Over There with the Canadians at Vimy Ridge

In his work with this catalog and files he was associated with a man whose countenance was strangely familiar to him from the first. He tried to assume that there was merely a resemblance in the face of this man to that of some other man he had known on the Canadian front or at home, but such assumption failed to satisfy him. He could not drive away the feeling that he had met this fellow somewhere since he dropped from the sky with a parachute behind the German battle lines, but although he studied over the matter for hours while busy with his work he was unable by such efforts to solve the mystery.

The solution came during a period of relaxation, as the solution of many mysteries come. On the third day since his last advancement in the service, while making entries on certain catalog cards, there recurred to him a mental picture of his experiences with the unidentified man who had shadowed him through the streets while he was still in Canadian uniform. Two weeks before he had dismissed this incident from his mind, being convinced that the man had given up his quest, whatever it was.

But the returned picture did not rest long peacefully in his mind. It was followed closely by a thrill that almost made him drop the card that he held in his hand. He looked quickly, almost involuntarily, at his associate worker, who was bent over a task at his desk.

Irving knew at once that he was not mistaken. Before him was the "middle-aged man in civilian clothes" who had shadowed him more than three weeks before from the intelligence building to the hotel where he was living and to other places in the city.

CHAPTER XXXIII

A SURPRISING OFFER

Emil Strauss was the name of Irving's coworker in the card index room. One could hardly say that he was either an agreeable or a disagreeable fellow. He had little to say. It was generally understood that he was very efficient in his work and ranked as one of the leading, if not the leading, experts in the department.

Strauss was not a typical Teuton in appearance. Irving thought he looked as much like an Irishman as a German, that he might have passed for either or a Swede. He was of medium height, somewhat slender of build, and had a smooth, round face, out of which shone two piercing black eyes-that is, they shone and pierced when the camouflage of heavy eyelashes and eyebrows was lifted. Otherwise one would have noticed almost everything else about him first.

There was no doubt in Irving's mind as to his identification, but he caught not even a surreptitious glance of recognition from the fellow at any time. He attended strictly and diligently to his own business, and the spy did likewise from the moment of his recognition of the man. He was determined his new associate should see no evidences of uneasiness in him as a result of this development.

Three days elapsed after Irving's last advancement to the card-catalog division, and still the conversations between him and his working companion were of the "yea, yea, nay, nay" character. Finally, however, the boy decided to attempt to draw Strauss into conversation. He did this by reference to humorous incidents in the war as brought out in cartoons and pointed paragraphs in Berlin newspaper and magazines.

He was somewhat surprised, and pleased also, to note that the "middle-aged man in civilian clothes" did not meet his advances with coldness or indifference. The fellow proved, indeed, to be much more polite than it had at first seemed possible. He appeared to enjoy Irving's palaver, for the youth was something of a wit, but preferred to listen rather than talk himself. Finally, however, he grew more communicative and manifested something of interest in his associate's personal affairs.

"They're telling some great stories about you around here," he said one day as they were preparing to go out for lunch. It was the first time they had quit work for the noon hour at the same time. Usually Irving went first and his companion went out after he returned, although Strauss was virtually "his own boss" and came and went as he chose.

"Yes, they're a bunch of gossips around here," Irving replied with a deprecating smile. "And you know what magnified stories gossips turn out when their tongues get busy."

Strauss smiled mysteriously and said:

"Oh, for that matter we are all gossips, even the quietest of us sometimes. All you have to do is to get us off on the subjects that we are well informed about and you'll soon find out how our tongues can wag at both ends."

"It's pretty hard for me to imagine your tongue wagging at both ends," Irving returned with more meaning in his mind than he expressed in his tone of voice.

"Why?"

"Because you seem to enjoy listening more than talking."

"I am engaged in a secret business," Strauss explained, lifting his shaggy brows slightly and darting a sharp glance at the other.

"Yes, so am I," Irving returned quickly. "But I like to talk."

"So I observe," said Strauss with veiled significance, which the boy did not try to penetrate.

"Just to be sociable," the spy added by way of explanation and to prevent the conversation from lagging.

But Strauss did not appear to be so talkatively eager. They were in the locker and wash room during most of this exchange of words, and nothing further was said between them until they were outside the building. The catalog expert then spoke first.

"Where do you eat?" he asked.

"Oh, any place," Irving replied. "I've been in two or three restaurants around here. There's a good one down in the next block."

"That suits me," said Strauss.

They walked along in silence half a square, and then the boy's mysterious companion put to him the most inquisitive query that the spy had listened to from this man since he became acquainted with him:

"When do you expect to go back to America?"

"Good!" Irving said to himself. "Sounds as if he's going to open up. Maybe I'll get something out of him after all."

He little dreamed how much that something was going to be.

"I don't know," he answered aloud. "I haven't received any orders yet."

"You'd better begin to find out then," was the expert's advice uttered in tones of startling sharpness. "I suppose you know it's up to you to decide that matter yourself."

"Oh, yes, I suppose so," Irving replied with a matter-of-factness of manner, which was anything but expressive of what was going on in his mind. The fact is, he was a little disturbed by the last remark of his companion.

"I'll have to undergo a surgical operation before I start back," he added.

"What's that?" inquired Strauss. "Were you wounded?"

"No," Irving replied. "But I must get rid of a mark of identification and go back as another person."

Strauss nodded a stoical sign of interest. They were now at the entrance of the restaurant for which they were headed, and the conversation ceased until they were seated at a table in one corner of the room and well removed from other lunchers. After they had been served they resumed their discussion of Irving's proposed operation in subdued tones.

"It must be a curious growth on your body that you should have to remove it in order to avoid identification," Strauss remarked as he spread a "knife-end" of war-time "butter" on a piece of black bread.

"No, it isn't a growth," Irving replied. "It's that cubist art picture on my arm."

"Oh, I see," Strauss grunted. "But," he added, "I don't just see how an operation there is going to do you much good. What are you going to have done-have your arm cut off?"

"No-have the skin peeled off."

"Ach," grunted the card-catalog expert. "That will leave a scar."

"Not if I have some other skin grafted in its place."

"Quite an idea. Where do you expect to get the other skin to graft there?"

"From some part of my body," Irving replied.

"Ja wo-ohl," said the other slowly, with a suggestion of doubt in his voice not contained in the phrase. "But that would leave a scar on your body, and if some sharp fellow tried to identify you as the person who brought that tattooed message ever here the scar might help him to explain the disappearance of the picture on your arm."

"Yes, that's true," Irving agreed. "But the chance of anything of that sort is small. Anyway, I'd have to find somebody who would give me a section of his skin four inches by two."

"There are thousands of patriotic Germans who are willing to give their lives for their country," reasoned the expert. "It ought not to be hard to find somebody who would give a few inches of skin."

"You are very logical," the spy observed. "Perhaps there's somebody in our office who would make such a sacrifice for his country."

"I'll do it myself," declared Strauss quickly.

In view of the fact that the latter appeared a few weeks previously to have regarded him with very grave suspicion, Irving had to admit to himself after this offer that the spy-cataloger was more of a mystery than ever.

CHAPTER XXXIV

SKIN GRAFTING

"Your offer is very kind," Irving said with emphasis intended to express warmth of feeling.

"No-patriotic," Strauss declared.

"No doubt of that," the spy admitted; "but a man can be patriotic and kind at the same time, can he not?"

"Yes, but this is all patriotism."

"Very well, I'll accept your offer," Irving announced. "But I doubt if Mr. Herrmann will allow it. You are a very valuable man in the office, and the operation would surely make it necessary for you to lay off a few days. He'll probably insist that an office boy or clerk or stenographer make the patriotic sacrifice in your stead."

"That'll suit me-just so there is no delay in finding someone who's willing," Strauss replied.

Irving proved to be correct in his prophecy of the probable attitude of the superintendent toward the proposition. Mr. Herrmann objected strenuously for the reason suggested by the spy and he took it on himself to find a person who would supply the skin to be grafted. Two days later he reported success and preparations for the operation were begun.

But everybody connected with these preliminaries had an important lesson to learn regarding the proper method for a layman to approach a matter of science. None of them, of course, knew anything, except in a very general way, about skin grafting. Irving had assumed that it was a simple process, and, as a matter of fact, it is, if we accept the principle of the simplicity of all things. But what startled him most was the simplicity of the error he had fallen into.

Mr. Herrmann gave Irving a note to the superintendent of one of the city hospitals and directed him to go there and make arrangements for the operation. He was authorized to state that a young soldier who had lost one of his legs in the first battle of the Marne had promised to furnish the needed four-by-two inches of skin to replace the tattooed integument on his arm.

The spy did as instructed and was turned over to a member of the surgical staff. The latter listened to the boy's story and his suggestions and then inquired:

"At what college of physicians and surgeons did you get your degree?"

Irving no doubt flushed like a schoolboy. He realized that the member of the hospital staff was laughing at him, and this confused him more than a veiled suspicion that he was a Canadian spy would have done.

"The college I graduated from was that of mother's home remedies," he replied.

"I thought so," nodded the surgeon with a smile. "Let me see-you are in the intelligence department, are you not?"

"Yes, sir."

"Doing important work, aren't you?'

"I believe so."

"Work that requires sharp wit?"

"Supposedly."

"Well, sharp wits never assume anything without some information to back them up. Your ideas of skin grafting are a good deal like a child's. In the first place we shan't need anybody to supply any skin. Sorry to disappoint the young patriot with really commendable spirit of loyalty."

Irving looked his surprise.

"You'll supply all the skin we need," the surgeon continued.

"But it is important that there be no scars," Irving insisted.

"There won't be any, or so slight that they'll be hardly noticeable," was the surgeon's reassuring reply. "Let me explain the process to an unscientific keen wit of the government's intelligence department."

The surgeon lifted the spy's bared arm with his left hand and began his explanation, indicating with one finger now and then the various moves necessary as he described the process.

"With a razor," he said, "we will cut an outline around this hideous art of yours. Then we'll peel off the atrocity and cremate it over an alcohol flame. Next we'll peel a strip of the same length and three-fourths of an inch wide just below here, leaving the upper end of the strip attached and twisting it around so that it will lie midway between the edges of the raw space where the tattooing was. Then we'll cut under the skin along both sides to loosen it an inch or more back and draw the loosened skin to the piece in the center and make a hair suture. The reason we must run a strip of skin over the middle of the raw area is because this area will be too wide for stretching the skin at the sides over it. Skin that is stretched too tight will die. The narrow raw place produced by the peeling of the strip down over the wrist can be covered by pulling together the edges of the skin on both sides after running the razor back under it a short distance. Quite different from the process you imagined, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is," Irving admitted.

"I bet you thought all that was necessary was to peel off a piece of skin and lay it on the raw place after this cubist art picture had been removed. Isn't that true?"

"Maybe-something of the kind. I hadn't thought it out in detail," Irving replied.

"Of course, you hadn't. You'd have been too scientific for a secret service operative, wouldn't you?"

"Can't secret service people be scientific?" Irving inquired.

"What do you think about it?" asked the surgeon. "You ought to know more about it than I do. But I'll tell you what my frank and unscientific opinion in the matter is."

"What is it?"

"That government secret service is 1 per cent information and 99 per cent bluff."

"That's a little strong on the side of the bluff," said the spy, smiling.

"But there's something to it?"

"Yes."

"Now you need this much science to prevent your bluff from getting you into trouble. When you attempt to bluff a scientific man be sure not to bluff along the line of his knowledge and the line of your ignorance. By the way, when do you want that operation performed?

"The sooner the better," Irving replied.

"How about now?"

This almost took the boy's breath away, but after a few minutes he answered:

"That's all right, I suppose, but I'd better call up my office first and tell the boss what's doing."

"Very well; here's a telephone. Call him up."

Irving did so and in a few minutes had authority to "go ahead and have it over as soon as possible."

CHAPTER XXXV

THE TAPPING ON THE WINDOW

Irving slept under an anæsthetic during the operation. He objected at first to the administration of ether, but the surgeon insisted.

"I don't want you to make any trouble," he insisted. "Remember you're not a scientific youth and might do something ridiculous. If I'm going to perform this operation you must take orders and obey them."

That settled it; Irving acquiesced. When he recovered consciousness he found himself in a hospital bed with his left arm bandaged and feeling a good deal like a limb of a tree, or anything else with a like degree of life. He remained in bed until the next morning, when his arm was put in a sling and he was permitted to move about as he pleased, although directed to remain in the hospital. Two days later he was allowed to leave the institution, but was instructed to return daily for examination and redressing of the graft.

He returned at once to the intelligence office and reported the success of the operation. The chief surgeon had informed him that his arm might be taken out of the sling in about a week.

During this period Irving was in the office much of the time, although he was able to be of little service with the use of only one arm. Still, he found it possible to add a good deal to his knowledge of the system of which the government was planning to make him an important agent, and this was, on the whole, quite satisfactory to him.

The youthful spy's plans for carrying out his mission for the British government had been developing rapidly since he became a member of the staff in the German intelligence office. And not a little of this development had been quite unforeseen by him. His original plans, therefore, underwent considerable change as time and experience advanced.

For instance, he decided not to attempt to make a list of names of leading enemy agents in the United States and Canada to take back with him. This had been his original purpose. He now regarded it as unwise, unsafe. He would depend on his memory to retain a store of information of this kind. So he watched and examined and probed and memorized, going over the information he had accumulated many times in his leisure hours in order to keep it fixed and unmistakable in his mind.

"I think I could go back to school and memorize history dates as I never did before," he told himself one evening about a week after the skin-grafting operation. "Gee! I never realized I had such a memory. I can run off a string of dope as long as the tune the old cow died on, just like saying the ABC's."

Irving had forgotten the "tune the old cow died on," but the expression stuck in his mind as a relic of nursery days.

One of the divisions of service in the intelligence department that interested the spy particularly was the telegraphic division. It came as an intermediate grade in his course of instruction, and he was required to learn to read the ticking of the telegraph instrument. Fortunately, a few years before, he had learned the alphabet while amusing himself with an amateur wireless outfit, and it now required comparatively little time for him to develop a fair degree of proficiency as a key-listener.

"You can never tell when it'll be greatly to your advantage to be able to read the telegraph instrument," Mr. Herrmann explained. "In fact, that may be one of your most important occupations in America-tapping wires, for instance."

Indeed, the spy caught a number of messages of incalculable importance while pursuing his studies in this division and made careful note of them in his mental repository.

About a week later he had a novel "telegraphic" experience, which, in turn, was to have an important bearing on his fortunes as a spy in the enemy's country. The affair took place in the rooming house where he was living. While he endeavored to get out in the evening, as a rule, and mingle with citizens of all sorts and descriptions, in order to absorb as much general information as possible, still he retired almost every night in good season, and not infrequently went early to his room to study, rehearse, memorize and plan. In this manner he endeavored to improve every opportunity to make his excursion a success.

He had just finished one of these solitary sessions in which several leading newspapers and magazines played an important part, and was about to lay them aside and prepare for bed, when his attention was attracted by a faint tapping sound. At first he gave little heed to it, presuming, in a semi-conscious way, that it was occasioned by a continuous breath of air and a tiny, loose pendant of some sort in the exterior construction work of the house. But it continued in a strangely familiar way and seemed to grow a little louder very gradually.

Suddenly, Irving sat up straight and listened rigidly. Anyone observing him in this attitude could not have failed to be impressed with the feeling that an alarm of some character was thrilling his every nerve center.

"My goodness!" was the exclamation that smothered itself within him. "What in the world can that mean? Yes, no, yes-somebody is trying to communicate with me. He's using the telegraphic signal. He's asking me to answer, to indicate in some way that I am getting his message. He says he's a friend. He knows I'm a British spy. But maybe it's a trap to catch me. What shall I do? If he's a friend he surely ought to know better than to expect me to make such an admission. But he says he has important information. What-what in the world shall I do? I may be in very great danger. Here is certainly the test of my life."

CHAPTER XXXVI

A REVELATION

"I have an important message for you. I am a French spy. I must get this message to you. Answer me in some way. Heave a big yawn or clear your throat and I'll know you hear me and get what I'm saying. I merely want to make sure you are what I think you are. I don't dare reveal myself to you for fear that I may be mistaken and you'd turn me over to the government."

These words were tapped off, alphabetically, with a small instrument, probably a pencil, on the window overlooking a court inclosed by the building on three sides. After a pause of half a minute, following the appeal just recorded, the dot-and-dash tapping continued thus:

"I am looking through the shade of your window and can see that you are listening attentively; so you need not reply. Just continue to listen, and I shall know everything is all right.

"When you leave for America you will be supplied with a message in cipher, prepared by me, for a certain agent of the kaiser. That message will bear the appearance of having been written by a friend of yours to you, but it will contain information in invisible ink for your benefit as a loyal agent of the Allies. This information will be of great value to the Allies, supplying them with material for undermining the Teutonic spy system in England, France, and America, which recently declared war.

"This is all. I merely wished to advise you of what you will find written with invisible ink on the paper that will be placed in your possession when you set out on your return to America."

The tapping ceased. Irving remained like a statue in his chair for several minutes. Then he arose, went to the window and pulled the shade aside. The court was dark, save for a solitary dim light out at the entrance. He could just faintly discern the steel structure of the fire escape near the window.

"That's the way he got up," he half muttered. "He stood there on that landing while he tapped his message. I wonder who he is and how he spotted me. He must be a very clever fellow. I really believe he's what he represented himself to be; and yet, it may possibly be a trap to catch me. However, I don't see what I can do except await developments."

He went to bed and slept better than might have been expected under the circumstances. But he had become so used to critical situations by this time that he felt almost capable of sleeping peacefully on the "edge of the earth" with a torpedo for a pillow.

Next day the mystery of the window-telegraph spy bothered him a good deal, even more than it did immediately after the fellow had "dotted and dashed" his message on the pane of glass.

"I wonder who he was?" he repeated many times. "I wonder if he's somebody I'm in close touch with every day?"

The suggestion caused him to watch narrowly every person in the office with whom he did business for the German government. But the more he watched, the more unsatisfactory the situation became. He continued his furtive outlook several days, but finally admitted to himself that the prospect of his efforts solving the mystery was anything but bright.

Meanwhile the spy's preparations for a new excursion out into a broad field of international espionage were rapidly drawing to a close. The surgeon at the hospital who had performed the skin-grafting operation on his arm pronounced it sufficiently well healed, first, to warrant taking the limb out of the sling, and then, a week later, for the removal of the bandage. There were a few slightly rough places here and there. around the edges of the patch, and one small scar at the lower end of the middle strip of skin where it had been twisted to cause it to lie "right side out" through the middle of the larger patch and make the latter complete by meeting the outer edges that had been undercut and drawn to it.