He was likely to prove, in addition, a spy so cunning as to be not so easily captured as the Commander imagined. Did they think, indeed, that Heinrich Hilker, a man who had spied in many countries and under varying conditions, would be so easily trapped? Why, even then, as the order was issued for an early morning muster of the whole division, Heinrich heard the news. At the moment he stood at the entrance to a tent, for all the world as though he had just turned out to see whether daylight were coming. He stretched his arms and yawned, and, seeing a sergeant about to pass, hailed him.
"What time o' day?" he asked.
"4.30."
"Be daylight in another hour," he suggested, smothering another yawn.
"Yep, an hour or a little more. There's a muster a half an hour after that—six o'clock sharp—every man-Jack of the division."
"A muster! A blame nuisance! What for?"
"Dunno! It's a blame nuisance, as you say—some! But guess they've got a reason!"
Heinrich guessed also. He stood outside the tent stretching his arms until the man was out of sight, and then, looking about him for a few moments, he sped off into the darkness and presently disappeared from sight. Yet, when the muster was held in the misty early hours of the morning, Heinrich, though absent, though not to be found among the American ranks, was yet within sight of the parade. In a little corner of a church tower, hidden beneath the tiles of the broken roof, lying full length on a truss of straw, placed there for him by a peasant who was his accomplice, he watched the whole scene and chuckled.
"My brave Alphonse!" he said, as the parade he witnessed was presently dismissed. "You see that! These American swine, eh? And you chuckle! Ha! where are you, Alphonse? You are a sly, slippery, cunning fellow."
But a few minutes before, the figure of a man had actually been beside Heinrich, staring out between the cracks in this tower, and pointing and gibing, and then, as the German turned, the man was no longer there. Now, however, as he called, there was just the merest trace of a sound on the rungs of the ladder which led to this loft in the tower of the church, and half a minute later a long, hooked-nosed visage was thrust over the edge of the floorway, up through the square opening—a leering, bleary, pock-marked face, crowned by a head of hair which was thin at the temples and decidedly so on the crown—the face of an inebriate, followed by the figure of a man who had once upon a time been powerful. Now, creeping and cunning and noiseless in his movements, it was clear from his attenuated frame, from his big bones and joints, his sunken flanks, his thin calves, and his claw-like hands, that the man was no longer what he had been. And what was his nationality? French? Bah! The man spoke like a peasant of those parts, and yet trace his history back.