"Phew! So that's how they spy out and trap deserters from their Reserve and Landwehr. Clever—uncommonly! Possibly it's not business to tell you, but you've given away a genuine bit of information. And as a lesson in caution for the future, I shall annex your nugget—do you hear? In return—I've a pass for an extra groom who has shot the moon with three weeks' double pay in advance, the cowardly beggar! And—supposing you're not too proud—I'll take you with me as far as Mayence."
"I don't know how to thank you, sir!"
"Leave thanking for the present." He pulled out the gold chronometer, secured by its twisted thong. "Ten o'clock, and here come Towers and Brotherton, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, 'with a kind of confession in their looks which their modesties have not craft enough to color.' No news to be had? No starting for Mayence before twelve sharp, in spite of honied entreaties lavished on the authorities?"
"Deuce a scrap!"
"Devil a minute!"
They threw themselves upon chairs, hot, dusty and panting. They had got their papers back, countersigned, from a kind of understrapper, after, to do him justice, very little delay. But of intelligence, not a modicum was obtainable, except that the Emperor was said to be close to the frontier near Saarbrück at the head of the Imperial Guards.
"Though they've been saying that for forty-eight hours," grumbled Tower, "and I'm dam' if I call it anything but Ancient History."
At which candid confession the Doctor's mouth twitched under the thick, curling mustache of rusty iron-gray. He said, his quick eye noting an excited stir and bustle about the thronged entrance of the hotel, and the crowding of officers about another, who had a paper in his hand:
"Those officers have heard—something that is not Ancient History. And look at the fellows who were eating at the tables in the windows; they've something tastier to discuss now than the landlord's indifferent grub!"
It was true. In the long dining-room, in the restaurant, and in the reading-room, which had been converted into a temporary coffee-room, men were swarming like bees and buzzing like them, while detached, staccato sentences shaped out of the buzz.