“His men!” It made him feel as if he had had the Victoria Cross fastened on his coat.  He had brain enough to see many things, and he knew that it was in this way that Loristan was finding him his “place.”  He knew how.

When they went to the Barracks, the Squad greeted them with a tumultuous welcome which expressed a great sense of relief.  Privately the members had been filled with fears which they had talked over together in deep gloom.  Marco’s father, they decided, was too big a swell to let the two come back after he had seen the sort the Squad was made up of.  He might be poor just now, toffs sometimes lost their money for a bit, but you could see what he was, and fathers like him weren’t going to let their sons make friends with “such as us.”  He’d stop the drill and the “Secret Society” game.  That’s what he’d do!

But The Rat came swinging in on his secondhand crutches looking as if he had been made a general, and Marco came with him; and the drill the Squad was put through was stricter and finer than any drill they had ever known.

“I wish my father could have seen that,” Marco said to The Rat.

The Rat turned red and white and then red again, but he said not a single word.  The mere thought was like a flash of fire passing through him.  But no fellow could hope for a thing as big as that.  The Secret Party, in its subterranean cavern, surrounded by its piled arms, sat down to read the morning paper.

The war news was bad to read.  The Maranovitch held the day for the moment, and while they suffered and wrought cruelties in the capital city, the Iarovitch suffered and wrought cruelties in the country outside.  So fierce and dark was the record that Europe stood aghast.

The Rat folded his paper when he had finished, and sat biting his nails.  Having done this for a few minutes, he began to speak in his dramatic and hollow Secret Party whisper.

“The hour has come,” he said to his followers.  “The messengers must go forth.  They know nothing of what they go for; they only know that they must obey.  If they were caught and tortured, they could betray nothing because they know nothing but that, at certain places, they must utter a certain word.  They carry no papers.  All commands they must learn by heart.  When the sign is given, the Secret Party will know what to do—­where to meet and where to attack.”

He drew plans of the battle on the flagstones, and he sketched an imaginary route which the two messengers were to follow.  But his knowledge of the map of Europe was not worth much, and he turned to Marco.

“You know more about geography that I do.  You know more about everything,” he said.  “I only know Italy is at the bottom and Russia is at one side and England’s at the other.  How would the Secret Messengers go to Samavia?  Can you draw the countries they’d have to pass through?”