By this time I was enchanted with the plans I was concocting.  I might look like an opera-bouffe hero,—­no doubt I did,—­but my hour would come.  Meanwhile events were marching.  My transformation being complete, Blenheim gave a curt order in German, the candles were blown out, and lighted only by the torch, we turned toward the door.  There was an inarticulate cry from Schwartzmann, just conscious enough, poor beggar, to grasp the fact of his abandonment in the strategic retreat his friends were beating.  Then we were out in the courtyard, beneath the stars.

Down the hill, sheltered behind the stones of a ruined house, the gray car was waiting, and Blenheim climbed into the driver’s seat, meanwhile giving brief directions.  There was no noise, no flurry; the affair, I must say, went with an efficiency in keeping with the proudest Prussian traditions.  I was installed in the tonneau, and I was hardly seated before the motor hummed into life, and we jolted into the moonlit road.

For perhaps the hundredth time I asked myself if I was dreaming; if this person in a French disguise, speeding through the night with a blue-clad German beside him,—­a German suffering, by the way, from a headache, the last stages of a nosebleed, and a pronounced dislike for me as the agency responsible for his ailments,—­was really Devereux Bayne.  But the air was cold on my face; a revolver pressed my side; I saw three set, hard profiles.  It was not a dream; it was a dash for safety.  And it was engineered by anxious, desperate men.

Blenheim, hunched over the steering wheel, had settled to his business.  Certainly his nerve was going; the mania for escape had caught him; he took startling chances on his curves and turns.  Still, he knew the country, it seemed.  We drove on, fast and furiously, by lanes, by mere paths set among thickets, by narrow brushwood roads.  Sometimes we skirted the river, which shone silver in the moonlight, lined with rushes.  Again, we could see nothing but a roof of trees overhead.

We emerged into a wider road, and I became award of various noises; a booming, clear and regular; the sound of voices; the rumbling of many wheels.  We must be nearing the Front; we were rejoining the main highroad.  My guess was proved correct at the next turning, where a sentry barred our path.

The sight of his honest French face was like a tonic to me.  In some welcome way it seemed to hearten me for my task.  The pistol of my friend in the tonneau bored through his cape into my side; I sat very quiet.  If I did this four, five, perhaps six times, they might think me cowed and relax their vigilance.  Their suspicions would be lulled by my tractability and their contempt.  Then my hour would strike.

Satisfied with the safe-conducts, the sentry gestured us forward, and his figure slipped out of my vision as the gray car purred on.  The man beside me chuckled.

“Behold this Yankee!  He is as good as gold, my captain.  He sits like a mouse,” he announced in his own tongue.