinking about it after I took that last special look at old Piff----"

Mr. Conne chuckled. "I see," he said encouragingly.

"Whoever that feller is," said Tom, "there's one thing sure. If he's comin' as a soldier he won't get to the front very soon, 'cause they're mostly the drafted fellers that are comin' now and they have to go in training over here. I know, 'cause I've seen lots of 'em in billets."

"Hmm," said Mr. Conne.

"So if the feller expects to go to the front and get captured pretty soon, prob'ly he's in a special unit. Maybe I might be all wrong about it--some fellers used to call me Bullhead," he added by way of shaving his boldness down a little.

But Mr. Conne, with hat tilted far down over his forehead and cigar at an outrageously rakish angle, was looking straight ahead of him, at a French flag across the way.

"Go on," he said crisply.

"Anyway, I'm sure the feller wouldn't be an engineer, 'cause mostly they're behind the lines. So I thought maybe he'd be a surgeon----"

Mr. Conne was whistling, almost inaudibly, his eyes fixed upon the flagpole opposite. "He was educated at Heidelberg," said he.

"I didn't think of that," said Tom.

"It's where he met L."

Tom said nothing. His line of reasoning seemed to be lifted quietly away from him. Mr. Conne was turning the kaleidoscope and showing him new designs. "He took L. home for the holidays," he quietly observed. "Old Piff and the boys."

"I--I didn't think of that," said Tom, rather crestfallen.

"You didn't ride fast enough and make enough noise," Mr. Conne said. His eyes were still fixed on the fluttering tricolor and he whistled very low. Then he rubbed his lip with his tongue and aimed his cigar in another direction.

"They were studying medicine there, I guess," he mused.

"That's just what my idea's about," said Tom. "It ain't an idea exactly, either," he added, "but it's kind of come to me sudden-like. You know what a _hunch_ is, don't you? There's something there about somebody having a cataract, and that's something the matter with your eyes; Mr.

Temple had one. So maybe that feller L. that he met again is an eye doctor. Long before the war started they told Mr. Temple maybe he ought to go to Berlin to see the eye specialists there--'cause they're so fine. So maybe the spy is a surgeon and L. is an eye doctor. It says how he met him again on account of somebody having a cataract. And he said the way of bringing the code key was L.'s idea. I read about a dentist that had a piece of paper with writing on it rolled up in his tooth. He was a spy. So that made me think maybe L.'s idea had something to do with eyes or gla.s.ses, as you might say."

"Hmm! Go on. Anything else?"

"But, anyway, that ain't the idea I had. In Temple Camp there was a scout that had a little pocket looking-gla.s.s and you couldn't see anything on it but your own reflection. But all you had to do was to breathe on it and there was a picture--all mountains and a castle, like.

Then it would fade away again right away. Roy Blakeley wanted to swap his scout knife for it, but the feller wouldn't do it. On the back of it it said _Made in Germany_. It just came to me sudden-like that maybe that was L.'s idea and they'd have it on a pair of spectacles. Maybe it's a kind of crazy idea, but----"

He looked doubtfully at Mr. Conne, who still sat tilted back, hat almost hiding his face, cigar sticking out from under it like a camouflaged field-piece. He was whistling very quietly, "_Oh, boy, where do we go from here?_" He had whistled that same tune more than a year before when he was waiting for a glimpse of "Dr. Curry," spy and bomb plotter, aboard the vessel on which Tom was working at that time. He had whistled it as he escorted the "doctor" down the companionway. How well Tom remembered!

"Come on, Tommy," he said, jumping suddenly to his feet.

Tom followed. But Mr. Conne did not speak; he was still busy with the tune. Only now he was singing the words. There was something portentous in the careless way he sang them. It took Tom back to the days when it was the battle hymn of the transport:

"And when we meet a pretty girl, we whisper in her ear, Oh, Boy! Oh, Joy! Where do we go from here?"

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

"NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON'T"

The big transport _Texas Pioneer_ came slowly about in obedience to her straining ropes and rubbed her mammoth side against the long wharf. Up and down, this way and that, slanting-wise and curved, drab and gray and white and red, the grotesque design upon her towering freeboard shone like a distorted rainbow in the sunlight. Out of the night she had come, stealing silently through the haunts where murder lurks, and the same dancing rays which had run ahead of the dispatch-rider and turned to mock him, had gilded her mighty prow as if to say, "Behold, I have reached you first."

At her rail crowded hundreds of boys in khaki, demanding in English and atrocious French to know where they were.

"Are we in France?" one called.

"Where's the Boiderberlong, anyway?" another shouted, the famous Parisian boulevard evidently being his only means of identifying France.

"Is that Napoleon's tomb?" another demanded, pointing to a little round building.

"Look at the pile of hams," shouted another gazing over the rail at a stack of that delectable. "Maybe we're in _Hamburg_!"

"This is Dippy," his neighbor corrected him.

"You mean Deppy," another said.

And so on and so on. There seemed to be hundreds of them, thousands of them, and all on a gigantic picnic.

"Which is the quickest way to Berlin?" one called, addressing the throng impartially.

"Second turn to your left."

Some of these boys would settle down in France and make it their long, final home, under little wooden crosses. But they did not seem to think of that.

At the foot of the gangplank stood the dispatch-rider and the man with the cigar. Several other men, evidently of their party, stood near by.

Mr. Conne's head was c.o.c.ked sideways and he scanned the gangway with a leisurely, self-a.s.sured look. Tom was shaking all over--the victim of suppressed excitement. He had been less excited on that memorable morning when he had "done his bit" at Cantigny.

It seemed to be in the air that something unusual was likely to happen.