CHAPTER XVII

A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH

At just this point in Ethel Clayton’s business troubles, when she wished so heartily that she could have the benefit of Barton’s advice, the general manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company was thinking very little indeed of such tame affairs as those relating to the factory in Mailsburg.

Like those other thousands who have a rendezvous with death on the battleline, the intensive training and preparation for that event was filling his whole thought, as well as taking up all his time. The regiment to which Frank Barton was attached had plunged immediately into such grilling work as many of the men had never in their lives experienced.

In the first place, Barton’s detachment was billeted in a little village which had before that day on which the American soldiery marched in, escaped all contact with the Yankees, or, indeed, any one outside its local confines. It was but a tiny collection of farm cottages and stables builded together far back in feudal times for protective reasons. Sanitation was an unknown word to the inhabitants.

Barton’s captain was taken down with pleuropneumonia almost at his landing from the troop ship _Tecumseh_, and was in a hospital. Barton as ranking lieutenant was in charge of the company of nearly two hundred men. With the medical major he had the well-being, both mental and physical, of these men upon his hands. It was a situation of responsibility.

His second in command appeared before him on the first morning, saluted, and said:

“Lieutenant Barton, I have to report, sir, that this place--er--really, Lieutenant, _it stinks_.”

“So my nose tells me, Lieutenant Copley. The doctor likewise agrees with us.”

“Bah jove!” groaned Morrison Copley, who could not altogether cast his drawl on such sort notice. “What is to be done about it?”

“Clean up!” announced Barton vigorously.

And that was their first job. Precious piles of stable scrapings that had occupied the little courtyards before the farmers’ cots, or had been heaped in stable penthouses since time immemorial, were forked into carts and spread upon the fallow ground outside the village.

It was a shock to the villagers, and at first they raised a great clamor, for custom was being vastly disturbed. But when they were made to see that the mules and horses of the American forces were adding daily to the fertilizer piles and that the Yankee boys in removing the manure to the fields were doing the farmers’ work, and that for nothing, objections died among the French population of the village, if not entirely among the soldiers themselves. But they made that village clean and kept it clean.

Once Frank Barton burst out laughing and had to retreat to his quarters to recover. The thought had struck him suddenly that if Madam Copley--the haughty, somewhat snobbish Madam Copley--could see her son bossing a gang forking over steaming manure piles, she would probably swoon.

It was rather startling, too, when one considered what a metamorphosis had come over Morry Copley. Even his voice had changed. Its shrillness had been modified and when he gave an order now it was with the snap of a whiplash in his tone.

Morry was diplomatic, too. In the cleaning up of the village this ranked high, for he managed such French as he possessed most adroitly and made the peasants who first thought they were being robbed agree with him that it might be a good thing, once in a hundred years, to scrape the manure platforms--and even the cobbled village street--right down to the bone.

From that first week of occupancy, when effectual sanitary measures were put into practice, right through the long season of trench training that followed, Barton and his detachment were never idle enough to suffer from homesickness.

Although the training field and trenches for this American division were near enough to the battlefront for the big guns to be heard, they were well hidden, and were defended from the enemy aircraft by a special squadron of French flying machines and sentinel airplanes.

The plan of the German military leaders to bring some great disaster upon the first American troops to arrive back of the battlelines, was not yet accomplished. That the attempt would be made again and again until the catastrophe was assured was well understood by the Americans as well as by the allied training officers working with the division.

“The Boche will get you if you don’t watch out,” became a byword in the Yankee camps. Perhaps the frequent cry of “wolf! wolf!” made the Americans at last somewhat careless. Men who have always joked about the lack of intelligence of German saloon-keepers and delicatessen shopmen are not likely to be easily impressed by stories of Fritz’s super-powers under the sea, on the earth, or in the air.

Working with his men all day and studying at night made up the round of Barton’s existence during these first weeks in France. It was not often he gave much attention to outside matters, or thought upon anything but military tactics.

It was true there was a desire in the back of his mind at first to learn how Helen Fuller was and where she was stationed in France--if she really had come over. He wrote a friendly note to her addressed in care of the Red Cross headquarters in Paris, but received no reply.

Then arrived Ethel’s first three letters, all in one mail. The picture in them of Mailsburg and the affairs of the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company, pleased Barton greatly. He had not realized before how hungry he was for news.

Jim Mayberry seemed to have forgotten him altogether. He was not so dense that he did not understand Mayberry’s character in a measure. Barton had never expected gratitude from the boyhood friend he had made superintendent of the factory. Ethel’s letters, however, hinted at none of the trouble Mayberry was making in Barton’s absence.

They were just cheerful narratives of the daily happenings that she knew would interest the absent manager. He had already written one general missive addressed to her; but now he sat down and replied particularly to Ethel Clayton--a warm and friendly letter inspired by a feeling that he had not before realized he held for the girl whom he had always considered so “capable.”

He remembered how she had looked at him from her desk on the evening of his final departure from Mailsburg. Actually he had never forgotten this picture of the girl he had left behind to watch over the affairs of the concern he had done so much for and which had meant so much to him. She seemed to mean a deal more in his thought, too, than merely a capable office assistant.

And she was a pretty girl. That Sunday she had visited the camp at Lake Quehasset! There was no girl he knew who could look more attractive. Why had he never noticed it before that day? Hers was a less glowing, a less striking beauty than Helen Fuller’s, but it was a beauty that once noted never lost its attraction for the appreciative eye.

The lonely man in camp or barracks is sure to contemplate the memory of his friends and acquaintances among womankind, and Barton’s mind dwelt as never before on the girls and women he knew in Mailsburg.

“Why,” he thought, as he closed the long letter to Ethel, “I might have tried to make a friend of her. I wonder why I did not try? Miss Clayton is very much worth while.”

The wound caused by Helen Fuller’s treatment of him at the last, was still raw. He felt that she had deliberately cultivated his acquaintance, had made him believe she had more than a passing interest in him, only to make the fall of his hopes seem the greater.

He wondered if Helen had really had for him exactly the same feeling that she had for Morrison Copley or Charlie Bradley. Was she merely a coquette, playing with men as a fisherman plays a trout--and for the same reason? Was it merely for sport that she had exerted herself to charm him?

Frank Barton felt all the hurt that a man of his kind does when he awakes to the fact that he has been made a fool of by a guileful woman. But he did not feel that pique which often turns a man from one woman to accept the salve of another’s sympathy. In thinking of Ethel Clayton and writing to her he had no such thought as this in mind.

No. Instead he threw himself with all his strength into his work. He was acting ranking officer of his company, and he felt all the responsibility which that implies. He desired to have his boys show at inspection a higher degree of training than any other company in the regiment. He kept his brother officers, as well as the non-commissioned officers, up to the scratch by both example and precept.

“Barton’s a shark for work,” they all said. “He just eats it up!”

The notice of staff officers was drawn to his command and it brought Lieutenant Barton some special attentions. He was taken with a group of other advanced officers to the front line trenches and there learned much of the actual work of modern warfare--much that would help him when his brave boys “went in.”

And then, back with his detachment once more, the men of which were “fit as a fiddle” and ready for any work, Frank Barton saw that day for which he had been preparing all these long weeks and months.

It did not come just as he expected. He and his men were not moved to some sector of the front where they would slip into the places of wearied and mud-encrusted poilus at night. They did not go to the Hun in fact; the Hun came to them.

The day began early indeed for Lieutenant Barton. He was up long before reveille, for there was a line of motor-lorries stalled in the mud just outside the village, that had been there half the night. Barton’s company was called on for help.

For several days there had been a thaw and each night a thick and penetrating fog arose from the saturated earth, wiping out the stars completely and hanging a thick pall over the countryside.

Under the oversight of the non-commissioned officers, the men began building miniature corduroy roads over the miry spots, and prying the lorries’ wheels out of the mud so that they could get a start, one by one, and go on through the village street.

Barton strode along the line of stalled trucks and their trailers to the very last one in the procession. Beyond, the forelights of a smaller motor-car showed in the mist. In curiosity he drew near to this.

“Any chance of getting by the jam, Lieutenant?” demanded an unmistakably American voice.

“Not, now,” Barton responded, drawing nearer. “You will have to wait for those trucks to get through the town.”

“And how long will that be?”

“I cannot say. By the way, perhaps you had better let me see your passes. Save time. I happen to be in command here.”

“Oh, sure! Here you are, Lieutenant.”

The driver of the car stepped out, pulling several papers from an inner pocket as he did so. Barton flashed the spotlight of his torch on them. At the same moment a clear and well remembered voice spoke from the tonneau:

“Why, it’s Frank Barton! How very odd!”

“Miss Fuller! Helen!” ejaculated the officer in equal amazement.

He turned his flashlight upon the occupants of the car. Two women in nurse’s cloaks and an elderly French citizen were Helen’s companions. She, too, was garbed as a Red Cross nurse.

“Oh, we shall be all right now!” the American girl cried.

She explained to her companions in French, but spoke so rapidly that Barton could not follow her observations. The chauffeur, a keen-faced American lad, evidently college-bred, chuckled and returned the papers to his pocket.

“You see, Mr. Barton,” she said to the lieutenant, “we are going to the base hospital on ahead--these ladies and I. Monsieur Renau goes to the village there on business. I engaged Johnny Gear and his machine to take us around this way because the railroad accommodations for civilians, as you know, are dreadful. And here you find us stuck in the mud,” she concluded dramatically.

“I fear you will be stuck in the mud more than once if you follow this lorry train,” Barton said. “It has right of way and will leave an almost impassable mire behind it.”

“Now you’ve said something, Lieutenant,” agreed Johnny Gear.

“But you can get us around it, of course, Frank,” said Helen confidently, and in the tone of an American girl to whom nothing is impossible if she has once made up her mind to get it.

“Not by any near road, Miss Helen,” he responded.

“Why! _there_ is a track,” the girl cried, for through a sudden rift in the fog she could see a few yards. “Doesn’t that go around this village you say is just ahead of us?”

“It leads into our training encampment. Nobody is allowed there without special permit.”

“Oh, now, _Frank_----”

“But there is a road,” he hastened to add. “You must turn back. Half a mile back you will find a road that encircles the whole field, and on which you will not be challenged. I’ll go with you if you can back and turn your car.”

“You bet I can,” agreed Gear. “Look out for the mud, Lieutenant.”

“Come and sit beside me, Frank,” the American girl said, quickly opening the tonneau door on her side. “How are you--and the other Mailsburg heroes? I’ve just lots and _lots_ to tell you!”

He slipped into the seat indicated and was introduced--after a fashion--to the French girls and to Monsieur Renau. Gear got his car turned about and they went lubbering on over the heavy road.

It was daybreak now but still very dark, with the world completely smothered in fog. Almost by chance Barton discovered the entrance to the encircling track he had spoken of. It was a twenty-mile trip around the training field; but if he continued with them he was sure the party would make it all right.

“And you _must_ see that we get through, Frank,” Helen Fuller urged. “Really, you know, we’ve _got_ to get to our destination to-day.”

Barton smiled at her reassuringly. Her eyes were as bright as ever, her smile as alluring. He quite forgot how cavalierly she had treated him at their last meeting in Mailsburg.

“Drive right ahead, Mr. Gear,” he told the chauffeur. “There is almost no heavy trucking over this road, and I think you will be able to get ahead of the lorry train.”

Then he gave his attention to the girl beside him. She chattered in her usual magpie fashion; yet Barton loved to hear her. Naturally of a serious trend himself, Helen Fuller’s inconsequential talk had always amused him. And much that she told him now about her experience since coming to France was interesting.

That she was quite as sure as ever that her interests and her activities were of more importance than anything else in the world, a listener could not fail to understand. When she asked him of his adventures she gave him no time for reply, but went on with her own story. Nobody in the world mattered so much as Helen Fuller. It began to irritate him after a while. It never had before.

The car plowed on for some time; it was Barton himself who stopped it.

“Wait!” he commanded. “What is that I hear? Shut off your engine, Mr. Gear.”

Then they all heard it--the unmistakable roaring of a powerful motor. Moreover it was not on the road before or behind them. It was in the air.

“An aeroplane!” cried Helen.

“A very heavy aero--_hein_?” queried one of her fellow nurses.

“And that’s right!” exclaimed the driver. “Foggy as it is I suppose there are plenty of flying men up yonder.”

“I have never heard a machine just like that,” Barton said, in a puzzled tone. “I thought I had identified the sound of all these French machines--Great heavens!”

A series of explosions interrupted his speech. Off to the left they were, in the direction of the village and the cantonments. Through the thick mist a flash or two was visible.

“Shells!” yelled Gear.

“An enemy plane dropping bombs!” ejaculated Barton. “Must have got past the French escadrille in this fog.”

A nearer explosion followed and the roar of the aeroplane’s engine seemed almost over their heads.