"Crumbs," who was kneading dough at his board, turned about.
"Don't mind me," said Sinclair cheerfully. He stepped into the bakehouse and held a good-humoured conversation with "Crumbs." He spent a quarter of an hour in cheery garrulity, and when he went away, "Crumbs," from the darkness of his lair, watched him stride across the asphalt yard towards the officers' quarters. The man's eyes narrowed as he recalled that Sinclair had been peering at him out of John's quarters a little while earlier. When his work was finished that night "Crumbs" cleaned himself and had a chat with Ewins, who was smoking a pipe on the step of the old railway carriage that formed both men's quarters in the upper fort.
"Who's this new captain we got?" Private Sims asked.
"Don't know," answered Ewins. "He's done his bit, seemingly." He was referring to Sinclair's Mons ribbon and the D.S.O.
"We seem to be getting a lot of changes lately," pursued "Crumbs." He had removed the flour from his eyelashes and moustache, and his lean, sallow, discontented face and glassy, strange-looking eyes struck Ewins as particularly unpleasant. Sims was generous in handing cake and so forth whenever chance occurred, but he was not liked in the fort. The other men could not get the hang of him, and when he rose presently and shambled away into the fort buildings, Ewins, who was expecting every minute to be called by Sinclair, was not sorry.
For an hour or two that evening "Crumbs" pottered about. He gossiped in the kitchen, had a talk with the sergeant controlling the leave-book, found his way into the mess-room, and complained to Parkson, who was adjutant, on the quality of the flour being supplied from outside. After that the Colonel met him in the corridor, where he had no right to be, near Sinclair's bedroom. And, as the Colonel was the one man in the fort, outside Sinclair, who knew the truth about him, he questioned "Crumbs" somewhat sharply.
"What are you doing here, Sims?"
"I have just been in, sir, to complain about the flour to the adjutant. I wasn't thinking," he went on, with a perfect semblance of an absent-minded air, "I wasn't thinking, and I came here instead of going along to the right——"
"You ought to know the run of the fort by this time," said the Colonel, and passed on.
It was an hour later that Sims, who had made a shattering discovery, sat in his cubicle of the railway compartment, with the door locked, and penned a rapid letter. He wrote fluently, in the manner of a man whose education has been thorough and efficient. His lips twitched slightly as his pen sped over the paper. There was a tense expression upon his sallow face, and he pulled nervously at his long, drooping moustache.