The Devil's Paw Part 11

"I cannot avoid a touch of melodrama, you see," she confessed. "It goes with my character and nationality. But seriously, now that that is over, I do not consider myself in the slightest danger. The poor fellow who was shot this morning belongs to a different order of people. He has been a spy over here since the beginning of the war."

"And what are you?" he asked bluntly.

She laughed up in his face.

"A quite attractive young woman," she declared,--"at least I feel sure you will think so when you know me better."

CHAPTER VII

It was about half-past ten on the following morning when Julian, obeying a stentorian invitation to enter, walked into Miles Furley's sitting room. Furley was stretched upon the couch, smoking a pipe and reading the paper.

"Good man!" was his hearty greeting. "I hoped you'd look me up this morning."

Julian dragged up the other dilapidated-looking easy-chair to the log fire and commenced to fill his pipe from the open jar.

"How's the leg?" he enquired.

"Pretty nearly all right again," Furley answered cheerfully. "Seems to me I was frightened before I was hurt. What about your head?"

"No inconvenience at all," Julian declared, stretching himself out. "I suppose I must have a pretty tough skull."

"Any news?"

"News enough, of a sort, if you haven't heard it. They caught the man who sandbagged me, and who I presume sawed your plank through, and shot him last night."

"The devil they did!" Furley exclaimed, taking his pipe from his mouth.

"Shot him? Who the mischief was he, then?"

"It appears," Julian replied, "that he was a German hairdresser, who escaped from an internment camp two years ago and has been at large ever since, keeping in touch, somehow or other, with his friends on the other side. He must have known the game was up as soon as he was caught. He didn't even attempt any defence."

"Shot, eh?" Furley repeated, relighting his pipe. "Serves him d.a.m.ned well right!"

"You think so, do you?" Julian remarked pensively.

"Who wouldn't? I hate espionage. So does every Englishman. That's why we are such duffers at the game, I suppose."

Julian watched his friend with a slight frown.

"How in thunder did you get mixed up with this affair, Furley?" he asked quietly.

Furley's bewilderment was too natural to be a.s.sumed. He removed his pipe from his teeth and stared at his friend.

"What the devil are you driving at, Julian?" he demanded. "I can a.s.sure you that I went out, the night before last, simply to make one of the rounds which falls to my lot when I am in this part of the world and nominated for duty. There are eleven of us between here and Sheringham, special constables of a humble branch of the secret service, if you like to put it so. We are a well-known inst.i.tution amongst the initiated.

I've plodded these marshes sometimes from midnight till daybreak, and although one's always hearing rumours, until last night I have never seen or heard of a single unusual incident."

"You had no idea, then," Julian persisted, "what it was that you were on the look-out for the night before last? You had no idea, say, from any source whatever, that there was going to be an attempt on the part of the enemy to communicate with friends on this side?"

"Good G.o.d, no! Even to have known it would have been treason."

"You admit that?"

Furley drew himself stiffly up in his chair. His ma.s.s of brown hair seemed more unkempt than usual, his hard face sterner than ever by reason of its disfiguring frown.

"What the h.e.l.l do you mean, Julian?"

"I mean," Julian replied, "that I have reason to suspect you, Furley, of holding or attempting to hold secret communication with an enemy country."

The pipestem which he was holding snapped in Furley's fingers. His eyes were filled with fury.

"d.a.m.n you, Julian!" he exclaimed. "If I could stand on two legs, I'd break your head. How dare you come here and talk such rubbish."

"Isn't there some truth in what I have just said?" Julian asked sternly.

"Not a word."

Julian was silent for a moment. Furley was sitting upright upon the sofa, his keen eyes aglint with anger.

"I am waiting for an explanation, Julian," he announced.

"You shall have it," was the prompt reply. "The companion of the man who was shot, for whom the police are searching at this moment, is a guest in my father's house. I have had to go to the extent of lying to save her from detection."

"Her?" Furley gasped.

"Yes! The youth in fisherman's oilskins, into whose hands that message pa.s.sed last night, is Miss Catherine Abbeway. The young lady has referred me to you for some explanation as to its being in her possession."

Furley remained absolutely speechless for several moments. His first expression was one of dazed bewilderment. Then the light broke in upon him. He began to understand. When he spoke, all the vigour had left his tone.

"You'll have to let me think about this for a moment, Julian," he said.

"Take your own time. I only want an explanation."

Furley recovered himself slowly. He stretched out his hand towards the pipe rack, filled another pipe and lit it. Then he began.

"Julian," he said, "every word that I have spoken to you about the night before last is the truth. There is a further confession, however, which under the circ.u.mstances I have to make. I belong to a body of men who are in touch with a similar a.s.sociation in Germany, but I have no share in any of the practical doings--the machinery, I might call it--of our organisation. I have known that communications have pa.s.sed back and forth, but I imagined that this was done through neutral countries. I went out the night before last as an ordinary British citizen, to do my duty. I had not the faintest idea that there was to be any attempt to land a communication here, referring to the matters in which I am interested. I should imagine that the proof, of my words lies in the fact that efforts were made to prevent my reaching my beat, and that you, my subst.i.tute, whom I deliberately sent to take my place, were attacked."

"I accept your word so far," Julian said. "Please go on."

"I am an Englishman and a patriot," Furley continued, "just as much as you are, although you are a son of the Earl of Maltenby, and you fought in the war. You must listen to me without prejudice. There are thoughtful men in England, patriots to the backbone, trying to grope their way to the truth about this b.l.o.o.d.y sacrifice. There are thoughtful men in Germany on the same tack. If, for the betterment of the world, we should seek to come into touch with one another, I do not consider that treason, or communicating with an enemy country in the ordinary sense of the word."

"I see," Julian muttered. "What you are prepared to plead guilty to is holding communication with members of the Labour and Socialist Party in Germany."

"I plead guilty to nothing," Furley answered, with a touch of his old fierceness. "Don't talk like your father and his cla.s.s, Julian. Get away from it. Be yourself. Your Ministers can't end the war. Your Government can't. They opened their mouth too wide at first. They made too many commitments. Ask Stenson. He'll tell you that I'm speaking the truth.

So it goes on, and day by day it costs the world a few hundred or a few thousand human lives, and G.o.d knows how much of man's labour and brains, annihilated, wasted, blown into the air! Somehow or other the war has got to stop, Julian. If the politicians won't do it, the people must."

"The people," Julian repeated a little sadly. "Rienzi once trusted in the people."