"Oh, no, not at all, Dawson," Colonel Fraser said. "After all, had you not gone out on the roof after Farmer, he might have met with a very nasty finish. There were two of them, you know, and—"
The colonel suddenly choked off the rest and gaped wide-eyed at Dawson. And well he might, for Dave's face had suddenly become the color of a four alarm fire, and he looked for all the world like a man seeking a hole into which he could crawl before pulling the hole in after him.
"Good heavens, man, what's wrong?" the colonel cried, and started up from his chair.
"Me, sir!" Dave replied with a grimace. "I guess I should be broken and sent back to the rear rank. I clean forgot. Funny, too, considering I remembered everything else so clearly. Maybe it was that smack on the head."
"Forgot what?" Colonel Fraser demanded. "Come, come, Dawson! What the devil is this all about?"
"This, sir," Dave said weakly, and fished a hand into his tunic pocket to pull out the little black leather book he had taken from the inside of Herr Baron's tunic lapel. "I felt it in his tunic lapel, sir," he said. "But I clean forgot to mention it. Here, sir. It's all in code, I think."
Dawson held it out and Colonel Fraser practically pounced on it like a tiger upon a hunk of meat. He flipped through the pages rapidly, and the look in his eyes got brighter and brighter.
"Praise the powers that be you didn't forget any longer than you did, Dawson!" he snapped. Then, with a quick shake of his hand, "I'm sorry for that, old man. I apologize. You went through enough to make a man to forget 'most everything. It's just that I'm so excited to get hold of this."
"That's all right, sir," Dave said with a smile. "I should have thought of it sooner. You think you can break down that code?"
"With ease," the colonel said, and reached out a hand to press one of a row of buttons on the edge of his desk. "It's one of the numbers codes. The Nazis go all out for that type of code, for some unknown reason. Naturally, though, we're grateful to them for that, because they are so simple to break down. I remember once when—"