Over There with the Canadians at Vimy Ridge

Lieutenant Ellis was a good enough spy not to confine his observations to the one supreme purpose of obtaining a list of enemy agents in Canada and the United States. He saw at once, after landing with his parachute in the boche lines, that he could be of great service to the cause for which the Allies were fighting by gathering a fund of information regarding the man power, supplies, ammunition and the general attitude of the people in the kaiser's country. By the time he reached Berlin, he felt considerably compensated for the uncongeniality of his traveling companion during the trip.

They took a horse-cab-there were no automobile taxis in evidence-and were driven at a very sleepy gait to a high-class hotel in Friederichstrasse. The horse behind which they rode looked as if he might have had a full meal of oats and corn some time before the war. There was little in the scenes through which they passed that impressed Irving as bearing any indications of the ravages of war, except perhaps the scarcity of automobiles and the lack of that spick-and-span condition for which the streets of Berlin had long been famous. The boy spy was unable to discover any quality of excellence at all superior to that of Buffalo, N.Y., in general appearance.

The hotel he found well furnished, decorated and supplied with rugs. The rooms taken by Irving and his companion were all that a "particular," if not fastidious, guest would demand. True, a girl operated the elevator, but the young spy had learned, through letters from his cousin, that Canadian girls went much farther than this in their patriotic efforts, sharing not a little in the heavy labors of munition shops and the general industries.

Irving's companion, whose name was Fritz Vollmer, spoke a few words to the clerk in an undertone, and the clerk nodded knowingly, as if to indicate that everything was all right.

"An old friend o' mine," Lieut. Vollmer remarked as they walked toward the elevator. "I just told him you were all right in spite of your uniform, that you'd been a spy over in the enemy's country and hadn't had time to change your clothes since you got through the lines. You won't be bothered about room rent or any other expenses here. Those will be taken care of. You're not to change your uniform until after you've had a session at intelligence headquarters."

"When will that be?" Irving inquired.

"This afternoon some time," was the answer. "I'll go over and make arrangements and then come back and go with you. Meanwhile we'll go out and have some lunch."

In spite of Lieut. Vollmer's supercilious ways and boastful language, the young boche officer evinced a deep personal interest in his companion. But undoubtedly the reason for this was the daring and romantic record that the young spy had behind him. And this record necessarily obtruded itself so conspicuously in Irving's affairs right now that the vainglorious Teuton could not subordinate it even when picturing his own "high excellence." Therefore Lieut. Vollmer's uncontrollable admiration for the venturesome youth whom he was companioning was just a result of the over-awed condition of his own mind.

They went out to a cafe in Friederichstrasse and ate a very modest luncheon for which Vollmer paid fifteen marks. Then they returned to the hotel, and Irving remained in his room while Vollmer went to Wilhelmstrasse to announce the arrival of "the spy" and make arrangements for presenting him to the proper official. The boy would have been glad to go out and stroll through the streets of the capital of the great war-making nation, but hesitated to do this because he feared that his Canadian uniform might get him into needless difficulty.

An hour later Fritz returned and announced that he had found the proper official to receive the spy's message. That official, he said, was eager to meet the kaiser's daring agent, and would he please return with Lieut. Vollmer at once?

Irving assented, and together they left the hotel. On the way the Prussian officer thrilled the spy with patriotic fervor which he was able to suppress only with great difficulty by informing him that the United States had declared war against Germany a few days before.

"America will bitterly rue the day she took that action," Lieut. Vollmer declared vengefully.

CHAPTER XXV

THE READING OF THE CRYPTOGRAM

It was a rather imposing structure with gray-stone front that Irving and his companion entered in Wilhelmstrasse as the headquarters of the globe-encircling spy system of the terrible German empire. They walked through the doorway and passed down the cavernous corridor, with its innumerable ramifications of mystery, secrecy, penetration. All of these ramifications were by no means physical and evident to the inquisitive eyes of the visitor from across the sea. Most of them, nearly all, in fact, were pictured in the brain of Lieut. Ellis, who saw visions of thousands of communicating branches reaching out into every part of the civilized world.

The names of Bernstorf, Von Papen, Boy-Ed, and other former leading agents of the kaiser in the United States flashed through his mind, and he was curious to know what sort of men directed their activities from central headquarters. It was not long before his curiosity was rewarded with visual evidence.

Lieut. Ellis and Lieut. Vollmer walked up a broad flight of flagstone steps to the second floor and into the waiting room of a large suite of offices. There they were met by a girl of freshman high-school age, who evidently served in the capacity of office boy.

"Have the office boys all been drafted for military service?" Irving asked himself as his companion answered the girl's questions.

They were directed to wait a few minutes, which they accordingly did, and in a quarter of an hour were ushered into the presence of a mild-eyed man whose least prepossessing characteristic was the undependability of the mildness of his gaze. Irving had not been long in the room with him before he realized that the fellow's "gentleness" was a carefully cultivated "attribute," schemed, plotted, and devised to qualify him for the shrewdest and most subtle of government secret service. He was a large man of good proportions, with a mustache that stood out like a tooth-brush parted in the middle and a very fair and well rounded face. Although he might have passed for thirty-five years of age, Irving subsequently learned that he was nearly ten years older. He answered to the title of "the baron," addressed familiarly by Lieut. Vollmer.

"Here he is," said the latter, who seemed to think this was all the introduction needed.

Irving bowed, and "the baron" bowed. There was no shaking of hands between them.

"Very well," said the intelligence official, indicating thereby that the announcer's duty was performed and that he might now retire. Vollmer did as suggested by the manner of the receiving nobleman, and Irving and his world-plotting host were alone.

"I have heard your story from Lieut. Vollmer," "the baron" began. "He said you had a message tattooed on your arm. Let me see it."

Irving took off his coat, rolled up his shirt sleeve and exhibited for inspection the "cubist art cryptogram" on his left forearm. The official gazed at it closely a minute or two; then said:

"Just wait a minute and I'll have it read."

He lifted a telephone receiver to his ear and called out a local number through the transmitter. Presently he was talking to the desired department.

"Send Kiehler and Joe Weber in here," he said.

Three minutes later two middle-aged men entered. Neither of them was of striking appearance. In fact, each had a rather stolid look, but it was not long before Irving realized that there was some real mechanical, if not imaginative, ability underneath their apparent stupidity.

"Take this young man into your office and read that cipher message on his arm," ordered "the baron."

The two cryptogram readers bowed and one of them requested Irving to follow. They left the office and proceeded to another on the top floor of the building.

It was a very light suite of rooms that Irving now found himself in. One room particularly was supplied with the best of daylight illumination through a skylight overhead. It reminded Irving of an architectural drafting room. Half a dozen men were seated at as many desks working as diligently over record and manuscript material before them as so many college students "cramming" for a trigonometry or chemistry exam. Irving was conducted to an unoccupied desk in a remote corner of the room and there he and his two companions sat down and the consultation began.

The two cryptologists, however, had little to say. They seemed to have little interest in Irving save as to the cipher message he had brought for them to translate. They exhibited no surprise when the boy spy rolled up his sleeve and disclosed the manner in which he had conveyed his message. They seemed to have become so accustomed to the discovery of unusual things that nothing could astonish them. Stolidity of manner was a term that fitted them exactly, but certainly not unqualified stolidity. Irving felt almost as if their eyes burned right into his arm.

They worked diligently for more than an hour over the boy's bared arm, frequently jotting down characters on tabs of paper before them. At last they finished and informed him that he might go.

"Go where?" Irving inquired.

Without answering, one of the men picked up the receiver of a telephone and put it to his ear. He gave a number to the operator and soon he was talking to someone. The waiting boy was sure that the person "at the other end" was "the baron."

"Go back to the hotel and remain there for instructions," the man at the 'phone said presently, as he hung up the receiver.

Irving left the building, intending to take a cab to the hotel. He had scarcely reached the street, however, when it suddenly occurred to him that he had no money with him.

"I'll have to walk," he mused. "Well, it isn't very far and I can make it easy before suppertime. But I wonder if I'll get through with this uniform. Well, I'll use my nerve and see what happens."

He started out briskly, but observed as he went that he attracted attention from a good many persons on the street, some of them soldiers. Undoubtedly it was his nerve that got him through, but he could not avoid several times turning his head with whatever nonchalance he could command and stealing glances to the right and left and behind. After looking back two or three times, he became curious regarding the purpose of a middle-aged man in civilian clothes whom he had observed in front of the intelligence building as he came out of the main entrance.

"I wonder if that fellow is following me?" he said to himself, a little nervously.

He walked a few squares farther, then stopped and looked into a tailor show-window. He remained there several minutes, really interested in the display and the prices. With a kind of meditative look, he glanced down the street, but could see nothing of his supposed shadower. Then he moved on again, turned a corner, walked half a square, and suddenly faced about as if he had made a mistake in his direction and must retrace his steps.

The middle-aged man in civilian clothes, who was not more than a hundred feet away, turned almost as suddenly as the boy in Canadian khaki had turned and entered a cafe that he seemed about to pass.

"I'm being followed," muttered the spy with a real chill of alarm. "I wonder what's up. Have they found something wrong with that message? Did those cryptogram readers discover that the message had been tampered with?"

CHAPTER XXVI

FOLLOWED

Irving walked on as if nothing unusual had occurred to disturb his peace of mind, and yet nothing more disquieting perhaps had ever moved the quakings of fear within him. If the man who had followed him could have looked into the face of the young second lieutenant in khaki as the latter passed the cafe, undoubtedly he would have seen there an expression of countenance exceedingly interesting to him.

The day was now rapidly drawing to a close, and the damp April atmosphere, chilly enough when the sun was at its zenith, was becoming cold toward night. Irving had no overcoat. He had worn only a flying-coat and "cover all," aside from his ordinary fair-weather garments, on the night of his ascent in an aeroplane and descent with a parachute, but he was not particularly uncomfortable even under present conditions. Still, he felt that it would be much more pleasant within four walls of a first class hotel, even though, as he suspected, the management was burning coal under war emergency limitations. So he hurried on, and did not slacken his pace until he was back at the hostelry.

About a square from the hotel he turned and looked down the street to see if the middle-aged man in citizen's clothes was still following him. Yes, there he was, 200 feet back, sauntering with a long stride, which rendered it possible for him to keep pace with the spy without an appearance of haste. As the latter entered the lobby and walked toward the elevator, he said to himself:

"I'll have to bluff it through. I'm not going to pretend ignorance of the fact that I've been followed. But I mustn't appear to be afraid of being watched. I must present the matter in a different light."

He knocked on the door of Vollmer's room, but received no response. Then he went to his own room to wait until his guide returned.

"I'll have to wait for him before I can get any supper," he mused. "I'm in a peculiar situation, and don't know exactly where I'm at. I think I'll have to have a plain talk with him tonight, much as I hate to rest any of my fortunes on his questionable goodwill."

Lieut. Vollmer returned at about 6 o'clock and announced without any formal greeting that they would go out to supper. Irving picked up his hat from the bed where he had thrown it on entering the room and signified his readiness to go at once.

He was eager to begin conversation on the subject that interested him most, but decided that he must await a favorable opportunity. His companion had relapsed again into unsociable aloofness, and the walk of three squares to the cafe where they had their luncheon was made without the passing of a word between them.

The meal, too, was eaten almost as quietly. Irving made a few attempts to draw his companion into conversation, hoping to lead up gradually to the subject that was weighing rather heavily on his mind, but he failed utterly. At last just as they were about to leave the restaurant, the young German lieutenant altered the aspect of affairs very much by saying:

"I'm going to leave you to your own devices now, Hessenburg. For anything you want, get in touch with the baron; he'll give instructions for taking care of you. They'll probably give you an army uniform and send you to the front to fight for the fatherland. I'm on a leave of absence and am going home to stay there until my leave expires."

Irving was stunned by this announcement from his uncongenial guide, who was about to leave him unceremoniously in the lurch. He did not know how to reply and so made no attempt to do so aside from the utterance of a few conventionalities, such as, "I hope you'll enjoy your furlough," and "I thank you for the courtesies you have shown me."

Lieut. Vollmer did not return with Irving to the hotel, but gave him a limp handshake out on the sidewalk, tossed a careless "aufwiedersehn" at him and sauntered away. The deserted spy went back to his room and passed an uncomfortable night, tormented with so many doubts of conflicting nature that he soon found himself in a very nervous condition. After he had lain awake an hour or two trying to clear up the obscurities in his mind, he decided that the course of thinking that he had permitted to sway him would result disastrously even if there was no reason for him to feel apprehensive of the outlook.

"I must throw this out of my mind and get a good night's rest," he told himself. "If my nerves are all shot to pieces tomorrow, it'll be folly for me to attempt to get any satisfaction from the government officials. They'll see there's something wrong, dead sure. I'm proving myself a mighty poor spy, and ought to have stayed in the Canadian trenches. Of course, I must expect to run into the most dangerous situations and depend on my wits, bluff, and nerve-yes NERVE-to get me out. What if I am under suspicion? If they have no goods on me, I'm safe enough so long as I don't convict myself by a guilty manner. I must be mistaken in my suspicion that they have found something wrong in that cubist art message. They'd 'ave arrested me right away if they'd discovered the change. I'll probably find everything all right tomorrow when I talk with the baron. Why, he may even decorate me with an iron cross. Hope it won't be too heavy to carry around, that's all. Or maybe they need all the iron to make shells with and will give me a leather cross-no, they need that for shoes; or a rubber cross-no, they need that to make rubber heels so they can pussy-foot out in No-Man's-Land. There! I've got my nerves in better shape; think I can go to sleep now, but I do wonder why that middle-aged man in civilian clothes was following me. I wonder if he wore rubber heels."

That was the way Irving managed to induce sleep an hour or two before midnight. He adopted the method very systematically and determinedly, and it worked. But his slumber was not as undisturbed as he would have had it, for he dreamed the most violent and mysterious of dreams enlivened and peopled with aeroplanes and booming cannon and minnenwerfers and parachutes and rubber-heeled secret service men who followed him so softly, gently, stealthily that it seemed as if even the thunder of battle was being toned down to zephyrs of inconsequential ghostly conflict.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE SPY'S DECISION

Irving arose at daybreak next morning. In spite of his uneasy night, he was much refreshed and felt confident that he had good command of his nerves. This was an important reassurance, and the young spy decided that he would not let it get away from him.

"I'll tie it down with a string of self-confidence and a knot of determination," he told himself resolutely.

This way of putting the idea amused him a little and added to his strength of purpose.

"First of all, how about breakfast?" he asked himself as he combed his hair with a pocket comb which he carried with him and regarded the puzzled wrinkling of his brow in the wash-room mirror.

"Well," he added, as he returned the comb to its case-and the case to his pocket, "I guess I'll have to go without breakfast. Not a very comfortable idea, either, but there seems to be no way out of it. That fellow Vollmer seemed to take a malicious delight in forgetting every one of my comforts. I wish I had something to do between now and 9 or 10 o'clock. I don't like to stroll around any more than is necessary in this uniform."

But there seemed to be nothing for him to do except remain in his room and wait for his wristwatch to tick several thousand seconds. It seemed, too, as if all of these ticks hammered away right in the center of his brain, always striking on the same pin-point spot and irritating his nervous system almost beyond endurance. At 8:30 o'clock he decided to wait no longer and grabbed his hat and hastened from the hotel. Without making particular note of his surroundings, he set out at a brisk pace for the building that contained the intelligence offices which he had visited the day before.

Meanwhile he had forgotten all about the middle-aged man in civilian clothes who had followed him through the streets. It had not occurred to him that the fellow might return to the hotel and continue his espionage next day. He had presumed that the man would make a report to his superiors and the affair would be taken up again in some other manner if, indeed, there should be any resumption at all of the investigation.

"If I'm suspected of being a British spy, they'll probably arrest me when I report back at the baron's office," he mused before leaving the hotel.

After walking a square or two, Irving slowed his pace considerably, realizing that it was still early and that he probably would have to wait an hour or more for "the baron" after his arrival at the latter's office if he continued to walk as rapidly as he had started. To "kill" a little of the surplus time ahead of him, therefore, he stopped and looked into several shop windows, the last being an "eat shop," which teased his appetite not a little and caused him to feel that he could chew a piece of army meat of the consistency of leather, or rubber, with a good deal of relish at that moment.

The suggestion contained in the word rubber, for which there seemed to be no appropriate reason in connection with a steaming breakfast, revived his burlesque musings of the night before as he was drifting away into a nervous slumber. The semi-dream pictures in his mind of a government sleuth on rubber heels brought him back to his startling experience of the previous day so suddenly that he turned almost involuntarily and gazed in the direction from which he had come.

If he had been a person of superstitious susceptibility wandering through a country cemetery in the ghostly moonlight, he could not have been more apprehensively thrilled by what he saw. Half a square up the street was the mysterious middle-aged man in civilian clothes who had followed him from the intelligence building to the hotel.

"Gee! I must hustle along and get to the baron's office as soon as possible," he decided as he quickened his steps. "I must bluff this thing through as I never bluffed before. I must put the matter up to him and find out what it means."

He hurried on more rapidly than the pace with which he started from the hotel and did not slow up again until he reached the building in Wilhelmstrasse for which he was headed.

He decided not to pretend to be ignorant of the fact that he was being followed; indeed, he would have retraced his steps and accosted his shadower if it had not seemed probable that such a course would have been futile. So, just as he was passing through the pillared entrance, he turned and looked again up the street.

Yes, there he was, 150 feet away, sauntering along as if his greatest object in life was the sniffing of the damp April ozone. One look was enough, and the shadowed spy entered the building and walked up the flagstone stairway.

"I'm going to find out who that fellow is and what he's up to if such a thing is possible," he resolved. "I'm going to put it up to the baron right now and if I'm under suspicion I'll soon find out and, I hope, drive the suspicion away."

The young spy was now exhibiting real qualities necessary to make a successful army secret service man.

CHAPTER XXVIII

MAKING PROGRESS WITH THE BARON

Irving entered "the baron's" outer office and asked to see the big intelligence official. To his surprise, that secret service dignitary was in, and the caller was requested to wait a few minutes until he was at leisure.

"Even the nobility are getting up early to help win the war," Irving ruminated as he waited. "Well, that shows a good trait of character-if they only had a good cause to fight for. I wonder if they really think they have. I don't see how they can."

Presently he was informed by an office girl that "the baron" would see him, and he entered the latter's private office. The big, usually mild-eyed official looked at him rather sharply, he thought, but he resolved not to be overawed by his dominating personality.

"I am here," he began, rather abruptly, but with a bow of seeming respect, "to find out what is to become of me. I feel lost in this big city. Lieut. Vollmer left me last night and informed me that if I wanted anything, I should apply to you. In the first place, I should like to have some breakfast."

"The baron" seemed to be amused by this speech. He did not, however, indicate any particular concern over the hungry condition of the spy, who had proved himself a daring and spectacular hero "in the service of the fatherland." But he smiled and answered in reassuring tones:

"No breakfast? Ach himmel! You shall have all you can eat, and by the time you have finished your breakfast, you'll realize how futile is the English blockade."

"What kind of plans have you for me?" Irving asked, deeming it of no advantage to enter into a discussion of conditions in Germany with a man who undoubtedly would express only the most optimistic views. "I'm getting impatient, I can't stand it to be idle. I want something to do."