In Secret

He saluted: Recklow followed him to the door, saw him mount his motor-cycle--a battered American machine--stood there watching until he was out of sight.

Hour after hour that afternoon Recklow sat in his quiet little house in Delle poring over the duplicate papers.

About five o'clock he called up Toul by telephone and got the proper department.

"Yes," came the answer, "Captain Herts went to you this morning on a confidential matter.... No, we don't know when he will return to Toul."

Recklow hung up, walked slowly out into his little garden and, seating himself on a green bench, took out the three packets of duplicate papers left him by Captain Herts. Then he produced a jeweller's glass and screwed it into his right eye.

Several days later three people--two men and a young woman--arrived at Delle, were conveyed under military escort to the little house of Mr. Recklow, remained closeted with him until verification of their credentials in duplicate had been accomplished, then they took their departure and, that evening, they put up at the Inn.

But by the next morning they had disappeared, presumably over the Swiss wire--that being their destination as revealed in their papers. But the English touring-car which brought them still remained in the Inn garage. Recklow spent hours examining it.

Also the arrival and the departure of these three people was telephoned to Toul by Recklow, but Captain Herts still remained absent from Toul on duty and his department knew nothing about the details of the highly specialised and confidential business of Captain Herts.

So John Recklow went back to his garden and waited, and smoked a short, dirty clay pipe, and played with his family of cats.

Once or twice he went down at night to the French wire. All the sentries were friends of his.

"Anybody been through?" he inquired.

The answer was always the same: Nobody had been through as far as the patrol knew.

"Where the hell," muttered Recklow, "did those three guys go?"

A nightingale sang as he sauntered homeward. Possibly, being a French nightingale, she was trying to tell him that there were three people lying very still in the thicket near her.

But men are stupid and nightingales are too busy to bother about trifles when there is courting to be done and nests to be planned and all the anticipated excitement of the coming new moon to preoccupy a love-distracted bird.

On a warm, sunny day early in June, toward three o'clock in the afternoon, a peloton of French cavalry en vidette from Delle stopped a rather rickety touring-car several kilometres west of the Swiss frontier and examined the sheaf of papers offered for their inspection by the young man who drove the car.