Adventure Magazine, Mid-September 1917 — page 113: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Vanished Plans muttered to himself, his bent back level with the table. “It happens to -be lying in your lap, Colonel,” said Judkins, his right-hand neighbor; and as the colonel, with an em- barrassed laugh, picked up the square of. linen and began nervously to use a corner of it for polishing his thick, heavy spectacles, Brock’s appearance was superseded by good- natured raillery at Colonel Levin. He was as short-sighted and absent-minded as an owl, but he would no more admit it than a man will admit snoring. Some months had passed since that eve- ning but Carter’s first estimate of Brock still prevailed. I believe that only three people had singled him out of the ruck of officers. One was General Sneed, the real as well as titular head of the troops in the Philippines —the two being by no means invariably the same—and another Sugundo, the thin, brown-faced cochero, who stuck the toes of his bare feet into flapping, red chinelas, and wore the tail of his shirt outside his loose pantaloons in comfortable, Oriental fashion. No man served long under, the occupant of the big, corner room overlooking the Pasig without being known for what he was, while to Segundo the man he drove was little less than a sandy-haired god. For one thing, Brock, having mastered the knack of the gutteral singsong, now spoke a fair brand of Tagalog; for another he generally recognized a plausible lie from the unin- spired truth. But the chief reason for his deification was the deference shown him by strange people who came to see him at odd times and in unexpected places—hard-mouthed Americans, who spoke little and in short, biting sentences, but whose manner indi- cated an ability and willingness to hit quickly, and occasionally a native who whispered sibilantly, and accompanied his words with mysterious, portentous gestures. A cochero is known by the wheels of his carromata; those of Segundo’s shone more brilliantly than his master’s riding-boots. I count myself the third—my duties as correspondent for a New York newspaper syndicate taking me daily to Fort Santiago. The circumstances which led to our intimacy form a story in themselves, touching this one only in that I had been brought on a gusty September morning to Brock’s desk at headquarters, and we were deep II! in conversation when Colonel Levin burst in upon us. “CAPTAIN,” he cried in a voice which showed signs of ending in a ' high-pitched squeak, ‘“‘the plans showing the battery positions are gone. I had them - He caught sight of me, halted abruptly in the middle of a sentence, and whipping~ off his glasses began agitatedly to polish them with his bare fingers. Brock rose unhurriedly. ‘Sit down, Colonel,” he said, and taking from his desk a Moro betel box which con- tained cigarets, he lighted one after offering them to us. ‘‘Never mind Peel,’ he went on. ‘He is all right. And you had better change your mind about smoking—tobacco is a great steadier.” Colonel Levin seemed to resent Brock’s coolness, for he sat down abruptly, and, leaning across the desk, took and lighted a cigaret, at which for a moment he puffed savagely. Then laying the cigaret on the edge of the desk, he began to tell us what had happened. As he spoke he wiped the finger smudges from his glasses, occasionally breathing upon them. “IT took the plans from the safe this morn- ing,” he said. “I had to add to them cer- tain details about the woods which conceal the gun positions—you know Lieutenant Clarkson’s map?” Brock nodded. “I finished the entries, refolded the plans and laid them on my desk, intending to return them when I left the room. In that of course I was wrong; the orders are ex- plicit. The plans must be kept in the safe when not actually in use. But who would have thought that they could disappear under my very eyes like that?” He put on his glasses, and gazed in- quiringly at Brock through their heavy lenses. Brock leaned over and dropped into an ash-tray the colonel’s cigaret which had begun to burn a black line in the varnish of the desk. “Of course that was only a technical violation,”’ he said. ‘“‘What happened?” ‘Some minutes later Rawlins called me -to the door of my room. He wanted my opinion on the new shoe bid. We dis- cussed: the matter briefly, standing in my doorway. Then I returned to my desk. I thought that before beginning anything COmicloo C©