cate the passport--find out whether
it was then being carried in the grip or on Kirtley's person. In
some way--probably from the manner in which the grip had been
handled--the sleuth had convinced himself it was kept in a pocket.

Although Gard could not clearly make it out, the puppet must have
been an ingenious device to mislead. The ridiculous card dealer,
going through all his mock part with such desperate earnestness,
could very well have conceived this eccentric project. Would anyone
outside Germany have believed in such use of a stuffed figure? The
maneuver succeeded in a fashion, for Gard had not been as shrewd as
he imagined in taking the auto from Heidelberg. He may have caused a
change in tactics, but he had simply fallen into the hands of
Furstenheimer in the museum. The leisurely stroll, the game of
cards, the badgering over the betting, everything, had been fully
worked out. Somehow, through it all, they were to deprive him of his
state paper--likely when he had become intoxicated, as was evidently
planned.

But the revelation about the Buchers! That was the finishing blow.
"Dastards!" Gard hurled out the word. It was not only Rudi but his
parents who had followed his leadership. The son's surprising
concern over the passport, their insistence on seeing about his
route and his ticket, Rudi's persistence about suggestions for
carrying the document--all was now plain. It must be that war was
coming and Rudi knew it.

Dastards! To betray their guest, to cause him to go through this
miserable experience, endanger his health when he had lately been in
a sick bed! Their kind hospitality, their flush demonstrations of
friendliness, their little presents! This was the final mark that,
to Gard Kirtley, branded the German as only a partly reclaimed Goth.

Perhaps the atmosphere of restraint he had detected in the Buchers
at the last, amid all their cordial expressions and deeds, was due
to the changed role they then knew they were playing as against an
American "pig." At their frontier all human relations--obligations,
honor, amicability, trust, good faith, religion--were exchangeable
for brutality and dastardly brutality.

Yet who in 1914 would have believed such things? It was the case of
old Rome asleep, with barbarians swarming in Europe. Gard kept
coming back to the sole word for it all--Hun!--in the Anderson
definition.

And what to do with the Huns--about them? Can the world ever get on
a genuine, fr