“In an emergency like this, Colonel R——,” he said, “you must take what Providence sends you. I am no more a German spy than is your son, Alec, who is, probably, at the present moment returning from an afternoon’s march out with the O.T.C. at Cheltenham.”
“Great Heavens,” the Colonel gasped, “how do you know I have a son Alec, and that he is at Cheltenham. Who are you, sir? A renegade?”
“No, Colonel, I’m not,” came the reply. “I’m someone in whom you can place perfect confidence. Trust yourself to me and I will conduct you at once to the cottage in the wood.”
“It’s very extraordinary. I don’t for the life of me know what to make of it,” the Colonel muttered, turning to the group of officers by his side. “What do you advise, Lambert?”
“Under the circumstances, sir,” Lambert replied slowly, “I should trust him. You can have him shot if he leads us wrong.”
“That’s true,” the Colonel murmured, and turning to the stranger, “Did you hear what Major Lambert said? I can have you shot, if you lead us astray. And, by Jove, I will. Take your position at the head of the column. If we are successful, I will see that you are adequately rewarded; if you betray us—you die. Do you understand?”
“I do, Colonel,” the stranger replied, “and I accept your conditions willingly.”
He stepped back, and, at a signal from the Colonel, followed Lieutenant Anderson to the head of the column. A sergeant and a corporal—two old and tried veterans—took up their positions a pace or two behind him, and, at a word from the Colonel, the whole battalion was once more on the move. On and on they went. A dull tramp, tramp, tramp, but in a completely different direction from the one in which they had previously been going. It was all so pitch dark that the corporal and the sergeant had to keep very close to the stranger to see him.
“He marches just like one of us,” the Sergeant whispered, “and yet I kenna hear the sound of his feet. What do you make of him?”
“I don’t know,” the Corporal replied. “I seem to know him, and yet I haven’t seen a feature of his face. Something about him reminds me of the night I escaped from N——. It strikes me, Sergeant, that the cottage the Colonel is after is the very one in which we took shelter.”