Although Gard could not clearly make it out, the puppet must have been an ingenious device to mislead. The ridiculous card dealer, going through all his mock part with such desperate earnestness, could very well have conceived this eccentric project. Would anyone outside Germany have believed in such use of a stuffed figure? The maneuver succeeded in a fashion, for Gard had not been as shrewd as he imagined in taking the auto from Heidelberg. He may have caused a change in tactics, but he had simply fallen into the hands of Furstenheimer in the museum. The leisurely stroll, the game of cards, the badgering over the betting, everything, had been fully worked out. Somehow, through it all, they were to deprive him of his state paper--likely when he had become intoxicated, as was evidently planned. But the revelation about the Buchers! That was the finishing blow. "Dastards!" Gard hurled out the word. It was not only Rudi but his parents who had followed his leadership. The son's surprising concern over the passport, their insistence on seeing about his route and his ticket, Rudi's persistence about suggestions for carrying the document--all was now plain. It must be that war was coming and Rudi knew it. Dastards! To betray their guest, to cause him to go through this miserable experience, endanger his health when he had lately been in a sick bed! Their kind hospitality, their flush demonstrations of friendliness, their little presents! This was the final mark that, to Gard Kirtley, branded the German as only a partly reclaimed Goth. Perhaps the atmosphere of restraint he had detected in the Buchers at the last, amid all their cordial expressions and deeds, was due to the changed role they then knew they were playing as against an American "pig." At their frontier all human relations--obligations, honor, amicability, trust, good faith, religion--were exchangeable for brutality and dastardly brutality. Yet who in 1914 would have believed such things? It was the case of old Rome asleep, with barbarians swarming in Europe. Gard kept coming back to the sole word for it all--Hun!--in the Anderson definition. And what to do with the Huns--about them? Can the world ever get on a genuine, fraternal basis for living with them? Can they ever be made to become like other people? These questions kept surging through his mind as he hurried along. When Holland was reached that morning, his passport was declared impeccable and his faithful trunk caused him no trouble. Although the war excitement was seizing that region he fortunately met no delay in getting to the coast. Once out of Deutschland he felt amazingly well despite the weariness of his exhausting night. He concluded that the vigorous exercise and sweating he had been through had steamed out of him the vileness he had found in Germany. It acted like a rejuvenating process. Gard now seemed to himself like a clean, new man. He _was_ to be a new man. CHAPTER XLII THE ANTI-CHRISTIANS?