Chapter XX: MONSIEUR OBERNAI's ATTIC

"I can't hardly believe it," said Ginger, when Kenneth recounted the facts and his inferences. "Never thought Stoneway had the pluck."

"A man without pluck is no good as a spy," Harry remarked.

"True. He must have had an awful time of it, always wondering if he'd be found out, or copped by a German bullet."

"What strikes me most forcibly is the thoroughness of the German organisation," said Kenneth. "You'll always find individuals ready to take their lives in their hands, for patriotism or pay; but you won't always find things so perfectly organised. If we're right, Stoneway must have been employed first as an anti-recruiting agent, with orders to enlist and act as spy within our ranks if that seemed feasible."

"I see through that post-card business now," said Ginger. "He gave our address to some pal in London so that the Germans should know where he was, and make use of him. And then to put it on to me!--a dirty trick. But what can you expect when the Kaiser lets his men do dirty tricks and gives 'em Iron Crosses for it? Whatever he is, Bill is no gentleman."

"Stoneway is a German, I suppose?" said Harry.

"Steinweg--not an uncommon German name," replied Kenneth. "But now, how are we going to set about our job?"

"What was that you said about a bat?" said Harry. "I didn't pay much heed."

Kenneth again described the curious phenomenon, adding:

"That's why I want to do something more than watch the lane. If the man I saw was Stoneway, we might catch him again, but give time for Obernai to clear away anything suspicious. It seems to me that what we have to do is to get into the house, and have a look at the back premises."

"That means we should have to get in at the back secretly?"

"Yes; if we went to the front openly we shouldn't get farther than the lobby."

"Suppose it turns out that we are quite wrong, wouldn't it be rather a serious matter to break into a French house? Obernai is popular: it might not be easy to persuade the French authorities that we were not burglars."

"Let's chance that," said Ginger. "For any sake don't let the police know beforehand, or the whole thing will be messed up like it was with that maire. Besides, if it comes to that, we've got the capting behind us."

"I quite agree," said Kenneth. "We'll risk it. Well now, judging by the length of the side garden wall, the house is about sixty yards from the lane. With these mysterious comings and goings the back gate will very likely be watched; at any rate there'll be somebody about to let visitors in and out. I vote we get into the next garden, and clamber over the wall into Obernai's. We shall have to wait until the people in the next house are asleep--say eleven o'clock to-night."

About half-past ten, when the village was dark and silent, the three men left their billet and, to avoid detection, took a round-about route to the lane. The air was rather chill, and a light mist hung low over the ground. Each of the three carried a revolver, and they had agreed not to speak except in case of necessity, and then only in whispers.

Creeping along softly under cover of the trees that lined one side of the lane, they passed Obernai's door, and halted opposite the door of the next house, a few yards beyond. Here they waited, listening. All was silent. Then Kenneth tiptoed across the lane and quietly tried the door of Obernai's garden. It was bolted. The next door opened to his touch. Joined by his companions, he entered and found himself in a garden much overgrown with weeds. They stole along by the side wall, and halted under it about fifty feet from the house.

"Give me a leg-up," Kenneth whispered.

In a few seconds he was down again. The top of the wall was spiked with glass. Stripping off his overcoat, he mounted again, laid the coat over the glass, and dropped lightly to the ground, after listening awhile to make sure that nobody was about. The others followed him in turn.

The back of the house was quite dark. There was no sound within or without. Through the mist they could just distinguish the path leading to the back door. Kenneth crossed the grass to it, stole along, and cautiously turned the door handle. The door resisted his slight pressure: it was locked or bolted. He looked up the wall. The windows were out of reach. It seemed that the house could only be entered forcibly.

He was returning to consult his companions when he suddenly heard behind him a sound like the ringing of a muffled electric bell inside the house. Hurrying on, he crouched with the other two at the foot of the wall and waited. In a few moments they heard a bolt drawn. They could see nothing, but apparently the door was being opened. Then from the doorway came a low whisper: "Geben Sie Acht," followed, as by an instantaneous after-thought, by the French words, "Prenez garde." There was no reply, but a slight rustle approached, and the three watchers, peering over the bushes, saw a woman passing in almost absolute silence down the path to the back wall.

Had she left the door open? Kenneth was thinking of stealing up to it to find out when it occurred to him that the woman had perhaps gone to let in a visitor. It would be well to wait a little. Very soon he was justified. The figure of the woman, scarcely distinguishable in the gloom, reappeared. At her heels was a man. They passed along the path within twenty feet of the lurking watchers; neither spoke a word. Presently came the sound of a bolt gently shot, then all was silent again.

It was pretty clear that the bell had been rung from an electric push in the garden door. Kenneth had seen none; it was probably concealed.

"Shall I find it, and get the door opened?" he whispered to his companions.

"That would give the whole show away," said Harry. "We don't want to raise an alarm."

"Then I don't see that we can do anything. The only thing is to tell the captain to-morrow, and he'll arrest the lot."

"Why not?" said Ginger. "If they're innocent, they won't mind--not much."

"But we shan't catch them at it. You may be sure there's nothing suspicious to be found in the daytime. We've got very artful men to deal with."

They were still discussing their course of action when they heard the bolt drawn again. Next moment there was a perpendicular streak of dim light, which widened rapidly. The door was open; the room or lobby behind was now lit by a small oil lamp, turned very low. Through the illuminated rectangle of the doorway came a man and a woman. The man was in a British uniform. They stepped down to the path.

"Stoneway!" whispered Ginger.

Pressing themselves almost flat on the ground they watched the two figures walking down the path, the end of which, towards the garden wall, was scarcely reached by the feeble rays from the doorway.

"Now!" murmured Kenneth.

Bending double, they hastened across the grass, and slipped in through the doorway. They were in a lobby. At the further end of it was a closed door. There were doors on both sides, one of them slightly open. In the corner on the right was the staircase leading to the upper floor, and on the square-topped newel-post stood the small oil lamp.

Taking in all this at a glance, Kenneth peered through the open door on the left. The room was dark and untenanted. He beckoned to his companions. They followed him into the room. In less than a minute the woman returned from the garden, closed and bolted the door, and was moving along the lobby when the stairs creaked slightly, and an old man came tottering down.

"Bier, noch Bier," he said in low tones to the woman.

The woman muttered something, took the lamp from its place, and accompanied by the old man went into one of the rooms off the lobby on the opposite side from the three watchers. They were heard clumping down wooden steps, no doubt leading to the cellars.

"Now's our chance," Kenneth whispered.

The three stole out of the room into the dark lobby, and crept on hands and knees up the staircase. The landing above was equally dark, except in the far corner on the right, where light came through a door slightly ajar. The three men tiptoed to it. Kenneth peeped in. The room was apparently Obernai's bedroom. No one was in it; the bed had not been disturbed. A candle was burning on the dressing-table. Pieces of heavy French furniture afforded means of concealment.

"You stay here," whispered Kenneth. "I'll go on."

He slipped off his boots, blew out the candle, and crept out. There was no sound from below. On the opposite side of the landing was a narrow staircase, leading, he presumed, to the attics. Up this he groped his way. At the top there was a passage, at the end of which, on the right, was a streak of light on the floor. Feeling his way along, he felt two other doors, the handles of which he turned in succession, hoping to slip into a dark room as he had done below. Both doors were locked. At this moment, hearing the footsteps of the old man coming slowly up the bottom flight of stairs, he slipped back to the dark end of the passage and stood watching there.

The old man mounted the upper flight. A can clinked against the post as he turned to the right towards the door beneath which the light shone. He tapped on the door; it was opened; the man passed in. Kenneth heard a guttural voice say: "Zwei Batterien heute morgen----" The remainder of the sentence was cut off by the closing of the door. In a few moments it opened again; the old man came out, closed it behind him, and sat down on a stool at the end of the passage, either as sentry, or to be at hand if more beer was required.

Kenneth scarcely dared to breathe. What was going on in that room? What could he do? After several uncomfortable minutes the door suddenly opened--too wide for his comfort--and a voice said:

"Frisch auf! Die Lampe ist beinahe erloescht."

The door was shut. The old man rose wearily and hobbled downstairs, no doubt to fetch oil or whatever was used for the lamp.

Kenneth felt that the time had come for action. The mention of the lamp left no doubt in his mind of the work on which the occupants of the room were engaged. Waiting until the old man had reached the foot of the lower staircase, he stole down to the room where he had left his companions and told them in a few whispered words what he had discovered. They removed their boots and stood behind the door, prepared to follow the man when he came up again.

In a few minutes he returned. They waited until he had ascended the upper staircase, then followed him noiselessly, saw him enter the room, and crept along to the door, drawing their revolvers. From within the room came the smell of acetylene gas. Standing back against the wall, they waited for the reopening of the door. As soon as the old man reappeared, they started forward, pointing their revolvers at him, pushed him before them and entered the room.

There was an exclamation, a moment of confusion.

"Hands up, or I fire!" cried Kenneth in German.

There were four men in the room, three seated at a table drinking beer, the fourth occupied with a steel lever operating a disc that worked from side to side in front of a bright bull's-eye lamp. Kenneth's warning had checked a movement on the part of two of the seated men towards their coat pockets. The man at the lamp, who had faced round at the sudden intrusion, was quicker than his companions, and drew his revolver at the moment of turning. But as he was raising his hand Harry fired. His revolver fell to the floor with a crash, and with a curse he clasped his broken wrist with the other hand.

The three others had fallen back into their chairs. A stream of beer from an overturned mug trickled from the table to the floor, for one tense moment the only sound in the room. The men's faces were pale and contorted with fear. They sat, limp, with no spirit for resistance, recognizing that the game was up.

Kenneth and Harry glowed with a quiet satisfaction. Ginger was more demonstrative.

"Blest if I haven't got him at last!" he exclaimed, smiling triumphantly at one of the prisoners. "It's the chap that downed me when I was sitting on that aeroplane."

"Monsieur Obernai is unfortunate in his friends," said Kenneth.

Obernai glared at him; it was not the expression of a bland philanthropist. One of his companions, a big man with a wart on his nose, did not wear the look of pious resignation that might have been expected from a man dressed in a cure's soutane. The features of the fourth man seemed familiar to Kenneth, though at the moment he could not recall the time or place of his seeing him before.

"We'll just hand these men over to the captain," said Kenneth. "Then we'll deal with Stoneway."

After ordering the men to empty their pockets, they marched them downstairs, and through the door connecting the back part of the house with the officers' billets. Captain Adams, like the others, had gone to bed. He came to the door of his room in his pyjamas.

"We've caught Obernai and three others signalling with a lamp, sir," said Kenneth.

"You don't say so! What have you done with them?"

"They are below, sir."

"Take them off to the provost-marshal: I don't want to see them."

"Stoneway is in it, sir, I am sorry to say."

"Arrest him, as quickly as you can. Then come back and tell me all about it."

The spies were marched off to prison. Then Ginger with a corporal's guard went to the cottage where Stoneway was billeted. Stoneway was not there. Enquiry and search were alike fruitless. It was not until an hour later that Ginger hit on a possible explanation of his absence.

"By jinks!" he exclaimed, with a gesture of vexation. "I forgot the old woman."

He hastened back to Obernai's house. The old woman had disappeared.

On returning to the house some time before, Kenneth and Harry found the officers, all in their night attire, examining the signalling apparatus in the upper room.

"They are all safely locked up, sir," Kenneth reported.

"That's well. How did you catch them?"

Kenneth gave an account of the night's work.

"You did very well, Amory," said the captain. "The battalion is lucky in having the Three Musketeers. And the whole brigade is indebted to you. This is a fiendishly ingenious arrangement."

He explained the working of the apparatus. The acetylene lamp faced one end of a long tube, which pierced the outer wall of the house. By means of a delicate mechanism the position of the tube could be altered by millimetres. The length of the tube prevented the rays from converging like the rays of a searchlight, so that the light, directed eastward, was not likely to be seen except by a person at an equal height.

"I have no doubt at all," said the captain, "that some miles away in the German lines there is an operator with a similar lamp, at the same height and in the same straight line with this. We have kept a look-out but seen nothing; no doubt the cessation of the flashing gave them warning. To them the light would appear like a star on the horizon, and the alternate exposure and dousing of it by means of the disc made the signals. No wonder we've got it unexpectedly hot sometimes."

Here Ginger came in.

"Stoneway's got away, sir," he reported. "I guess the old woman gave him the tip."

"Poor wretch! He can't get far. I'll circulate the news at once and he'll be hunted down. Now get to your billets, men; I shall want your evidence in the morning."

As they were returning through the silent streets, talking over the exciting incidents of the night, Kenneth suddenly exclaimed:

"By George! I remember now. That fellow was the man I saw talking French to Stoneway at St. Pancras station."