About each sidewalk table heads were clustered close in conference, and eloquent hands aided explosive argument. Around the news kiosk at the Cafe Pytheas corner a constant stream eddied. Men snatched papers from the pile, spread them before their faces, and blundered into their fellow pedestrians as they walked, buried in the inky columns. Now and again half-naked urchins came charging down the Cannebiere, waving shinplaster extras above their heads--"L'Allemagne s'arme! La guerre vient!" Up from the Quai marched a dozen sailors from a torpedo boat, arms linked so that they almost spanned the Cannebiere. Their red-tasseled caps were pushed back at cocky angles on their black heads, and as they marched they shouted in time: "A Berlin! Hou--hou!"

The black shadow of war--the first hallucinations of the great madness--gripped Marseilles.

For Captain Woodhouse, just in from Berlin that evening, all this swirling excitement had but an incidental interest. He sat alone by one of the little iron tables before the Cafe Pyreas, sipping his boc, and from time to time his eyes carelessly followed the eddying of the swarm about the news kiosk. Always his attention would come back, however, to center on the thin shoulders of a man sitting fifteen or twenty feet away with a wine cooler by his side. He could not see the face of the wine drinker; he did not want to. All he cared to do was to keep those thin shoulders always in sight. Each time the solicitous waiter renewed the bottle in the wine cooler Captain Woodhouse nodded grimly, as a doctor might when he recognized the symptoms of advancing fever in a patient.

So for two days, from Berlin across to Paris, and now on this third day here in the Mediterranean port, Woodhouse had kept ever in sight those thin shoulders and that trembling hand beyond the constantly crooking elbow. Not a pleasant task; he had come to loathe and abominate the very wrinkles in the back of that shiny coat. But a very necessary duty it was for Captain Woodhouse to shadow Mr. Billy Capper until--the right moment should arrive. They had come down on the same express together from Paris. Woodhouse had observed Capper when he checked his baggage, a single shoddy hand-bag, for La Vendee, the French line ship sailing with the dawn next morning for Alexandria and Port Said via Malta. Capper had squared his account at the Hotel Alices de Meilhan, for the most part a bill for absinth frappes, after dinner that night, and was now enjoying the night life of Marseilles in anticipation, evidently, of carrying direct to the steamer with him as his farewell from France all of the bottled laughter of her peasant girls he could accommodate.

The harsh memories of how he had been forced to drink the bitter lees of poverty during the lean months rode Billy Capper hard, and this night he wanted to fill all the starved chambers of his soul with the robust music of the grape. So he drank with a purpose and purposefully. That he drank alone was a matter of choice with Capper; he could have had a pair of dark eyes to glint over a goblet into his had he wished--indeed, opportunities almost amounted to embarrassment. But to all advances from the fair, Billy Capper returned merely an impolite leer. He knew from beforetime that he was his one best companion when the wine began to warm him. So he squared himself to his pleasure with an abandoned rakishness expressed in the set of his thin shoulders and the forward droop of his head.

Woodhouse, who watched, noted only one peculiarity in Capper's conduct: The drinker nursed his stick, a plain, crook-handled malacca, with a tenderness almost maternal. It never left his hands. Once when Capper dropped it and the waiter made to prop the stick against a near-by chair, the little spy leaped to his feet and snatched the cane away with a growl. Thereafter he propped his chin on the handle, only removing this guard when he had to tip his head back for another draft of champagne.

Eleven o'clock came. Capper rose from the table and looked owlishly about him.