"Go where?" Irving inquired.
Without answering, one of the men picked up the receiver of a telephone and put it to his ear. He gave a number to the operator and soon he was talking to someone. The waiting boy was sure that the person "at the other end" was "the baron."
"Go back to the hotel and remain there for instructions," the man at the 'phone said presently, as he hung up the receiver.
Irving left the building, intending to take a cab to the hotel. He had scarcely reached the street, however, when it suddenly occurred to him that he had no money with him.
"I'll have to walk," he mused. "Well, it isn't very far and I can make it easy before suppertime. But I wonder if I'll get through with this uniform. Well, I'll use my nerve and see what happens."
He started out briskly, but observed as he went that he attracted attention from a good many persons on the street, some of them soldiers. Undoubtedly it was his nerve that got him through, but he could not avoid several times turning his head with whatever nonchalance he could command and stealing glances to the right and left and behind. After looking back two or three times, he became curious regarding the purpose of a middle-aged man in civilian clothes whom he had observed in front of the intelligence building as he came out of the main entrance.
"I wonder if that fellow is following me?" he said to himself, a little nervously.
He walked a few squares farther, then stopped and looked into a tailor show-window. He remained there several minutes, really interested in the display and the prices. With a kind of meditative look, he glanced down the street, but could see nothing of his supposed shadower. Then he moved on again, turned a corner, walked half a square, and suddenly faced about as if he had made a mistake in his direction and must retrace his steps.
The middle-aged man in civilian clothes, who was not more than a hundred feet away, turned almost as suddenly as the boy in Canadian khaki had turned and entered a cafe that he seemed about to pass.
"I'm being followed," muttered the spy with a real chill of alarm. "I wonder what's up. Have they found something wrong with that message? Did those cryptogram readers discover that the message had been tampered with?"