great ring of assorted keys; and his manner was as propitiatory and mild-eyed as that of any mouse. There must be some mistake. He was some sober mechanic, not a robber. But on the other hand, he looked ready to faint with fright.
“Mein Gott!” he murmured in a sort of fishlike gasp.
This illuminating remark was my first clue.
“Ah! Mein Herr is German?” I inquired, not stirring from my place.
The demand wrought an instant change in him—he drew himself up, perhaps to five feet five.
“Vat you got against the Germans?” he asked me, almost with menace. It was the voice of a fanatic intoning “Die Wacht am Rhein”—of a zealot speaking for the whole embattled Vaterland.
The situation was becoming farcical.
“Nothing in the world, I assure you,” I replied. “They are a simple, kindly people. They are musical. They have given the world Schiller, Goethe, the famous Kultur, and a new conception of the possibilities of war. But I think they should have kept out of Belgium, and I feel the same way about my room—and don’t you try to pull a pistol or I may feel more strongly still.”
“I ain’t got no pistol, nein,” declared my visitor, sulkily. His resentment had already left him; he had shrunk back to five feet three.
“Well, I have, but I’ll worry along without it,” I remarked, with a glance at the nearest bag. As targets, I don’t regard my fellow-creatures with great enthusiasm and, moreover, I could easily have made two of this mousy champion of a warlike race. Illogically, I was feeling that to bully him was sheer brutality. Besides this, my dinner was not being improved by the delay.
“Look here,” I said amiably, “I can’t see that you’ve taken anything. Speak up lively now; I’ll give you just one chance. If you care to tell me how you got through a locked door and what you were after, I’ll let you go. I’m off to the firing line, and it may bring me luck!”
Hope glimmered in his eyes. In broken English, with a childlike ingenuousness of demeanor, he informed me that he was a first-class
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