“Told?” Colonel Welsh echoed sharply. “Told what? What now?”
“I don’t think the man you expect, sir, will arrive,” Dave said slowly. “That’s why I haven’t got my tunic. I left it spread over his face. He crashed in a P-Forty. Told us his oxygen tank had gone haywire. Thought somebody had fixed it. We spotted the crash on the way up here, in the mountains near El Prado. He—died shortly after we landed and got to him. Was his code name Copper? Did he carry this copper disc for secret identification, sir?”
As Dave ran out of breath momentarily, he took the copper disc from his pocket and handed it over. The Colonel took it as though it were a red hot coal. He dropped it on the desk top twice and had to pick it up. Suddenly he picked up the knife and dug the point into the surface of the copper and made a long scratch. Leaning way forward, Dave and Freddy saw that there was silver under the copper. The Colonel dropped the disc on the desk for the third time and looked as if he were going to collapse and come apart in chunks.
“Tell me everything,” he said in a hollow voice. “Give me all the details, every single bit you can remember. Did he say anything? Did he give you any message? Anything that sounded like a code word?”
Dave didn’t answer at once. He half closed his eyes and thought back to that scene in the mountain valley. Then slowly he related word for word everything that had taken place, and every word, or syllable of a word, that had been spoken. When he came to the end he half turned and looked at Freddy.
“Did I miss anything?” he asked. “Leave anything out?”
“Not a thing that I can recall,” the English born youth said. “I’d swear that was all of it.”
“Well, there you are, sir,” Dave said, turning to Colonel Welsh again. “If there were any code words, they must have been that Al, Bar, Cur, and Keys that he spoke. Do they mean anything to you?”
The Colonel plucked hard at his lower lip, and stared hard and savagely at the top of the desk. Finally he made noises in his throat, and shook his head.
“Nothing,” he grunted. “Those four words don’t mean anything to me. I—What’s the matter with you, Farmer?”