Lucy waited but an instant before she left her shelter and ran toward the lodge door. She felt of the strong padlock and pulled at it, but in vain.
“If their secrets are inside, that’s easy,” she said to Michelle, who had followed her. “Bob will come here to-morrow and break the place open. Who won the war, anyhow?”
Michelle smiled in the moonlight, swinging her arms across her chest, for she was cold. “If they are so simple as to leave their secrets in this lodge we have little to fear from them,” she said. “I think this place is no more than a rendezvous, well hidden from sight.”
“Then why was that Ludwig so anxious about locking the door?”
“He was told to lock the door, and as he is afraid of Herr Johann, he obeyed with great care. To look at him, he is one of those Germans who does not think much for himself.”
Lucy tried vainly to see through the red-curtained windows, prowling restlessly about the lodge, which was no more than a big log-cabin, with the decoration of gables and leaded windows.
“Come, Lucy, what more is there to see?” asked Michelle, turning back to the forest.
Lucy followed reluctantly, exasperated by the teasing uncertainty which made her mind swing back and forth between unanswerable questions. As she walked away from the lodge she caught sight of a slip of paper lying on the snow in front of her. She picked it up and stopped in the moonlight to study it.
“Michelle, look here,” she said, her heart suddenly beating faster. “One of them dropped this. Oh, how hard German is to read.”
Michelle looked over her shoulder and together they began spelling out the sentences scribbled on the paper, which was a page roughly torn from a small note-book, covered with inky memoranda. It ran as follows: