One of the chairs was drawn close up to the table and on it sat a young man dressed in a well-worn travelling-coat with heavy boots on his feet, and a shabby tricorne hat on the top of his head. His arms were stretched out over the table and his face was buried in them. He had obviously been asleep when the door was so unceremoniously thrown open. At the sound he raised his head and blinked drowsily in the dim light at the newcomers.
Then he stretched out his arms, yawned and gave himself a shake like a sleepy dog, and finally exclaimed in English! “Ah! at last!”
One of the vagabonds—the one namely who at Les Amandiers had appeared with bent shoulders and a hacking cough, now straightened out what proved to be a magnificent athletic figure, and gave a pleasant laugh.
“Tony, you lazy dog!” he said, “I’ve a mind to throw you downstairs. What say you, Ffoulkes? While you and I have been breaking our backs and poisoning our lungs with the scent of garlic, I verily believe that this villain Tony has been fast asleep.”
“By all means let’s throw him downstairs,” assented the second vagabond, now no longer lame, whom his friend had addressed as Ffoulkes.
“What would you have me do but sleep?” Tony broke in with a laugh. “I was told to wait, and so I waited. I’d far rather have been with you.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Ffoulkes demurred, “for then you would have been dirtier than I, and almost as filthy as Blakeney. Look at him; did you ever see such a disgusting object?”
“By Gad!” rejoined Blakeney, surveying his own slender hands coated with coal-dust, grease and grime, “I don’t know when I have been quite so dirty. Soap and water!” he commanded with a lofty gesture, “or I perish.”
But Tony gave a rueful shrug.
“I have a bit of soap in my pocket,” he said, and diving into the capacious pocket of his coat he produced an infinitesimal remnant of soap which he threw upon the table. “As for water, I can’t offer you any. The only tap in the house is in the back kitchen which Madame, our worthy landlady, has locked up for the night. She won’t have anything wasted, she tells me, not even water.”
“Fine, thrifty people, your Dauphinois,” commented Blakeney, wisely shaking his head. “But did you try bribery?”
“Yes! But Madame—I beg your pardon, Citizeness Martot—immediately called me a cursed aristo, and threatened me with some committee or other. I couldn’t argue with her, she reeked of garlic.”
“And you, Tony, are an arrant coward,” Blakeney rejoined, “where garlic is concerned.”
“I am,” Tony was willing to admit. “That’s why I am so terrified of you both at this moment.”
They all laughed, and since water was not obtainable, Sir Percy Blakeney, one of the most exquisite dandies of his time, and his friend Sir Andrew Ffoulkes, sat down on rickety chairs, in clothes sticky with dirt, their faces and hands masked by a thick coating of grime. Down the four walls of the small attic-room fillets of greasy moisture trickled and mingled with the filth that lay in cakes upon the floor.
“I can’t bear to look at Tony,” Blakeney said with a mock sigh, “he is too demned clean.”
“We’ll soon remedy that,” was Ffoulkes’s dry comment.
And behold Sir Andrew Ffoulkes at close grips with Lord Anthony Dewhurst, and this in silence for fear of disturbing the rest of the house, and bringing attention on themselves. It was a sparring match in the best style, Blakeney acting as referee, its object—to transfer some of the grime that coated the clothes and hands of Sir Andrew on to the immaculate Lord Tony. They were only boys after all, these men, who even now were risking their lives in order to rescue the innocent from the clutches of a bloody tyranny. They were boys in their love of adventure, and in their hero worship, and men in the lighthearted way in which they were prepared for the supreme sacrifice, should luck turn against them.
The sparring match ended in a call for mercy on the part of Lord Tony. His face was plastered with grime, his hands as dirty as those of his friends.
“Tony,” Blakeney said finally, when he called a halt, “if her ladyship were to see you now, she would divorce you.”
Vent having been given to unconquerable animal spirits, there was a quick return to the serious business of the day.
“What is the latest?” Lord Tony asked.
“Just this,” Sir Percy replied: “That those hellhounds have sent out detachments of soldiers all over the country to ferret out what they are pleased to call treason. We all know what that means. Since their iniquitous ‘Law of the Suspect,’ no man, woman or child is safe from denunciation: now with this perambulating army, summary arrests occur by the thousand. It seems that at any moment any of those brigands can seize you by the coat-collar and drag you before one of their precious committees, who promptly sends you to the nearest guillotine.”
“And you came across a detachment of those brigands, I suppose.”
“We have; Ffoulkes and I spent a couple of hours in their company, in the midst of fumes of garlic that would have reduced you, Tony, to a drivelling coward. I vow the smell of it has even infested my hair.”
“Anything to be done?” Tony asked simply. He knew his chief well enough to perceive the vein of grim earnestness through all this flippancy.
“Yes!” Blakeney replied. “The squad of brigands who are scouring this part of France are principally after a family named Frontenac, which consists of father, mother and an invalid daughter. I had already found out something about them in the course of the day, whilst I carted some manure
