The Dark Star

She shuddered and pressed her hands over her temples.

Neeland said:

“I am going to stand by you. Captain Sengoun will do the same.”

She shook her head:

“No use,” she said with a shiver. “I am too well known. They have my dossier almost complete. My procès will be a brief one.”

“Can’t you get away by the roof? There are two of your men up there.”

“They themselves are caught, and do not even know it. They too will face a squad of execution before the sun rises tomorrow. And they never dream of it up there–”

She made a hopeless gesture:

“What is the use! When I came here from the Turkish Embassy, hearing that you were here but believing the information false, I discovered you conversing with a Russian spy – overheard her warn you to leave this house.

“And there, all the while, unknown to me, in the salle de jeu were Curfoot and that unspeakable scoundrel Brandes! Why, the place was swarming with enemies – and I never dreamed it!.. Yet – I might have feared some such thing – I might have feared that the man, Brandes, who had betrayed me once, would do it again if he ever had the chance… And he’s done it.”

There was a long silence. Ilse stood staring at the melancholy greyish light on the window panes.

She said as though to herself:

“I shall never see another daybreak.”… After a moment she turned and began to pace the attic, a strange, terrible figure of haggard youth in the shadowy light. “How horribly still it is at daybreak!” she breathed, halting before Neeland. “How deathly quiet–”

The dry crack of a pistol cut her short. Then, instantly, in the dim depths of the house, shot followed shot in bewildering succession, faster, faster, filling the place with a distracting tumult.

Neeland jerked up his pistol as a nearer volley rattled out on the landing directly underneath.

Sengoun, exasperated, shouted:

“Well, what the devil is all this!” and ran toward the head of the stairs, his pistol lifted for action.

Then, in the garret doorway, Weishelm appeared, his handsome face streaming blood. He staggered, turned mechanically toward the stairs again with wavering revolver; but a shot drove him blindly backward and another hurled him full length across the floor, where he lay with both arms spread out, and the last tremors, running from his feet to his twitching face.

CHAPTER XXXIII

A RAT HUNT

The interior of the entire house was now in an uproar; shots came fast from every landing; the semi-dusk of stair-well and corridor was lighted by incessant pistol flashes and the whole building echoed the deafening racket.

“What do you make of it?” shouted Sengoun furiously, standing like a baited and perplexed bull. “Who’s fighting who in this fool of a place? By Erlik! I’d like to know whom I’m to fire at!”

Ilse Dumont, creeping along the wall, looked fearfully down at Weishelm who no longer moved where he lay on the dusty floor, with eyes and mouth open and his distorted face already half covered by a wet and crawling scarlet mask.

“Brandes and Stull are betraying us,” she whispered. “They are killing my comrades – on the stairs down there–”

“If that is true,” called out Neeland in a low, cautious voice, “you’d better wait a moment, Sengoun!”

But Sengoun’s rage for combat had already filled him to overflowing, and the last rag of patience left him.

“I don’t care who is fighting!” he bellowed. “It’s all one to me! Now is the time to shoot our way out of this. Come on, Neeland! Hurrah for the Terek Cossacks! Another town taken! Hurrah!”

Neeland caught Ilse by the wrist:

“You’d better get free of this house while you can!” he said, dragging her with him after Sengoun, who had already reached the head of the stairs and was starting down, peering about for a target.

Suddenly, on the landing below, Golden Beard and Ali Baba appeared, caught sight of Sengoun and Neeland above, and opened fire on them instantly, driving them back from the head of the staircase flat against the corridor wall. But Golden Beard, seeming to realise now that the garret landing was held and the way to the roof cut off, began to retreat from the foot of the garret stairs with Ali Baba following, their restless, upward-pointed pistols searching for the slightest movement in the semi-obscurity of the hallway above.

Sengoun, fuming and fretting, had begun to creep toward the head of the stairs again, when there came a rattling hail of shots from below, a rush, the trample of feet, the crash of furniture and startling slam of a door.

Downstairs straight toward the uproar ran Sengoun with Neeland beside him. The halls were swimming in acrid fumes; the floors trembled and shook under the shock as a struggling, fighting knot of men went tumbling down the stairway below, reached the landing and burst into the rooms of the Cercle Extranationale.

Leaning over the banisters, Neeland saw Golden Beard turn on Doc Curfoot, raging, magnificent as a Viking, his blue eyes ablaze. He hurled his empty pistol at the American; seized chairs, bronzes, andirons, the clock from the mantel, and sent a storm of heavy missiles through the doorway among the knot of men who were pressing him and who had already seized Ali Baba.

Then, from the banisters above, Neeland and Sengoun saw Brandes, moving stealthily, swiftly, edge his way to a further door.

Steadying the elbow of his pistol hand in the hollow cup of his left palm, his weapon level, swerving as his quarry moved, he presently fired at Golden Beard and got him through the back. And then he shot him again deliberately, through the body, as the giant turned, made a menacing gesture toward him; took an uncertain step in his direction; another step, wavering, blindly grotesque; then stood swaying there under the glare of the partly shattered chandelier from which hung long shreds of crystal prisms.

And Brandes, aiming once more with methodical and merciless precision, and taking what time he required to make a bull’s-eye on this great, reeling, golden-crowned bull, fired the third shot at his magnificent head.

The bronze Barye lion dropped from Golden Beard’s nerveless fist; the towering figure, stiffening, fell over rather slowly and lay across the velvet carpet as rigid as a great tree.

Brandes went into the room, leaned over the dying man and fired into his body until his pistol was empty. Then he replaced the exhausted clip leisurely, leering down at his victim.

There was a horrid sound from the stairs, where Curfoot and another man were killing a waiter. Strange, sinister faces appeared everywhere from the smoke-filled club rooms; Stull came out into the hallway below and shouted up through the stair-well:

“Say, Eddie! For Christ’s sake come down here! There’s a mob outside on the street and they’re tearing the iron shutters off the café!”

Curfoot immediately started downstairs; Brandes, pistol in hand, came slowly out of the club rooms, still leering, his slitted, greenish eyes almost phosphorescent in the semi-obscurity.

Suddenly he caught sight of Ilse Dumont standing close behind Sengoun and Neeland on the landing above.

“By God!” he shouted to Curfoot. “Here she is, Doc! Tell your men! Tell them she’s up here on the next floor!”

Sengoun immediately fired at Brandes, who did not return the shot but went plunging downstairs into the smoky obscurity below.

“Come on!” roared Sengoun to Neeland, starting forward with levelled weapon. “They’ve all gone crazy and it’s time we were getting out of this!”

“Quick!” whispered Neeland to Ilse Dumont. “Follow me downstairs! It’s the only chance for you now!”

But the passageway was blocked by a struggling, cursing, panting crowd, and they were obliged to retreat into the club rooms.

In the salle de jeu, Ali Baba, held fast by three men dressed as waiters, suddenly tripped up two of them, turned, and leaped for the doorway. The two men who had been tripped scrambled to their feet and tore after him. When they reached the hallway the Eurasian was gone; but all of a sudden there came the crash of a splintered door from the landing above; and the dim corridor rang with the frightful screaming of a woman.

“It’s – that – that – Russian girl!” stammered Ilse Dumont; “ – The girl I locked in! Oh, my God! – my God! Karl Breslau is killing her!”

Neeland sprang into the hall and leaped up the stairs; but the three men disguised as waiters had arrived before him.

And there, across the threshold of the bedroom, backed up flat against the shattered door, Ali Baba was already fighting for his life; and the frightened Russian girl crept out from the bedroom behind him and ran to Neeland for protection.

Twice Neeland aimed at Ali Baba, but could not bring himself to fire at the bleeding, rabid object which snarled and slavered and bit and kicked, regardless of the blows raining on him. At last one of his assailants broke the half demented creature’s arm with a chair; and the bloody, battered thing squeaked like a crippled rat and darted away amid the storm of blows descending, limping and floundering up the attic stairs, his broken arm flapping with every gasping bound.

After him staggered his sweating and exhausted assailants, reeling past Neeland and Ilse Dumont and the terrified Russian girl who crouched behind them. But, halfway up the stairs all three halted and stood clinging to the banisters as though listening to something on the floor above them.

Neeland heard it, too: from the roof came a ripping, splintering sound, as though people on the slates were prying up the bolted scuttle. The three men on the stairs hesitated a moment longer; then turned to flee, too late; a hail of pistol shots swept the attic stairs; all three men came pitching and tumbling down to the landing.

Two of them lay still; one rose immediately and limped on again down the hallway, calling over the banisters to those below:

“The Germans on the leads ’ave busted into the garret! Breslau is up ’ere! Send along those American gunmen, or somebody what can shoot!”

He was a grey-haired Englishman, smooth shaven and grim; and, as he stood there at the head of the further stairs, breathing heavily, awaiting aid from below, he said to Neeland coolly enough:

“You’d better go below, sir. We ’ad our orders to take this Breslau rat alive, but we can’t do it now, and there’s like to be a ’orrid mess ’ere directly.”

“Can we get through below?”

“You can,” said the man significantly, “but they’ll be detaining one o’ them ladies at the door.”

“Do you mean me?” said Ilse Dumont.

“Yes, ma’am, I do–”

She sprang toward the attic stairway, but the British agent whipped out a pistol and covered her.

“No,” he said grimly. “You’re wanted below. Go down!”

She came slowly back to where Neeland was standing.

“You’ll have to take your chance below,” he said under his breath. “I’ll stand by you to the end.”

She smiled and continued on toward the stairs where the English agent stood. Neeland and the Russian girl followed her.

The agent said:

“There’s ’ell to pay below, sir.”

The depths of the house rang with the infernal din of blows falling on iron shutters. A deeper, more sinister roar rose from the mob outside. There was a struggle going on inside the building, too; Neeland could hear the trampling and surging of men on every floor – voices calling from room to room, shouts of anger, the terrible outcry of a man in agony.

“Wot a rat’s nest, then, there was in this here blessed ’ouse, sir!” said the British agent, coolly. “If we get Breslau and the others on the roof we’ve bagged ’em all.”

The Russian girl was trembling so violently that Neeland took her by the arm. But Ilse Dumont, giving her a glance of contempt, moved calmly past the British agent to the head of the stairway.

“Come,” she said to Neeland.

The agent, leaning over the banisters, shouted to a man on the next floor:

“Look sharp below there! I’m sendin’ Miss Dumont down with Mr. Neeland, the American! Take her in charge, Bill!”

“Send her along!” bawled the man, framing his face with both hands. “Keep Breslau on the roof a bit and we’ll ’ave the beggar in a few moments!”

Somebody else shouted up from the tumult below:

“It’s war, ’Arry! ’Ave you ’eard? It’s war this morning! Them ’Uns ’as declared war! And the perlice is a-killin’ of the Apaches all over Paris!”

Ilse Dumont looked curiously at the agent, calmly at Neeland, then, dropping one hand on the banisters, she went lightly down the stairs toward the uproar below, followed by Neeland and the Russian girl clinging to his arm with both desperate little hands.

The British agent hung far over the banisters until he saw his colleague join them on the floor below; then, reassured, and on guard again, he leaned back against the corridor wall, his pistol resting on his thigh, and fixed his cold grey eyes on the attic stairs once more.

The secret agent who now joined Neeland and Ilse Dumont on the fourth floor had evidently been constructing a barricade across the hallway as a precaution in case of a rush from the Germans on the roof.

Chairs and mattresses, piled shoulder high, obstructed the passageway, blocking the stairs; and the secret agent – a very young man with red hair and in the garb of a waiter – clambered over it, revolver in one hand, a pair of handcuffs in the other. He lost his balance on top of the shaky heap; strove desperately to recover it, scrambled like a cat in a tub, stumbled, rolled over on a mattress.

And there Neeland pinned him, closing his mouth with one hand and his throat with the other, while Ilse Dumont tore weapon and handcuffs from his grasp, snapped the latter over his wrists, snatched the case from a bedroom pillow lying among the mattresses, and, with Neeland’s aid, swathed the struggling man’s head in it.

“Into that clothes-press!” whispered Ilse, pointing along the hallway where a door swung open.

“Help me lift him!” motioned Neeland.

Together they got him clear of the shaky barricade and, lugging him between them, deposited him on the floor of the clothes-press and locked the door.

So silent had they been that, listening, they heard no movement from the watcher on the floor above, who stood guard at the attic stairs. And it was evident he had heard nothing to make him suspicious.

The Russian girl, dreadfully pale, leaned against the wall as though her limbs scarcely supported her. Neeland passed his arm under hers, nodded to Ilse Dumont, and started cautiously down the carpeted stairs, his automatic pistol in one hand, and the revolver taken from the imprisoned secret agent clutched tightly in the other.

Down the stairs they crept, straight toward the frightful tumult still raging below – down past the wrecked club rooms; past a dead man sprawling on the landing across the blood-soaked carpet – down into the depths of the dusky building toward the lighted café floor whence came the uproar of excited men, while, from the street outside, rose the frantic yelling of the mob mingled with the crash of glass and the clanging dissonance of iron grilles and shutters which were being battered into fragments.

“It’s my chance, now!” whispered Ilse Dumont, slipping past him like a shadow.

For a moment he saw her silhouetted against the yellow electric glare on the stairs below, then, half carrying the almost helpless Russian girl, he stumbled down the last flight of stairs and pushed his way through a hurrying group of men who seemed to be searching for something, for they were tearing open cupboards and buffets, dragging out table drawers and tumbling linen, crockery, and glassware all over the black and white marble floor.

The whole place was ankle deep in shattered glass and broken bottles, and the place reeked with smoke and the odour of wine and spirits.

Neeland forced his way forward into the café, looked around for Sengoun, and saw him almost immediately.

The young Russian, flushed, infuriated, his collar gone and his coat in tatters, was struggling with some men who held both his arms but did not offer to strike him.

Behind him, crowded back into a corner near the cashier’s steel-grilled desk, stood Ilse Dumont, calm, disdainful, confronted by Brandes, whose swollen, greenish eyes, injected with blood, glared redly at her. Stull had hold of him and was trying to drag him away:

“For God’s sake, Eddie, shut your mouth,” he pleaded in English. “You can’t do that to her, whatever she done to you!”

But Brandes, disengaging himself with a jerk, pushed his way past Sengoun to where Ilse stood.

“I’ve got the goods on you!” he said in a ferocious voice that neither Stull nor Curfoot recognised. “You know what you did to me, don’t you! You took my wife from me! Yes, my wife! She was my wife! She is my wife! – For all you did, you lying, treacherous slut! – For all you’ve done to break me, double-cross me, ruin me, drive me out of every place I went! And now I’ve got you! I’ve sold you out! Get that? And you know what they’ll do to you, don’t you? Well, you’ll see when–”

Curfoot and Stull threw themselves against him, but Brandes, his round face pasty with fury, struggled back again to confront Ilse Dumont.

“Ruined me!” he repeated. “Took away from me the only thing God ever gave me for my own! Took my wife!”

“You dog!” said Ilse Dumont very slowly. “You dirty dog!”

A frightful spasm crossed Brandes’ features, and Stull snatched at the pistol he had whipped out. There was a struggle; Brandes wrenched the weapon free; but Neeland tore his way past Curfoot and struck Brandes in the face with the butt of his heavy revolver.

Instantly the group parted right and left; Sengoun suddenly twisted out of the clutches of the men who held him, sprang upon Curfoot, and jerked the pistol from his fist. At the same moment the entire front of the café gave way and the mob crashed inward with a roar amid the deafening din of shattered metal and the clash of splintering glass.

Through the dust and falling shower of débris, Brandes fired at Ilse Dumont, reeled about in the whirl of the inrushing throng engulfing him, still firing blindly at the woman who had been his wife.

Neeland put a bullet into his pistol arm, and it fell. But Brandes stretched it out again with a supreme effort, pointing at Ilse Dumont with jewelled and bloody fingers:

“That woman is a German spy! A spy!” he screamed. “You damn French mutts, do you understand what I say! Oh, my God! Will someone who speaks French tell them! Will somebody tell them she’s a spy! La femme! Cette femme!” he shrieked. “Elle est espion! Esp–!” He fired again, with his left hand. Then Sengoun shot him through the head; and at the same moment somebody stabbed Curfoot in the neck; and the lank American gambler turned and cried out to Stull in a voice half strangled with pain and fury:

“Look out, Ben. There are apaches in this mob! That one in the striped jersey knifed me–”

“Tiens, v’la pour toi, sale mec de malheur!” muttered a voice at his elbow, and a blow from a slung-shot crushed the base of his skull.

As Curfoot crumpled up, Stull caught him; but the tall gambler’s dead weight bore Stull to his knees among the fierce apaches.

And there, fighting in silence to the end, his chalky face of a sick clown meeting undaunted the overwhelming odds against him, Stull was set upon by the apaches and stabbed and stabbed until his clothing was a heap of ribbons and the watch and packet of French bank-notes which the assassins tore from his body were dripping with his blood.

Sengoun and Neeland, their evening clothes in tatters, hatless, dishevelled, began shooting their way out of the hell of murder and destruction raging around them.

Behind them crept Ilse Dumont and the Russian girl: dust and smoke obscured the place where the mob raged from floor to floor in a frenzy of destruction, tearing out fixtures, telephones, window-sashes, smashing tables, bar fixtures, mirrors, ripping the curtains from the windows and the very carpets from the floor in their overwhelming rage against this German café.

That apaches had entered with them the mob cared nothing; the red lust of destruction blinded them to everything except their terrible necessity for the annihilation of this place.

If they saw murder done, and robbery – if they heard shots in the tumult and saw pistol flashes through the dust and grey light of daybreak, they never turned from their raging work.

Out of the frightful turmoil stormed Neeland and Sengoun, their pistols spitting flame, the two women clinging to their ragged sleeves. Twice the apaches barred their way with bared knives, crouching for a rush; but Sengoun fired into them and Neeland’s bullets dropped the ruffian in the striped jersey where he stood over Stull’s twitching body; and the sinister creatures leaped back from the levelled weapons, turned, and ran.

Through the gaping doorway sprang Sengoun, his empty pistol menacing the crowd that choked the shadowy street; Neeland flung away his pistol and turned his revolver on those in the café behind him, as Ilse Dumont and the Russian girl crept through and out into the street.

The crowd was cheering and shouting:

“Down with the Germans! To the Brasserie Schwarz!”

An immense wave of people surged suddenly across the rue Vilna, headed toward the German cafés on the Boulevard; and then, for the first time, Neeland caught sight of policemen standing in little groups, coolly watching the destruction of the Café des Bulgars.

Either they were too few to cope with the mob, or they were indifferent as to what was being done to a German café, but one thing was plain; the police had not the faintest idea that murder had been rampant in the place. For, when suddenly a dead body was thrown from the door out on the sidewalk, their police whistles shrilled through the street, and they started for the mob, resolutely, pushing, striking with white-gloved fists, shouting for right of way.

Other police came running, showing that they had been perfectly aware that German cafés were being attacked and wrecked. A mounted inspector forced his horse along the swarming sidewalk, crying:

“Allons! Circulez! C’est défendu de s’attrouper dans la rue! Mais fichez-moi le camp, nom de Dieu! Les Allemands ne sont pas encore dans la place!”

Along the street and on the Boulevard mobs were forming and already storming three other German cafés; a squadron of Republican Guard cavalry arrived at a trot, their helmets glittering in the increasing daylight, driving before them a mob which had begun to attack a café on the corner.

A captain, superbly mounted, rode ahead of the advancing line of horses, warning the throng back into the rue Vilna, up which the mob now recoiled, sullenly protesting.

Neeland and Sengoun and the two women were forced back with the crowd as a double rank of steel-helmeted horsemen advanced, sweeping everybody into the rue Vilna.

Up the street, through the vague morning light, they retired between ranks of closed and silent houses, past narrow, evil-looking streets and stony alleys still dark with the shadows of the night.

Into one of these Neeland started with Ilse Dumont, but Sengoun drew him back with a sharp exclamation of warning. At the same time the crowd all around them became aware of what was going on in the maze of dusky lanes and alleys past which they were being driven by the cavalry; and the people broke and scattered like rabbits, darting through the cavalry, dodging, scuttling under the very legs of the horses.

The troop, thrown into disorder, tried to check the panic-stricken flight; a brigadier, spurring forward to learn the cause of the hysterical stampede, drew bridle sharply, then whipped his pistol out of the saddle-holster, and galloped into an impasse.

The troop captain, pushing his horse, caught sight of Sengoun and Neeland in the remains of their evening dress; and he glanced curiously at them, and at the two young women clad in the rags of evening gowns.

“Nom de Dieu!” he cried. “What are such people as you doing here? Go back! This is no quarter for honest folk!”

“What are those police doing in the alleys?” demanded Sengoun; but the captain cantered his horse up the street, pistol lifted; and they saw him fire from his saddle at a man who darted out of an alley and who started to run across the street.