THE PIIANTOM A CE
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again on the French front Tom and Ted Ritchie and Chester and I had gone over, with the first detachment of flyers from Canada. And shoulder to shoulder we had struggled through the fearful hell of strife, had seen the kind of service that had blistered the very soûls of men, until Chester had corne crashing down—to his death.
And now, after years, lie had corne back, in the spirit, to Tom, one of his favorite buddies. Not once, but twice. But why? Not for a sinister purpose, surely. For he had loved us ail. Perhaps, then, to convey a warning, to try to prevent some disaster.
| REALIZED why Tom had sent for me rather than for
- ■ Ritchie, even though our divergent duties had kept us
apart, except at infrequent intervals, since the armistice. He had hinted his reason in his letter. It was because I long had given close study to, matters of the occult, to things beyond the ken of most humans. I never had been a scoffer when I did not understand. Instead, I had tried to learn, to understand. On two occasions my studies had carried me to India. And of the mysterious things I had seen there I had written books which had won me some récognition as one who had gone considerably beyond the average in peering across the intangible border line which séparâtes the living froin those who hâve passed on.
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However, he did not corne back alone. A woman was with him, a nurse who wore the insignia of a French Red Cross unit. He called her Sonya. And he introduced her as his wife. His earnest eyes lighted with a new fire when he held her hand and told us how she had nursed him, after he had turned back from the edge of the Great Divide and was battling for recovery.
She was a beautiful créature, this Sonya, part Muscovite and part French. She had been singing in the Paris caba¬ rets when the thunder of the first war guns had rolled over the land, and had volunteered as a 'nurse. Her hair was midnight black, accenting the dead whiteness of her skin and the trace of glow high on her cheéks. But it was her eyes that caught and held one. Great green-brown eyes, like those of the cobra, that fascinated but never smiled.
Perhaps, had she corne without Chester, any of us would hâve tried to know her, intimately. But, as his wife, we feared for him. We admitted this, to one another. For she was the kind whose presence set most men’s puises to throb- bing and turned hot the blood within them. And fate had linked her with the most unworldly among us, the one least fitted to tame and hold such a woman.
I bit my li.-r until the blood started. The thought had me going. I could not banish thoughts of her—and of Chester. He could hâve been in- valided from the service. Or he could to a post behind the Unes, he could hâve performed war service and yet in touch with some of to which Sonya
sessed no nerves. Times un-
counted he had gone out against the invading planes, ripping and dropping them. but always coming back right side up and whole, winning the “Légion,” then the Cross, and finally the Palms.
But it had been Chester, good old comrade, who had been our leader. A shade less daring than Hewitt, perhaps. Still, ail men loved him for his simple, unaflfected and followed wherever he led. And he had led
could be of service at the front, toward m
advising, planning, helping to
remake some of the machines brought down in combat.
But his wife went back to the great city—to nurse, she said. She left Chester with kisses and tears. She left him to dream of a future with her, when the écho of the war’s last shot died away—left him to eat his heart out with loneliness for her.
Sonya soon forgot. Her marriage had been but a gestUre, just one more thrill in the life of this woman of the world, one utterly incapable of stability. And, though still wearing the cross of the man whose name she bore, she quickly be- came one of the most conspicuous figures among those who made a mockery of the war by their mad life in the French capital. Then came more tantalizing whispers, brutal and sinister in their purport. We never repeated them. We
