Now Turcas, the assistant vice-chief of staff, and Bouchard, chief of the division of intelligence, standing on either side of Westerling’s desk, awaited his decisions on certain matters which they had brought to his attention.  Both were older than Westerling, Turcas by ten and Bouchard by fifteen years.

Turcas had been strongly urged in inner army circles for the place that Westerling had won, but his manner and his inability to court influence were against him A lath of a man and stiff as a lath, pale, with thin, tightly-drawn lips, quiet, steel-gray eyes, a tracery of blue veins showing on his full temples, he suggested the ascetic no less than the soldier, while his incisive brevity of speech, flavored now and then with pungent humor, without any inflection in his dry voice, was in keeping with his appearance.  He arrived with the clerks in the morning and frequently remained after they were gone.  His life was an affair of calculated units of time; his habits of diet and exercise all regulated for the end of service.  His subordinates, whose respect he held by the power of his intellect, said that his brain never tired and he had not enough body to tire.  He was one of the wheels of the great army machine and loved the work for its own sake too well to be embittered at being overshadowed by a younger man.  As a master of detail Westerling regarded him as an invaluable assistant, with certain limitations, which were those of the pigeonhole and the treadmill.

As for Bouchard, nature had meant him to be a wheel-horse.  He had never had any hope of being chief of staff.  Hawk-eyed, with a great beak nose and iron-gray hair, intensely and solemnly serious, lacking a sense of humor, he would have looked at home with his big, bony hands gripping a broadsword hilt and his lank body clothed in chain armor.  He had a mastiff’s devotion to its master for his chief.

“Since Lanstron became chief of intelligence of the Browns information seems to have stopped,” said Westerling, but not complainingly.  He appreciated Bouchard’s loyalty.

“Yes, they say he even burns his laundry bills, he is so careful,” Bouchard replied.

“But that we ought to know,” Westerling proceeded, referring very insistently to a secret of the Browns which had baffled Bouchard.  “Try a woman,” he went on with that terse, hard directness which reflected one of his sides.  “There is nobody like a woman for that sort of thing.  Spend enough to get the right woman.”

Turcas and Bouchard exchanged a glance, which rose suggestively from the top of the head of the seated vice-chief of staff.  Turcas smiled slightly, while Bouchard was graven as usual.

“You could hardly reach Lanstron though you spent a queen’s ransom,” said Bouchard in his literal fashion.

“I should say not!” Westerling exclaimed.  “No doubt about Lanstron’s being all there!  I saw him ten years ago after his first aeroplane flight under conditions that proved it.  However, he must have susceptible subordinates.”