Chapter IV · MYSTERIOUS ASHES.

After sending his curt message to Major Appleby, Grail sat in the office at headquarters, whither he had betaken himself from the meeting, smoking fiercely, and glowering at a spot on the wall. He had set himself in defiance of the whole post, and he could not but feel that he was in the right. At any rate, he scorned to defend himself against the aspersions of a blunderer like Appleby, or an officious young ass like Hemingway; for, as it happened, he knew of the story set afloat by the mess manager, Colonel Vedant having detailed it to him jestingly during their hurried trip to the foundry. Grail had been prevented then from offering any explanation, owing to their arrival at Schilder’s office.

Rather than make such an explanation now, he vowed he would be drawn and quartered, for he bitterly resented the attitude taken by his brother officers, their readiness—nay, almost eagerness—to believe the very worst of him.

Grail loved his profession. More than once he had refused flattering offers to leave it for a career in civil life. But now, in his hot indignation, he declared that not another week should find him wearing the uniform and associating with such double-faced, intriguing cads.

On the impulse of the moment, he stepped over to his desk, and, snatching up a pen, started to write out his resignation. But as he blotted the sheet before affixing his signature he paused, with an exclamation of annoyance, to find that the lines he had written were streaked with fine gray dust, which had fallen on the paper. A sort of gritty powder, it seemed to be, like the dust which rises from the handling of filed papers or documents. Without giving the matter second thought, Grail was about to tear up the blurred resignation and start to draft another one, when his attention was suddenly caught by a flake of the powder slightly larger than the others.

It was a tiny shred of paper, but what especially aroused his interest was that it showed the trace of a lithographed letter “V” of the peculiar style and shading used as a heading by the Dolliver Foundry.

Quickly he caught up the blotter he had been using, and shook it over a sheet of carbon paper, for there had flashed into his mind a prompt suspicion as to the nature of that dust. That it had fallen from the blotter there could be no question, and he recalled distinctly that he had left the mysteriously missing note lying on that blotter when he and the colonel took their hasty departure.

A moment or two gave him all the confirmation of his suspicion that he required, for under his vigorous shaking there sifted down on the dark surface several fragments, from a sixteenth to a thirty-second of an inch in diameter, on which he could plainly decipher indications of typewriting.

Snatching up a reading glass belonging to the colonel, he bent over these to satisfy himself he had made no mistake; then straightened up, with a muttered expletive and a little, puzzled frown between the eyes.

The glass brought out on one of the specks what appeared unquestionably the upper half of an “m”—and, what was more, the letter was slightly chipped on one side.

Grail leaned over to subject the fragment to a second examination, and make sure that he had not been misled; then drew from his pocket the carbon copy of the note he had dictated to Schilder’s stenographer, and compared the two impressions. They were alike, defect and all, as two pennies struck from the same die. One was forced to the conclusion that they had been made by the same machine.

Dropping his chin into his hand, the adjutant sat staring almost incredulously at the telltale speck in front of him. This knocked into smithereens the entire theory he had evolved as to the disappearance of Colonel Vedant, for, despite the pains he had taken to secure a copy of the note from Schilder’s typewriter, he had never really believed that the original summons had come from there.

Now, however, he was driven to a fresh line of speculation. Recalling the foundry manager’s freely expressed insinuations, he arose half impatiently, and tested the two typewriting machines used at headquarters. There were, as he expected, no point of similarity shown with the copy of the note he had caused to be transcribed by Miss Griffin. The “m” on both machines was clear-cut and flawless; there was no indication of blurring on the “D.”

Returning to the desk, he resumed his perplexed contemplation of the fragments on the sheet of carbon paper. It seemed certain that Schilder must have sent the decoy message, relying on its speedy disintegration to cover up his tracks. And right there another consideration arose to muddle him: How had this disintegration been accomplished? Hitherto he had been so intent on establishing the identity of these specks of typewriting with the missing message that he had not stopped to question the agency which could so quickly and thoroughly destroy a stout sheet of linen paper.

“Some powerful chemical, doubtless,” he reflected, recollecting that the note had been a trifle damp when he drew it from the envelope; and with this suggestion, he scraped together a little pinch of the dust to taste and smell of it. The tests confirmed his opinion. There was a faint, pungent odor to the particles, which, although familiar, he could not exactly place; and one of them, applied to his tongue, produced a slight burning sensation. The paper undoubtedly had been treated with some solution, which, in drying, reduced it to shreds.

He carefully transferred what remained of it to an envelope, in order to have his conclusions verified and the exact nature of the solvent determined by expert analysis; but he really needed no such corroboration. He was fully satisfied that the demolition of the message must have been effected in the way he assumed.

With so much settled, though, he seemed in no way relieved. Indeed, the frown of perplexity on his forehead grew deeper, and, seated there before his desk, he fell into a brown study.

Why, he thought, should Schilder have gone to so much trouble to get rid of this note, when he could so easily have supported his denial of writing it by the simple expedient of using another machine? As he himself had said to Grail, it would be quite a job, without other clews, to trace, among all the hundreds of machines in a city like Brantford, the particular one on which a specific communication was written.

“No,” the adjutant said aloud, fishing from his pocket the half-smoked cigarette he had found at the threshold of the foundry office, and, surveying it with a decisive nod, “I can’t be so far off the track. This new complication simply means that the trail is a bit more involved than I thought. However”—he shrugged his shoulders with returning resentment—“that is something for the bunch of wiseacres down the row to work out. I’m done with the whole business.” And once more he drew a sheet of paper toward him to indite his resignation.

With his pen dipped in the ink, he hesitated. There came a natural reluctance to quit in this way under fire. The fresh developments he had unearthed, too, served as a challenge to his ingenuity. He had a well-defined theory to account for the disappearance of the colonel, and, after his first anxiety at Schilder’s office, had not entertained any serious alarm as to the outcome. It was, he believed, merely a bold attempt on the part of some of the foreign spies who had been hanging around the post of late to obtain information in regard to the experiments in progress there. They must have become aware of the colonel’s habit of carrying home with him at night the reports made to him, in order that he might digest them at his leisure. Since the coup had failed, however, Colonel Vedant having no papers with him that evening, and being the last person in the world to divulge under duress or otherwise any official secrets, Grail felt satisfied that the captive would be released just as soon as those responsible for the outrage were safe beyond the reach of retribution.

He had not really credited Schilder with any hand in the affair. On that one point, at least, he was agreed with Lieutenant Hemingway, regarding the German merely as a rather thick-headed dupe who had unwittingly allowed his establishment to be used as a theater for the enterprise.

Now, however, with the seeming assurance that this decoy message must have come from the typewriter at the foundry, he began to wonder if he had not been taking too much for granted. One was certainly justified in believing that either the manager or his stenographer must have had knowledge of the writing of the note.

“Suppose,” Grail speculated, “the assumption I’ve been going on is a mistake? By Jove, I’m not infallible, and I’ve got no proof to support me—that is, nothing you could call real proof. Suppose, then, that there’s more to this job than I’ve been willing to concede, and that the old colonel is actually in danger? Have I got the right, merely from personal pique, to stand from under and leave the old boy to the mercy of a set of bunglers like Appleby and his crew?”

While he hesitated, his glance happened to fall on the pen he still held between his fingers, which he had picked up from the desk at random. It was a gold one, belonging to the colonel—a gift from his daughter, Meredith, as was shown by the tiny plate affixed to the handle, with the inscription: “Merry Christmas. M. L. V.”

Before the adjutant’s mind rose suddenly the vision of the fair-haired, lovely girl, so devotedly attached to her father. He knew what this affair would mean to her, how deeply she would be affected, whether there were any actual menace in the situation or not. He laid down his pen, and, picking up the form of resignation he had drafted, tore it across, and dropped it into the wastebasket.

“I’ve got to stick it out,” he muttered. “I’ve got to stick it out and clear this thing up—for her sake!”

His mind made up, he threw himself whole-heartedly into his task. A glance at his watch showed him it was after three o’clock, but no thought of sleep suggested itself to him. Instead, he caught up his hat and coat, and started out to take another look over the scene of the disappearance.

But there was nothing new to be gained, he found. The foundry yard, silent and deserted now, the last vestige of the scrap heaps cleared away, and only the idle crane, with its long, sweeping arm at rest, to serve as a reminder of the evening’s earlier activity, offered nothing more in the way of a clew; nor could old Dennis, at the gate, although garrulous enough, add any fresh information to what he had already told.

Leaving him after a brief colloquy, Grail thoughtfully strolled down to the railroad tracks skirting the banks of the river, and patrolled them slowly the length of the foundry inclosure and back, climbing up on each of the scrap-loaded freight cars standing on the siding to investigate, but only to drop down again every time, with a shake of the head. The night was beginning to give way now to the first faint gray of the summer dawn. More and more distinctly the different features of the water front revealed themselves—the chimneys of the big smelter, Brantford’s largest industry; the railroad machine shops beyond; and, overhead, dark and shadowy against the sky, the dim perspective of the great bridge stretching across the stream.

The horizon flushed into pink and crimson; the gilded cross of a steeple off in the distance flashed with the first beams of the rising sun; somewhere up the river a factory whistle blew. Morning had come.

Only the wide river was invisible now, blanketed in the thick mist which still hung over its swift, muddy current. Grail stood a moment staring out at the impenetrable veil; then, obliged to step nimbly from the tracks for the passage of an express train, turned, and made his way back past the gate of the foundry.

As he reached old Dennis, he halted suddenly, and wheeled to glance sharply once more out over the mist-enveloped stream.

“What is that noise?” he inquired.

The old gateman cupped his wrinkled fingers behind his ear, and bent his head to listen.

“Is it th’ choog, choog, choog ye mane?” he returned. “Sure, that must be a autymobile over in th’ bottoms.”

“No.” Grail shook his head. “That’s the exhaust of a motor boat, if I ever heard one.”

“A motor boat!” scoffed Dennis. “Wid all thim sand bars out there? Sure, there’s a loonytick runnin’ it, thin. W’y, sorr, nobody don’t niver sail motor boats on this river. Th’ boss just had wan iv th’ things shipped in yistedah, he was tellin’ me, but ’tis not on no river he’ll be thryin’ it. He’s goin’ to have it tuk out to Lake Manawa.”

A quick flash shot into the adjutant’s eye at this information, but his tone betrayed only a polite interest.

“So Mr. Schilders is going to have a boat out at the lake this summer, eh?”

“As I tell ye, sorr. An’ sure it may be out there already f’r all that I know. He was dickerin’ wid a felly yisteday afthernoon to haul it out f’r him.”

Grail merely nodded, and turned the conversation to another channel. The chug-chug which had caught his attention had faded away by this time, and there seemed nothing to keep him there, but still he lingered on, chatting with the old watchman.

It might have been observed, though, that he directed an occasional keen glance toward the mists, thinning fast now in the rays of the rising sun, and that when at last the vapors were entirely dissipated, and the river visible from shore to shore, a little frown of disappointment gathered between his eyes. On all the broad expanse of the tawny stream there was no craft of any kind to be discerned. He bade old Dennis good morning, and betook himself back to the post.

TO BE CONTINUED.