Tales of Mysteries & Espionage - John Buchan Edition. Buchan John

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СКАЧАТЬ in cars and weren’t due to start from Pacheco till twenty hours later. A place had been agreed on as a rendezvous.

      “It was a mad ride, and Sandy was the maddest thing in it. It looked as if he had been getting charged with electricity till he could hold no more and had to give some of it off in sparks. He’s fit again too, fitter than I’ve ever seen him before… We climbed out of the levels up long glens of loess till we struck the stony corridor that runs between the ridges. There was a big white moon, and the shale looked like snowdrifts and ice couloirs. There wasn’t a sound, for there are no beasts or birds up there—only the thud of hoofs, an occasional clash of buckles, and Sandy humming his crazy songs.

      “We did fifty miles before dawn, and then lay up for most of the day on the top of the ridge, where there were water and scrub. We were off again at nightfall, and next morning came to the place they call Tulifa, where there is a bad foot-track zip from the Vulpas valley. Here we had to go cannily, for we had to get off the hills, which had become a series of knife-edges, and take to the sandy valleys to the north of ‘em. Yet they made pretty fair cover for men in open order, and we had goodish guides, and by nightfall we weren’t twenty miles from the railway. The staff-work had been top-hole, for we got to the appointed rendezvous just fifteen and a half minutes late. The cars had come through without a hitch and had been hiding all day in a ravine. There were three of ‘em—Rolls-Royce chassis and bodies that looked like a travelling circus.

      “At the rendezvous we separated. Sandy transferred himself to the cars, for San Luca was the main objective, and I went with him. Jervoise trotted off with his bandits according to plan. They had to work exactly to schedule, for there was a big freight train due to pass Tombequi at forty-three minutes past nine. The plan was to let it pass and blow up the line behind it, while we blew up the San Luca bridge in front, and so bottled it up. Our motto was ‘Anything to give pain!’…

      “I wasn’t an eye-witness of Jervoise’s show, but it ran like a clock. The roads were difficult and the party had to split up, but the sections arrived to a tick, and the only chaps who could complain were the poor devils of horse-holders, and the Olifa post, who were surprised at supper and put in the bag. No—there were no casualties, and we don’t take prisoners. Jervoise annexed their trousers, and turned them loose. He don’t like the raggedness of his outfit, and consequently has the eye of an old-clothes man for pantaloons. His lot made a fearsome mess, blew up the rack in twenty places over a three-miles stretch, and tumbled down half the mountainside on it. Sandy reckons it will take a fortnight’s hard work to clear it.

      “I was in the San Luca push myself. There was a dust-storm blowing up from the east and the moon was covered, and as we had no lights and the road was naked prairie I’m bound to say I felt a bit rattled. If you’re loaded up with guncotton and blasting gelatine it isn’t much fun to be ricocheting from boulder to boulder. We couldn’t go slow and feel our way, for we had to keep to schedule time. But the weather was a godsend, for the wind drowned the noise of our wheels, and when we got to the bridge, the lights were burning clearly at each end and everything as peaceful as Clapham Junction.

      “We didn’t take long about the job, for the whole thing had been arranged to the last detail, with the help of a plan of the bridge provided by one of our fellows who had been in the railway shops. We laid the charges, lit the fuses, and, if you believe me, when we started off on the return journey we weren’t two minutes out in our reckoning.

      “It was all too easy, and that made me nervous. But we didn’t miss fire. In the War I saw a good many mines go up, but never anything like this. The empty valley became suddenly like Tophet, spouting sheets of greeny-yellow flame, while a mushroom of black smoke wavered above it. Then the wind blew the mushroom aside, and we saw that two of the arches had gone and that the viaduct was like a man’s mouth with the front teeth drawn…

      “After that there is nothing to tell. The posts on each side of the bridge started shooting into vacancy, and just as we left there came an agonised whistle from the south. It was the freight train slowing down to discover what the devil had happened.”

      Thus Archie to Janet. Before dinner he repeated the tale in its main features to Castor, who heard it with drawn brows.

      “I make you my compliments,” the latter said. “You have certainly instituted a new kind of war. Can Lord Clanroyden repeat the performance?”

      “Whenever he pleases. You see, we have the real mobility, and we have also knowledge of the country on our side. Lossberg already finds it hard to know what to do. He can’t police the whole Gran Seco, and as soon as he gets away from his bases we give him beans. We’re not too well off for stores, but we can always replenish at his shop… No, we don’t mean to make the railway unworkable. We can’t afford that, for we want Lossberg to supply himself—that he may supply us. He’s our Q. side. But we shall make it so difficult that the job will take up a lot of his time. He’s vulnerable, you see, and we’re not. We’re not in the same elements. It’s like a fight between a wolf and a shark.”

      “Then how can you hope for a decision?”

      “We don’t want any dramatic coup. We want to tire him out so that he’ll see it’s hopeless, and Olifa will make peace. On our terms, of course… On your terms, that is to say,” Archie added.

      Castor smiled at the correction.

      “You are convinced that you are invulnerable?” he asked. “What about the air? Olifa has twice your number of machines.”

      “She can’t use ‘em properly. That’s our almighty luck. They’re good average flying men, but they’ve no genius for the thing, and we’ve got the pick of the American fliers. Blenkiron saw from the first the necessity of that.”

      “If you had a genius against you it might be uncomfortable?”

      “To be sure. In the air you don’t reckon by quantity. One airman like Lensch—you remember?—the Boche who was killed in April ‘18—would put a different complexion on the business.”

      It was Janet who first saw the stranger. She had gone on a before-dinner scamper on the downs, and had turned for home, when her eye caught sight of a small monoplane coming in from the sea. That was not a route taken by their own planes, and the girl halted and had a look at it through her glasses. It was a strange make, one she had never seen before, and suddenly she realised what it meant. Lossberg had at last broken the cordon, and the Courts of the Morning were discovered.

      As she galloped furiously towards the huts, she saw that the alarm had become general. The visitor had dropped low and was cruising scarcely two hundred feet up, getting a full view of the details of the place. There were no anti-aircraft guns, and the rifle shots from the sentries left him unharmed… Then one of their own planes rose, and the girl checked her horse to watch. The stranger let it approach, and then—contemptuously, it seemed—flew towards it. There was a burst of fire, the two planes seemed about to collide, and then by a curious manoeuvre the stranger slipped out and turned his head for the sea. She thought she saw a hand wave in farewell. It was indeed farewell, for the pursuing plane was utterly outclassed in speed. Almost in a minute, it seemed to her, the stranger was a speck in the pearly haze which marked the meeting of sea and sky.

      She found Archie and Castor outside the mess-hut.

      “Do you still maintain your invulnerability?” the Gobernador asked, but Archie did not hear. He was engaged in a passionate soliloquy.

      “There’s only one fellow in the world who could do that trick,” he exclaimed. “I’ve seen him do it a dozen times. Who? A Frenchman called D’Ingraville. He used to go gunning for Lensch, and would have got him too, if Peter Pienaar СКАЧАТЬ