PROLOGUE

THE FOUR OF THEM

The crash of guns. A flare across the heavens. Battle. Dismay. Death. A night of chaos.

And four men in a thicket.

One of them spoke:

"A bloody Hun prison, that's us! My Gawd! Where are we?"

Another answered caustically:

"Monsieur, we are lost—and very tired."

A third man laughed. The laugh was short.

"A Frenchman! Where in hell did you come from?"

"Where you and the rest of us came from." The Frenchman's voice was polished; his English faultless. "We come from the tickling of the German bayonets."

The first man elaborated the statement gratuitously:

"I don't know about you 'uns; but our crowd was done in good and proper two days ago. Gawd! ain't there no end to 'em? Millions! And us running! What I says is let 'em have the blinking channel ports, and lets us clear out. I wasn't noways in favour of mussing up in this when the bleeding parliament says up and at 'em in the beginning, leastways nothing except the navy."

"Drafted, I take it?" observed the third man coolly.

There was no answer.

The fourth man said nothing.

There was a whir in the air ... closer ... closer; a roar that surged at the ear drums; a terrific crash near at hand; a tremble of the earth like a shuddering sob.

The first man echoed the sob:

"Carry on! Carry on! I can't carry on. Not for hours. I've been running for two days. I can't even sleep. My Gawd!"

"No good of carrying on for a bit," snapped the third man. "There's no place to carry on to. They seem to be all around us."

"That's the first one that's come near us," said the Frenchman. "Maybe it's only—what do you call it?—a straggler."

"Like us," said the third man.

A flare, afar off, hung and dropped. Nebulous, ghostlike, a faint shimmer lay upon the thicket. It endured for but a moment. Three men, huddled against the tree trunks, torn, ragged and dishevelled men, stared into each others' faces. A fourth man lay outstretched, motionless, at full length upon the ground, as though he were asleep or dead; his face was hidden because it was pillowed on the earth.

"Well, I'm damned!" said the third man, and whistled softly under his breath.

"Monsieur means by that?" inquired the Frenchman politely.

"Means?" repeated the third man. "Oh, yes! I mean it's queer. Half an hour ago we were each a separate bit of driftwood tossed about out there, and now here we are blown together from the four winds and linked up as close to each other by a common stake—our lives—as ever men could be. I say it's queer."

He lifted his rifle, and, feeling out, prodded once or twice with the butt. It made a dull, thudding sound.

"What are you doing?" asked the Frenchman.

"Giving first aid to Number Four," said the third man grimly. "He's done in, I fancy. I'm not sure but he's the luckiest one of the lot."

"You're bloody well right, he is!" gulped the first man. "I wouldn't mind being dead, if it was all over, and I was dead. It's the dying and the thinking about it I can't stick."

"I can't see anything queer about it." The Frenchman was judicial; he reverted to the third man's remark as though no interruption had occurred in his train of thought. "We all knew it was coming, this last big—what do you call it?—push of the Boche. It has come. It is gigantic. It is tremendous. A tidal wave. Everything has gone down before it; units all broken up, mingled one with another, a mêlée. It has been sauve qui peut for thousands like us who never saw each other before, who did not even know each other existed. I see nothing queer in it that some of us, though knowing nothing of each other, yet having the same single purpose, rest if only for a moment, shelter if only for a moment, should have come together here. To me it is not queer."

"Well, perhaps, you're right," said the third man. "Perhaps adventitious would have been better than queer."

"Nor adventitious," dissented the Frenchman. "Since we have been nothing to each other in the past, and since our meeting now offers us collectively no better chance of safety or escape than we individually had before, there is nothing adventitious about it."

"Perhaps again I am wrong." There was a curious drawl in the third man's voice now. "In fact, I will admit it. It is neither queer nor adventitious. It is quite—oh, quite!—beyond that. It can only be due to the considered machinations of the devil on his throne in the pit of hell having his bit of a fling at us—and a laugh!"

"You're bloody well right!" mumbled the first man.

"Damn!" said the Frenchman with asperity. "I don't understand you at all."

The third man laughed softly.

"Well, I don't know how else to explain it, then," he said. "The last time we—"

"The last time!" interrupted the Frenchman. "I did not get a very good look at you when that flare went up, I'll admit; but enough so that I would swear I had never seen you before."

"Quite so!" acknowledged the third man.

"Gawd!" whimpered the first man. "Look at that! Listen to that!"

A light, lurid, intense for miles around opened the darkness—and died out. An explosion rocked the earth.

"Ammunition dump!" said the Frenchman. "I'm sure of it now. I've never seen any of you before."

The third man now sat with his rifle across his knees.

The fourth man had not moved from his original position.

"I thought you were officers, blimy if I didn't, from the way you talked," said the first man. "Just a blinking Tommy and a blinking Poilu!"

"Monsieur," said the Frenchman, and there was a challenge in his voice, "I never forget a face."

"Nor I," said the third man quietly. "Nor other things; things that happened a bit back—after they put the draft into England, but before they called up the older classes. I don't know just how they worked it over here—that is, how some of them kept out of it as long as they did."

"Godam!" snarled the Frenchman. "Monsieur, you go too far! And—monsieur appears to have a sense of humour peculiarly his own—perhaps monsieur will be good enough to explain what he is laughing at?"

"With pleasure," said the third man calmly. "I was laughing at the recollection of a night, not like this one, though there's a certain analogy to it for all that, when an attack was made on—a strong box in a West End residence in London. Lord Seeton's, to be precise."

The first man stirred. He seemed to be groping around him where he sat.

"Foolish days! Perverted patriotism!" said the third man. "The family jewels, the hereditary treasures, gathered together to be offered on the altar of England's need! Fancy! But it was being done, you know. Rather! Only in this case the papers got hold of it and played it up a bit as a wonderful example, and that's how three men, none of whom had anything to do with the others, got hold of it too—no, I'm wrong there. Lord Seeton's valet naturally had inside information."

"Blimy!" rasped the first man suddenly. "A copper in khaki! That's what! A bloody, sneaking swine!"

It was inky black in the thicket. The third man's voice cut through the blackness like a knife.

"You put that gun down! I'll do all the gun handling there's going to be done. Drop it!"

A snarl answered him—a snarl, and the rattle of an object falling to the ground.

"There were three of them," said the third man composedly. "The valet, who hadn't reached his class in the draft; a Frenchman, who spoke marvellous English, which is perhaps after all the reason why he had not yet, at that time, served in France; and—and some one else."

"Monsieur," said the Frenchman silkily, "you become interesting."

"The curious part of it is," said the third man, "that each of them in turn got the swag, and each of them could have got away with it with hardly any doing at all, if it hadn't been that in turn each one chivied the other. The Frenchman took it from the valet, as the valet, stuffed like a pouter pigeon with diamonds and brooches and pendants and little odds and ends like that, was on his way to a certain pinch-faced fence named Konitsky in a slimy bit of neighbourhood in the East End; the Frenchman, who was an Englishman in France, took the swag to a strange little place in a strange little street, not far from the bank of the Seine, the place of one Père Mouche, a place that in times of great stress also became the shelter and home of this same Frenchman, who—shall I say?—I believe is outstandingly entitled to the honour of having raised his profession to a degree of art unapproached by any of his confreres in France to-day."

"Sacré nom!" said the Frenchman with a gasp. "There is only one Englishman who knew that, and I thought he was dead. An Englishman beside whom the Frenchman you speak of is not to be compared. You are—"

"I haven't mentioned any names," said the third man smoothly. "Why should you?"

"You are right," said the Frenchman. "Perhaps we have already said too much. There is a fourth here."

"No," said the third man. "I had not forgotten him." He toyed with the rifle on his knee. "But I had thought perhaps you would have recognised the valet's face."

"Strike me pink!" muttered the first man. "So Frenchy's the blighter that did me in, was he!"

"It is the uniform, and the dirt perhaps, and the very poor light," said the Frenchman apologetically.

"But you—pardon, monsieur, I mean the other of the three—I did not see him; and monsieur will perhaps understand that I am deeply interested in the rest of the story."

The third man did not answer. A sort of momentary, weird and breathless silence had settled on the thicket, on all around, on the night, save only for the whining of some oncoming thing through the air. Whine ... whine ... whine. The nerves, tautened, loosened, were jangling things. The third man raised his rifle. And somewhere the whining shell burst. And in the thicket a minor crash; a flash, gone on the instant, eye-blinding.

The first man screamed out:

"Christ! What have you done?"

"I think he was done in anyway," said the third man calmly. "It was as well to make sure."

"Gawd!" whimpered the first man.

"Monsieur," said the Frenchman, "I have always heard that you were incomparable. I salute you! As you said, you had not forgotten. We can speak at ease now. The rest of the story—"

The third man laughed.

"Come to me in London—after the war," he said, "and I will tell it to you. And perhaps there will be—other things to talk about."

"I shall be honoured," said the Frenchman. "We three! I begin to understand now. A house should not be divided against itself. Is it not so? We should go far! It is fate to-night that—"

"Or the devil," said the third man.

"My Gawd!" The first man began to laugh—a cracked, jarring laugh. "After the war, the blinking war—after hell! There ain't no end, there ain't no—"

And then a flare hung again in the heavens, and in the thicket three men sat huddled against the tree trunks, torn, ragged and dishevelled men, but they were not staring into each others' faces now; they were staring, their eyes magnetically attracted, at a spot on the ground where a man, a man murdered, should be lying.

But the man was not there.

The fourth man was gone.