“Our information is that General von Hindenburg is many miles from where you are,” he flashed back.  “Are you sure of your facts?”

“Absolutely sure,” Fred answered.  “Do you want the exact location of the house used as headquarters?  I can describe it for you if you have the village shown on your map.”

“Yes.  Give it to me,” came the answer.

Before he finished his wireless talk, Fred felt that the Russian operator did not fully trust him.  Nor did he blame him.  He knew the excellence of the German spy system; he had heard a good deal about it from Boris, and, for that matter, before he had even seen Boris at all.  So he only laughed, though he hoped that this feeling would not prevent the Russians from using the information he had given.  He could not see just how it was to be useful to them, however.  Possibly the fact that von Hindenburg was here, and not to the south, was the important thing.

By this time it was growing dark, and Fred decided that it would soon be safe to try to throw the cord up to Boris’s window—­as safe, at least, as it would ever be.  He got a bundle of clothes from Vladimir, and this time he determined to travel through the tunnel, since he knew that if he went by the outside route he would have trouble in getting through the sentries.  Luck was with him again.  He was nervous as he opened the door and came out into the night, but there was no one about.  At a little distance he could hear steady footsteps; evidently a sentry was walking his beat near by.  But Fred’s scout training had taught him how to move quietly and he slipped through the gully and toward the house without raising an alarm.

Once he was on the right side of the house, he found shelter in a clump of bushes, where, unseen himself, he could study the situation.  His first thought was of the house.  He soon found the window of Boris’s room.  Immediately below it were the windows of corresponding rooms, and one of these was lighted.  This made him pause at once.  For the rope to be drawn up, or for Boris to show himself before that lighted window for even the moment of a swift descent, might well be fatal.  That was one point, but he speedily devised a way of overcoming that.

There was another danger to be considered, and it took him longer to calculate this.  Naturally there was a patrol about the house.  Fred himself had had to avoid the sentry, making his steady round.  Now he lay in the bushes and timed the man’s appearances for nearly half an hour.  There were two men, as a matter of fact, and they met on each circling of the house.  Fortunately, their meeting came at the very end of the garden.  So Fred was able to work out a sort of mental chart of their movements, and to confirm it by timing them.  The two sentries met on his side of the house at the eastern end.  The first walked west, the second north.  The one who walked west had his back to Fred and to the window where Boris waited for a minute.  Then he, too, turned north.  Then came a blessed interval of just a minute, in which neither sentry was in sight.  Altogether, there was a period of almost two minutes in which no eye would be fixed on Boris’s window, unless the sentry chanced to turn and look back.