They did.

CHAPTER IV

“EXTRA”

Toward nine o’clock to my relief it became obvious that the Re d’Italia was really going to sail at last.  The first and second whistles, sounding raucously, sent the company officials and the family of the young officer of reserves ashore.  The plank was lowered; between the ship and the looming pier a thread of black water appeared and grew; a flash and an explosion indicated that the possibly doomed liner had been filmed according to schedule. “Evviva l’Italia!” yelled the returning braves in the steerage—­a very decent set of fellows, it struck me, to leave so cheerfully their vocations of teamster, waiter, fruit vender, and the like, and go, unforced, to wear the gray-green coats of Italy, the short feathers of the mountain climbers, the bersagliere’s bunch of plumes, and to stand against their hereditary foes the Austrians, up in the snowy Alps.

The details of departure were an old tale to me.  As we swung farther and farther out, I turned to a newspaper, a twentieth extra probably, which I had heard a newsboy crying along the dock a little earlier, and had bribed a steward to secure.  Moon and stars were lacking to-night, but the deck lights were good reading-lamps.  Moving up the rail to one of them, I investigated the world’s affairs.

From the first sheet the usual staring headlines leaped at me.  There were the inevitable peace rumor, the double denial, the eternal bulletin of a trench taken here, a hill recaptured there.  A sensational rumor was exploited to the effect that Franz von Blenheim, one of the star secret agents of the German Empire, was at present incognito at Washington, having spent the past month in putting his finger in the Mexican pie much to our disadvantage.  On the last column of the page was the photograph of a distinguished-looking young man in uniform, with an announcement that promised some interest, I thought.

“War Scandal Bursts in France,” “Scion of Oldest Noblesse Implicated,” “Duke Mysteriously Missing,” I read in the diminishing degrees of the scare-head type.  Then came the picture, with a mien attractively debonair, a pleasantly smiling mouth, and a sympathetic pair of eyes, and in due course, the tale.  I clutched at the flapping ends of the paper and read on: 

Of all the scandals to which the present war has given birth, none has stirred France more profoundly than that implicating Jean-Herve-Marie-Olivier, Count of Druyes, Marquis of Beuil and Santenay, and Duke of Raincy-la-Tour.  This young nobleman, head of a family that has played its part in French history since the days of the Northmen and the crusaders, bears in his veins the bluest blood of the old regime, and numbers among his ancestors no fewer than seven marshals and five constables of France.