"I had, but he drank himself to death five years or so back, poor fool. Why do you ask?"
"I've a letter for you;" and I gave it him.
He read it and pocketed it with a chuckle of pleasure. "Couldn't be better. Friends of Martha's are friends of mine. Come along."
We had not left the station before we had a proof of our good luck. We were in front of him as we went out and the police sergeant at the door stopped us and was beginning to question me, when he intervened.
"It's all right, Braun. They're friends of mine. A stroke of luck, too," he said with a wink, which suggested there was a mutually satisfactory understanding between them.
We were allowed to pass at once, and he stayed talking to the sergeant for a couple of minutes. "Lucky you gave me that letter when you did," he said when he caught us up. "They've been ordered to keep a special look-out for a couple such as you. But they won't worry you while you're with me."
Ominous news in view of what had occurred just before the train smash outside Osnabrück, and it made me more anxious than ever to get Nessa safely over the frontier.
"You'll bide with me, of course," he said when we reached his house, a flourishing grocer's store in the main street of the little town. "I don't have any one in the house nights. We'll have a bite of food and then talk things over."
He was silent and thoughtful during the meal, and the trend of his thoughts was shown in a question he put.
"There's nothing black against you, is there?"