“Come with me, boy,” he said.  “We are short of servants in the house here.  You will do.”

For a moment he was indignant, but then his heart leaped happily.  If he was taken into the house as a servant, he could find out all and more than he had hoped, and that without risk.

CHAPTER IX

“THERES many A slip—­”

Once inside the house, Fred found a scene of orderly confusion.  That is, it looked like confusion to him, but he could see that, for all the bustling and the hurrying that went on, everyone knew just what his part in the work was.  Telephone bells were ringing all the time, and Fred noticed now that wires entered the house through the dining-room window.  Evidently a field telephone system had been installed and connected this house with a whole region, of which, in a military way, it seemed to be the brain.  Then Fred heard a voice that he recognized at once, and started at the sound, until he placed it as that of the captain who had taken Boris away, and remembered that the captain had not seen him, even before he was disguised.

Fred’s work, he soon found, was simplicity itself.  He was to do the bidding of any officer.  He was sent on errands, from one part of the house to another; often he carried written messages, handed to him by staff officers, to the room in which three telegraph operators were hard at work.  Generally speaking, he was there to do odd jobs and make himself generally useful.  Luckily, he was taken for granted.  Everyone seemed assured that he was one of the village boys, pressed into service because he happened to be the first one to come along.

But for the first hour or so it was impossible for him to make any attempt to discover if Boris was still in the house.  He was too busy, and he dared not spoil his opportunity to learn something really worth while by seeming to spy about.  He was rewarded before long for his patience, for just as he was beginning to despair, an officer spied him in a moment when he was not actively engaged upon some errand.

“Here, boy,” called the officer, “take this tray!”

Fred took a tray from a soldier who was holding it awkwardly.

“Take it upstairs to the room on the third floor where a sentry is on guard.  He will let you in.  When the prisoner there has finished his meal, return with the tray to the kitchen.  Do not let any knife or fork or spoon stay in the room when you go.  So you will make yourself really useful and release a man who can do things for which you are too young.”

It seemed to Fred, as he started upstairs with his tray, that this luck was almost too good to be true.  He scarcely dared to hope for what had seemed to him the inevitable explanation of his errand.  But when the sentry opened the door of the locked room, and he looked in, he saw Boris sitting dejectedly on the side of a bed.  It was all he could do to suppress a cry of delight, but he managed it, and he was hugely tickled as he saw Boris’s indifferent glance at him.  His disguise must be good, or Boris would have known him.  He put the tray down, and then walked to the window.  He looked down first, and then up.  Then with a grin, he turned to his cousin.