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Still Clubfoot was silent, but I noticed a bead of perspiration tremble on his forehead, then trickle down his ashen cheeks and drop splashing to the floor. Francis continued in the same deep, relentless voice. "I never thought I should have to soil my hands by ridding the world of a man like you, Grundt, but it has come to it and you have to die.
Ah, yes," he sighed, "our beautiful Countess is now a widow, alone ..." he paused, then added, "... and unprotected!" I understood his allusion and went cold with fear. Why, Monica was involved in this affair as much as I. Surely they wouldn't dare to touch her.... Clubfoot leaned forward and tapped me on the knee. "You will be sensible, Okewood," he said confidentially. "You've lost.
The tree was a pinon about a foot thick and would have been a safe refuge from any other bear, and I felt all right perched about twenty feet from the ground. But Old Clubfoot is different from other bears. He's a persistent, wicked old cuss, and would just as soon sit down at the foot of a tree and starve a man out as hunt sheep.
I heard the chairs scrape in the corner of the hall where the dinner-party was breaking up. "The Frau Gräfin has only to command," I said. "The Frau Gräfin knows I have been waiting for years...." Clubfoot was crossing towards the open door.
I would have infinitely preferred violent language and open threats to the subtle menace that lay concealed beneath all this suavity. "You smoke?" queried Clubfoot. "No!" he held up his hand to stop me as I was reaching for my cigarette case, "you shall have a cigar not one of our poor German Hamburgers, but a fine Havana cigar given me by a member of the English Privy Council. You stare! Aha!
So I made use of his cupidity to leave a message for the man who, I hoped, would be coming after me, wrote that line on the wall under the Boonekamp poster in that filthy hovel where we slept and came up here after a job I had heard of at the Café Regina. "And now, Des, old man," said my brother, "you know all that I know!" "And Clubfoot?"
I described to them my adventure in the hotel at Rotterdam, my reception in the house of General von Boden, and my interview at the Castle, ending with the experiences of that night, the trap laid for me at the hotel and my encounter with Clubfoot in the room below. Two things only I kept back: the message from Francis and the document.
He runs away, after displaying unusual determination in dealing with a prying Englander whose fate should be a lesson to all who interfere in other people's business and goes to Germany, leaving poor old Clubfoot in the lurch. You must admit, Herr Doktor, that I have been hardly used by yourself as well as by another person?" My throat was dry with anxiety.
"Hauptmann von Salzmann!" ... he introduced himself, clicking his heels and bowing to Clubfoot, who glared at him, frowning at the interruption. He spoke with the clipped, mincing utterance of the typical Prussian officer. "I am looking for Herr Leutnant Schmalz," he said. "He is not in," answered Clubfoot in a surly voice. "He is out and I am busy ... I do not wish to be disturbed."
The clock whirred faintly. There was a knock at the door. "Come in!" roared Clubfoot and resumed his seat. The clock was chiming twelve. An officer stepped in briskly and saluted. It was Francis!... Francis, freshly shaved, his moustache neatly trimmed, a monocle in his eye, in a beautifully waisted grey military overcoat, one white-gloved hand raised in salute to his helmet.
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