"Well, what of him? He's gone, I hope."
"First train to Madrid, General; but he left a message for you, sir, to be delivered after he'd gone, he said."
"A message?" General Crandall was perplexed.
"As Sergeant Crosby had it and gave it to me to repeat to you, sir, it was, 'Arrest the cigar girl calling herself Josepha. She is one of the cleverest spies of the Wilhelmstrasse.'"
CHAPTER XIII
ENTER, A CIGARETTE
Mr. Joseph Almer, proprietor of the Hotel Splendide, on Waterport Street, was absorbed, heart and soul, in a curious task. He was emptying the powder from two-grain quinine capsules on to a sheet of white letter paper on his desk.
It was noon of Wednesday, the day following the arrival of Captain Woodhouse. Almer was alone in the hotel's reception room and office behind the dingy glass partially enclosing his desk. His alpaca-covered shoulders were close to his ears; and his bald head, with its stripes of plastered hair running like thick lines of latitude on a polished globe, was held far forward so as to bring his eyes on the work in hand. Like some plump magpie he appeared, turning over bits of china in a treasure hole.
A round box of the gelatine cocoons lay at his left hand; it had just been delivered by an Arab boy, quick to pick up the street commission for a tuppence. Very methodically Almer picked the capsules from the box one by one, opened them, and spilled the quinine in a little heap under his nose. He grunted peevishly when the sixth shell had been emptied. The seventh capsule brought an eager whistle to his lips. When he had jerked the concentric halves apart, very little powder fell out. Instead, the thin, folded edges of a pellet of rice paper protruded from one of the containers. This Almer had extracted in an instant. He spread it against the black back of a ledger and read the very fine script written thereon. This was the message:
"Danger. An informer from Alexandria has denounced our two friends to Crandall. You must warn; I can not."