The Little Patriot
Summary
A sun-drenched American small town, 1917: chalk-dust still hovers in the schoolhouse when the teacher’s voice lifts the tale of Jeanne d’Arc and drops it, molten, into the imagination of seven-year-old Marie Yarbell. The child returns home, eyes blazing with the same celestial fire that once licked the battlements of Orléans; she badgers her gentle, pacifist father until the man trades his fountain pen for a doughboy’s rifle. Not content with one conscript, she marshals the neighborhood’s ragamuffins into a miniature corps—wooden rifles, paper helmets, a battle hymn whistled through milk-teeth. Across town, the reclusive plutocrat Nathan Mulhouser bankrolls a top-secret torpedo that could tilt the Atlantic war; the tycoon, moved by the children’s flag-waving pageant, purchases them a silk standard crisp as fresh snow. Into this idyll slouches Hertz, a boarder with nicotine-stained fingers and a trunk that clicks like distant artillery when locked. Marie shadows him through elm-lined dusk, watches him lob a suitcase bomb into Mulhouser’s lab, and—tiny Joan reborn—extinguishes the fuse with seconds to spare, though the blast rattles her mind into a white silence. The magnate carries the unconscious child to his mansion; meanwhile, Marie’s pint-sized platoon, discovering Hertz’s confederates, trusses the saboteurs like Thanksgiving turkeys. In the denouement’s golden hush, birth-ledgers reveal that Marie’s late mother was Mulhouser’s lost daughter: the little patriot is heir to both a fortune and a nation’s gratitude.
Synopsis
Instilled with the spirit of patriotism after her teacher reads to her the story of Joan of Arc, Marie Yarbell goes home, persuades her father to enlist and then organizes a "military company" comprised of her playmates. Wealthy old Nathan Mulhouser, who is financing the development of a torpedo, is so touched by the children's patriotism that he buys them a flag. Marie's mother rents out a vacant room to Hertz, a stranger, who instructs her to see that no one enters his room because he is working on an important invention for the government. Curious, Marie follows Hertz as he leaves the house carrying a suitcase. He goes to a building that houses Mulhouser's laboratory, tosses in a bomb and runs away. Marie disposes of the bomb in time, but is stunned by the explosion. Mulhouser finds Marie in a state of shock and takes her to his home. Meanwhile, Mr. Yarbell has returned home at his wife's alarm and finds Marie's soldiers holding the spies prisoner. Mulhouser finally ascertains Marie's identity, discovering that she is his granddaughter, and all ends happily.
