"In here!" exclaimed Peter, and literally bundled his brother into an open doorway, then slammed and bolted the door.
"We've five minutes fresh start at least," he said hurriedly. "Come along through. There's a boat at the end of the garden."
Even as they made their way through a spotlessly-clean kitchen, to the consternation of a portly woman-servant, Malcolm could not help noticing the resplendant copper vessels on the shelves. Evidently the owner of the house had not conformed to the Imperial German Government's order to surrender all metal suitable for the manufacture of munitions.
At the farther part of the garden two men were sitting at a table. One was a rotund pleasant-faced man of about fifty who was puffing sedately at a long-stemmed, huge-bowled pipe. The other, holding a large cigar in his hand, was certainly not far off sixty years of age, clean-shaven, 'and dressed in a manner more like an Englishman than a German. Before the smokers could rise from their seats the two fugitives were past and dropping over the low wall into a boat.
"Push off, Malcolm!" shouted Peter, as he gripped the oars.
"What's your hurry, you fellows?" asked a deliberately cool voice from above. "Can't you behave yourselves in a neutral country? What's the trouble?"
Leaning on the wall, his grey eyes twinkling with suppressed mirth, was the elder of the two men who had been sitting in the garden. At his elbow was the other, gesticulating and protesting volubly at the bull-in-a-chinashop tactics of the intruders.
"Neutral country?" repeated the astounded Peter. "What do you mean? Where are we?"
"In Holland. To be more precise, in the town of Roermonde," was the surprising information. "You've done a bunk from Germany, I presume? I thought so. It's all right, Mynheer van Enkhuizen," he continued in English, addressing the Dutchman; "these are some of my compatriots who have escaped from Germany."
"In that case it does matter not at all," replied the owner of the house in the slow hesitating manner of foreign-spoken English. "It is of no consequence that your friends have trampled through my dwelling and over my garden. Excuse me. I will inform the noisy crowd also that it is not of any consequence, and then I will instruct Katje to provide food for your military friends."