"My goodness!" he exclaimed, clapping his hand to his appetite region. "I haven't had any breakfast yet."
Which being a sufficiently thrilling climax for the closing of a chapter, we will carry the reader over in suspense to the next.
CHAPTER XXXI
AT WORK IN THE SPY OFFICE
Irving laughed and felt hungrier than ever. The humorous relaxation afforded him great relief from the nervousness of his morning's activities, which had been associated enough with doubt and apprehension to make a coward run and a brave man extremely cautious.
"Well, that's a good one," the young pseudo-boche lieutenant continued in soliloquy. "Here it's nearly 2 o'clock and I haven't eaten my breakfast, and meanwhile I'd forgotten all about it. And I'm as hungry as a bear. I wonder if the British blockade has left enough food in the kaiser's kingdom, to fill up the vacuum inside of me. I think I'll go and find out. That'll be worth-while information to carry back to the Canadian commanders."
So out he went to a restaurant two squares away, where he had small difficulty in getting all he wanted to eat, the only qualification being that he had to pay prices so out of proportion to his income that he instinctively began to figure out the financial problem of how to make his salary carry him through to the end of the month.
"I'm starting out too swell," he concluded after several minutes' reckoning. "I'll have to eat at cheaper restaurants and get a cheaper room. That makes me think I don't know how much my room at the hotel is going to cost me; but it's bound to be pretty steep. Anyway, I don't care, so long as I can pull through on my salary. I don't want to carry any of this money with me when I go back to the other side of No-Man's Land."
Irving did not ask how much the hotel was charging for his room. He merely announced that he would check out that evening after engaging quarters in a comfortable rooming house in a semi-residence district near the Tiergarten. Economy was not the only motive that caused him to make this move. Being now in German uniform, he reasoned that he might be able to throw off of his trail the "middle-aged man in civilian clothes" who had been shadowing him, if he changed his living address also. As a further precaution he made this change late in the evening.
Next morning he reported for duty at the office of "Mr. Herrmann" as he had been instructed by "the baron" to do. Mr. Herrmann proved to be in charge of a suite of offices in the intelligence building in which were employed more than a hundred persons, most of them men, varying in ages from 20 to 70. Irving, for want of detailed information regarding their duties, classed them all as clerks, stenographers and typists at first glance, and this in general was a very good classification, although many of them performed special work that entitled them to ranking positions of greater dignity. And he had not been employed there more than two or three days when he learned that half of them held such ranking positions together with salaries proportionate to the grades of work they did.