“That’s what I make it. We’ll leave here at eleven.”
A dollar and a quarter seemed to satisfy the old woman. Indeed, she obviously had not expected so much, but she quickly hid the money in her purse. Then we took our leave.
The weather had cleared somewhat. It was freezing slightly. The clouds were thinning here and there, and an occasional ray of sunshine drifted over the landscape. It was a regular Christmas picture. Two or three inches of snow covered the ground, reflecting strongly the dispersed light from the sky. Black and sharply defined, the woods were outlined against it or the unblemished white of the fields, where they stretched up the hillsides behind them. Each branch had a ridge of snow on its upper surface, and looked as if it had been drawn with India ink and a sharp-pointed pen on glazed paper. The boughs of the dark-green pines were bending under masses of downy white, lumps of which slid to the ground as we passed. Then the boughs, relieved from part of their load, swayed upward.
“You see why I wanted to be off,” I explained to Wallace as soon as we were out of earshot, glad to drop back into English, since nobody was about. “Our unexpected appearance at the farm was sufficiently extraordinary to make the girls serve it up hot and strong to their friends in Haltern. It’ll fly round the town like bazaar talk, and we’d have had the police coming for us in a couple of shakes. But what now?”
We talked it over. Again Wallace asked me to leave him, but my stern answer silenced his arguments. Again it was he who urged “carrying on,” although he admitted that to walk any distance was out of the question for him. He submitted a plan which did not strike me as particularly hopeful, but it was the best we could do under the circumstances.
We were to go back to a certain town in Germany, get help there, and rest in security until Wallace’s condition and the weather had improved sufficiently to make another attempt feasible.
Our exchequer was at low water, and I had my doubts whether we could reach the town. But we might try.
Sundry groups of people were coming from Haltern; some of them stared rather hard at us. Wallace was improving, and enjoyed the walk, but he seemed very weak, and his feet hurt him so that he limped painfully along.