A discomfited spy
IV
The cruiser made all speed back to Tenedos. There the spy, a forlorn, chapfallen individual, was taken ashore under an escort of marines. Within a short time a drum-head court-martial was constituted. Papers found on the prisoner left no doubt of his occupation; his protest that he was a subject of King Constantine availed him nothing. When the sentence had been pronounced, he recovered his courage and confessed himself a German, and it was as a German soldier that he paid the final penalty.
Burton's exploit was reported to the Admiralty, and some weeks later, when he returned one evening from reconnoitring the Turkish trenches after the landing on the Gallipoli peninsula had been so magnificently accomplished, he was welcomed with the news that he had been awarded the Distinguished Service Medal by the King.
Chapter IV Heading
THE WATCH TOWER
I
A rough, lumbering ox-cart was crawling slowly up a steep winding hill-track in Southern Macedonia. The breath of the two panting oxen formed steam-clouds in the frosty air; slighter wreaths of vapour clung about the heads of the two persons who trudged along beside them. One was an old man, tall, broad, and vigorous, his hair straggling beneath his fur cap, his long white beard stiff with the ice of his congealed breath. The other was a boy, whose face, ruddy with health and cold, showed scantly under a similar cap much too large for him, and above a conglomeration of warm wrappings reaching to his feet and giving him the appearance of a moving bundle, thick and shapeless.
"I am tired, grandfather," murmured the boy, pausing at the foot of a steep ascent.