Part 61 (1/2)

”Of course there was mess-table talk--but that is always the gauziest myth. Perhaps you know the fable that is told in all European armies of the ghost general?”

”No, I've never heard it.”

”The story runs that there is a certain man of extraordinary military genius--genius of the first cla.s.s--who is not so much a soldier of fortune as a super-soldier. In peace times no army knows him. No government owns him. He disappears as does the storm petrel when the sea is quiet. But when the tempest breaks and the need arises for a leader beyond small leaders--then, under a new name each time, this ghost-commander reappears. You see, they make the story a good one. Mess tables have embellished and elaborated it with much retelling over their wine gla.s.ses. It is even said that the mystery man fights on the righteous side and brings victory.” The Russian lighted a fresh cigarette and navely observed, ”When we fought j.a.pan, however, he was reported to be against us, guiding the hand of Kuroki. When Savoff defeated the Turks, it was rumoured that he sat in the Bulgar's councils. Now”--Ivangoroff laughed--”now it is whispered in Petrograd and Moscow that he laid his sword at the service of the Grand Duke Nicholas and stands shoulder to shoulder with the men he fought in Manchuria.”

The _raconteur_ glanced at his wrist watch and rose hastily.

”I have overstayed my time,” he declared. ”It is hard for me to leave one who suffers me to talk--even when I talk of moons.h.i.+ne gossip like this.”

But when he had gone, Boone sat for a long while unmoving, and before he went to his bed that night he had resolved, so soon as his duties freed him long enough, to undertake a journey to Russia.

CHAPTER XLVI

The snow that had lain along the Appalachian slopes had felt the first breath of thawing breezes in March, 1917. Here and there, in a sun-touched hollow, dry twigs grew less brittle and the hint of buds gave timid forecasting of spring. The roads were deep in red mud and black mud, and men in ill-lighted cabins looked to crowbar and pike-pole and made ready for the swelling of the ”spring tide” that should heft their rafted logs on its shoulders of water to the markets of a flattened world.

In the log house which Victor McCalloway had built, Boone Wellver was making his final preparations to go to Was.h.i.+ngton again--and, after that, if G.o.d willed, to Russia. Upon his wall calendar once more a date was marked; the date of a call, come at last, for which through two years his spirit had fretted.

The President had sent his summons for Congress to gather in extraordinary session, and that order, given first for April the sixteenth, had been advanced to April the second. That could carry one meaning only--that at last the fiction of a national aloofness was to be cast aside as a garment unworthy of its wearer; that at last the nation was to take her place at Armageddon!

Ahead lay action; the only medicine for a deep-rooted sorrow which, after a grim clinging to the fringe of hope, had begun to admit despair.

For almost three years Boone had divided himself between his work and his search for Anne, and his mission had come to seem as far from attainment as that of the seekers of the Holy Grail. Now he was to be one of those whose voices should speak for the nation in its declaration of war.

That would not be enough. It would be only a beginning of his self-required service, but since the well-springs of sentiment were deeper in his nature than he realized, it was important to him that he, the pioneer type of American, should join with his modern brethren in committing his country to her forward stride across the Atlantic.

The sun was setting over the ”Kaintuck' Ridges” in a blazing glory of wine red and violet, and his imagination flamed responsively until it saw in the bristle of crest pine and spruce, the silhouette of lance-bearing legions marching eastward.

Already his trunk had gone in a neighbour's ”jolt wagon,” and the horse that he was to ride across Cedar Mountain was saddled. Other respondents to that call might motor to their trains. He must make the beginning of his journey on horseback, with his most immediate needs packed in saddle bags--as Jefferson had done before him.

Boone paused at the door of the house, where already the fire had been quenched and the windows barred. Now he turned the key in the lock and went slowly to the barn, but even when he had led out his mare and stood at the stirrup, something held him there with the spell of memory.

He was not coming back here until he had fulfilled the resolve long ago made--and since in these days overseas journeys were less simple than in other times, he could not be sure of coming back at all. So with his bridle rein over his forearm, he stood for a while with the picture of the log cabin and the sunset in his eyes.

Then he mounted and rode slowly away.

In a few days he was to hear the earnest voice of the President sounding over the sober faces of his gathered colleagues: ”Gentlemen of the Congress:--I have called the Congress into extraordinary session because there are serious, very serious, choices to be made, and made immediately, which it was neither right nor const.i.tutionally permissible that I should a.s.sume the responsibility of making.”

Though he came bearing no official mission, because he was a member of the American Congress and because the United States Amba.s.sador had exerted himself to that end, Boone Wellver found it possible to leave revolutionary Petrograd and make his way to the front where, after a year of successful offensive, the armies of Brussilov lay drugged with the insidious poison of anarchy.

Already, ”Order Number One to Army” had with a pen-stroke abolished all the requirements of discipline and all the striking power of unity.

The marvel was that the heart of the organization had not at once stopped beating--but old traditions still held the fragments loosely cemented, and the resolute hand of Brussilov still grasped and steadied the brittle material left to him in the face of the enemy and disaster.

If guns still thundered on the eastern front, the men who had for a year been launching successful a.s.saults knew that their voices were hollow.

If his army groups still maintained a zone of activity between themselves and the foe, he knew that it was only a screen behind which he sought to s.h.i.+eld the evaporating powers of his forces.

Yet even in these days the commander adhered to his custom and received the correspondents, and when Boone came to his headquarters with the credentials that had pa.s.sed him that far, he was turned over to an intelligence officer, whose instructions were to serve him in every way compatible with military expediency until the general could grant him an audience.