"Of course not; but don't you see it's a danger, it's a weak spot that can be shot at."
"No, I don't," said Nixie, stretching himself at full length on the sofa until it creaked again and again.
I was lying on a bed, and the room was in darkness. One can think better in the dark. There is no counter-attraction for the sense of sight to divert any stray thought from the objective in being. The brain becomes more active and more concentrative accordingly.
"If you flatter yourself you can touch his lines of communication—after he has been established some time, as the message says, you are apt to get your fingers burnt in the trying. Won't do, Jim, my boy. Try and think of something else."
"Bide a wee. Don't you see where we are drifting to? My idea is that we don't try to touch him at all, but that we make a line of communication in order to be able to break it. Twiggez vous?"
A short silence ensued, which Nixie broke, in an emphasised drawling tone: "You diabolical devil! You mean you will send a note to him which you will take good care is intercepted before he gets it, and in such a manner that the local authorities will do the rest to complete the coup de grâce."
"That's my suggestion," I exclaimed in a deliberate tone. "Also that's where you come in. You, being a garrison expert, will weave the strands and splice the knot of rope that will eventually hang him. Think it out. Ponder over how it will work."
For a long time we both smoked in silence, and we smoked in the dark, which somehow seems entirely different from smoking when one can see the blue clouds drifting. How long the interval lasted neither of us could tell. It seemed an age. Then Nixie Pixie demanded lights up. He wanted to get on with the business. He was keenly interested. His instincts foretold success, and, what was far sweeter to both of us, we imagined one more dictatorial militarist would shortly be driven back to stew in the kultured juice of Teutonic concentrated cruelties, in the Fatherland.
With lights burning and pens and papers before us, we soon filled in necessary details of the plan of campaign; chuckling the while in anticipatory satisfaction at the debacle to come.