"One of Panizzi's Town Guardsmen. They put him on at the Convent with another sentry, their first experience of a night on guard. By not being in a hurry to challenge, and keeping his ears open while a conversation of the confidentially-affectionate kind was going on between a Dutchman—a fellow employed in the booking-office at the railway, on whom I've had my eye for some little time past—and his sweetheart, my townie found out for himself something that most of us knew before, and something else that we wanted to know particularly badly...."
"Namely?"
"For one thing, that the town is a hotbed of spies, and that our friends in laager outside are nightly communicated with by means of flash-signals."
"And that's an indeesputable fact. Toch!" No other combination of letters may convey the guttural, "Have I no' seen the lamps at warr'k mysel', after darr'k, at the end o' the roads that debouch upon the veld! The Dutchman would be able to plead precedent, I'm thinking."
"He will have plenty of time to think where he is at present. When the sentry interfered he was instructing the young woman in a simple but effective code of match-flare signals, by means of which she was to communicate with him when he had cleared out. And he had announced his intention of doing that without delay."
"An' skipping to his freends upo' the Borr'der.... Toch!" The network of wrinkles tightened about the sharp little blue-grey eyes of the Chief Medical Officer. "That would gie a thochtfu' man a kind o' notion that a reese in the temperature may be expectit shortly. An' so you—slept soundly on the strength o' many wakeful nichts to come? Ay, that would be the kind o' information ye were badly wanting!"
"You're wrong, Major. The bit of information was this—from the spy to his friends outside: 'No—news—to-night.'" The keen hazel eyes conveyed something into the Northern blue ones that was not said in words: "'No news to-night.' And the sender of that message was a railway man!"
The wiry hairs of the Chief Medical Officer's red moustache bristled like a cat's.
"Toch! Colonel, you will have reason to be considering me dull in the uptake, but I see through the mud wall now. And so the knowledge that ye have no equal at hiding your deeds o' darkness even in the licht o' the railway-yard was as good to ye as Daffy's Elixir. And when micht we reckon on getting notification from what I may presume to ca' your double surpreese-packet?"
He looked at his watch—a well-used Waterbury, worn upon the silvered steel lip-strap of a cavalry bridle, and said: