The Man on Horseback/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII
BARON HORST VON GÖTZ-WREDE
Baron Horst von Götz-Wrede was the exact opposite of the German accepted and perpetrated as typical by the comic sheets, the music halls, and the weeklies with guaranteed over two and a half million circulation.
He was neither short nor plump. His hair was not honey-blond and brushed straight back from a square and stubborn forehead; there was no supercilious upsweep of pointed, curled mustache, and his eyes were neither watery blue nor glassed in by immense, professorial spectacles. He smoked no ell-long, cherry-wood stem, china-bowl pipe, nor did he dine exclusively on such Teuton delicacies as sauerkraut, pickled herrings, liver sausage, veal kidney roast with sour gravy, and nut cake topped by whipped cream.
On the contrary, he was tall and lean and clean-shaven, of a certain angular, feline grace; dark enough to be an Italian with a dash of Moor; polite enough to be a Frenchman of fiction, and dressed in a pronouncedly and aggressively British style. His clothes spoke of a Haymarket tailor, his neckties and socks and blazers and hats of the Burlington Arcades.
He was good-looking, even striking-looking, with his clean, trained down length of limb, his wide, supple shoulders, his narrow hips, and his long, predatory face that sloped wedge-shaped to a cleft chin.
Baron Horst von Götz-Wrede was a cosmopolite, and he had a disconcerting habit of telling people so.
"Now, please don't take me for one of those fabulous Prussian officers who have swallowed the ramrod with which they were beaten in school," he said in his precise, beautiful English to Miss Virginia Ryan at the first dinner party given in his honor by the Wedekinds. "I assure you that I don't begin my morning prayer with shouting three times ‘Hoch der Kaiser!’ nor do I wind up the evening by getting dismally drunk on blond beer and singing some sentimental ditty about ‘Die Lore am Thore.’ I am—" he looked into her heavy-fringed, blue, Irish eyes, "well. … Don't you think that I could easily pass for an American?"
"For an Englishman rather—I should say," replied Virginia Ryan.
"What's the difference?" laughed the Baron. "English or American? It's one and the same, and I …" He raised his voice slightly so that it carried the length of the dinner table, "We Germans have a deep respect, a lasting admiration, even affection for the Anglo-Saxon peoples." He rose, glass in hand, as if carried away by the surging feelings in his heart. "Ladies and gentlemen! Pardon me—I know it's—oh not the right thing to do, at such an informal little party. But will you permit me to drink to—ah—" looking at the men behind the table, successful men of the Northwest, hearty, well-fleshed, keen Americans with a sprinkling of Britons and Canadians—"to you! The Anglo-Saxons! First in freedom and achievement!"
The toast was taken up. Glasses clinked. Only Tom Graves and Martin Wedekind sat silent and moody.
There was no doubt that the Baron was a great social success. Too, a social lion. Seventh Avenue and the North side, the Spokane Club and the Country Club, native-born and Canadian-born, vied with each other in entertaining the visitor, who was plentifully supplied with money and had taken a suite at the new Davenport. He spoke freely and ingenuously to the reporters of the local and other Northwestern papers who quizzed him for copy.
"My reasons for coming to America? Oh, curiosity to see with my own eyes if the American women run true to the charming specimens which we see in Berlin, during the season; and anxiety—possibly tinged by a little envy, but you must not print this, gentlemen, if you please—to find out the secret for America's colossal advance in international affairs. For, gentlemen, I own up to it. We of my country are envious of you, and just a little afraid. I hope to Heaven that we shall always be friends—we Germans—and you—and"—he turned with a smile to Bob Defries, correspondent of the Victoria, B. C., Daily Colonist—"you—Canadians—British!" and it was natural that the Baron's words were freely printed, quoted, and circulated.
He had brought letters along to Martin Wedekind from the latter's brother in Berlin. Too, Bertha told her father that the Baron and the younger comrades in his regiment had been most attentive to her during her stay in the German capital; and so Martin Wedekind was of necessity forced to play host-in-chief to the Prussian officer.
It was only to Tom Graves that he spoke his real mind.
"I don't like him," he said.
"Nor do I," growled Tom. "I like him about as well as a cold in the head."
And then both would be silent and look guilty. For they were fair and just, and deep down in their hearts they knew that there was no cogent reason for their dislike. On the other hand, Tom was too honest to hide the antipathy he felt, and when he met the Baron he treated him in an abrupt, rasping manner which, putting the odium as it were on him and not on the other, only served to increase his dislike.
"Say, I feel like kicking him," he said one day to Newson Garrett.
"Whom?"
"That foreigner with the unpronounceable, double-barreled name! That German Baron with the hook nose and the British accent and the atmosphere of noble ancestors and the general culpability that goes with it!"
"The ladies like him!" signed Garrett, who had a tender spot in his heart for blue-eyed Virginia Ryan.
"Sure—and …" Tom checked himself. "I was going to say that he does the regular Young Lochinvar dope, hands 'em out sob stuff copped from the Ladies' Own Gazette, signed Jessica Pinkney and written by a red-haired Mick with a pipe, three inches of stubble, and an overdue board bill. But it isn't fair. He isn't one of those sighing, ogling, hand-kissing society corsairs. He and—I hate like the deuce to own up to it—he's a sportsman, all right. And it isn't only the ladies that like him. The men, too, have fallen for him like weak-kneed nine pins …"
"What are you going to do about it?" inquired the logical assayist.
"Me? Nothing! I am going to shake the dust of Spokane off my feet. Temporarily, that is. I'm going up to the Yankee Doodle Glory and have a squint at things there. My bank account is running up so fast that I'm afraid at times it's all a dream …"
And so, the next morning, Tom Graves left town, and two days later found him facing Gamble in the latter's cabin, a long, low building of dovetailed logs, dirt-roofed and chinked with mud, most of its four-paned windows built in to "keep the air out," its tall stove pipe wired and braced, trying to lead an upright life in spite of the furious wind that sometimes boomed from the higher Hoodoo peaks and roared through the draw at the rate of forty and fifty miles an hour.
But Tom was quite happy. This wasn't the range, the Killicott. Yet at least it was the free, the open. It was the untrammeled West; his own!