"Who is it?" he cried, and I saw a wave of relief surge into his face. Peiffer had been caught outside the gates and within a hundred yards of the neutral zone. He had strolled out in the thick of the dockyard workmen going home to Linea in Spain.
"Search him and bring him up here at once," said Slingsby, and he dropped into his chair and wiped his forehead. "Phew! Thirty seconds more and he might have snapped his fingers at us." He turned to me. "I shall want a prisoner's escort here in half an hour."
I went about that business and returned in time to see Slingsby giving an admirable imitation of a Prussian police official.
"So, Peiffer," he cried sternly, "you broke your word. Do not deny it. It will be useless."
The habit of a lifetime asserted itself in Peiffer. He quailed before authority when authority began to bully.
"I did not know I was outside the walls," he faltered. "I was taking a walk. No one stopped me."
"So!" Slingsby snorted. "And these, Peiffer--what have you to say of these?"
There were four separate passports which had been found in Peiffer's pockets. He could be a Dane of Esbjerg, a Swede of Stockholm, a Norwegian of Christiania, or a Dutchman from Amsterdam. All four nationalities were open to Peiffer to select from.
"They provide you with these, no doubt, in your school at Hamburg," and Slingsby paused to collect his best German. "You are a prisoner of war. Das ist genug," he cried, and Peiffer climbed to the internment camp.
So far so good. Slingsby had annexed Peiffer, but more important than Peiffer was Peiffer's little plot, and that he had not got. Nor did the most careful inquiry disclose what Peiffer had done and where he had been during the time when he was not. For six hours Peiffer had been loose in Gibraltar, and Slingsby began to get troubled. He tried to assume the mentality of Peiffer, and so reach his intention, but that did not help. He got out all the reports in which Peiffer's name was mentioned and read them over again.