Once or twice he went down at night to the French wire.  All the sentries were friends of his.

“Anybody been through?” he inquired.

The answer was always the same:  Nobody had been through as far as the patrol knew.

“Where the hell,” muttered Recklow, “did those three guys go?”

A nightingale sang as he sauntered homeward.  Possibly, being a French nightingale, she was trying to tell him that there were three people lying very still in the thicket near her.

But men are stupid and nightingales are too busy to bother about trifles when there is courting to be done and nests to be planned and all the anticipated excitement of the coming new moon to preoccupy a love-distracted bird.

On a warm, sunny day early in June, toward three o’clock in the afternoon, a peloton of French cavalry en vidette from Delle stopped a rather rickety touring-car several kilometres west of the Swiss frontier and examined the sheaf of papers offered for their inspection by the young man who drove the car.

A yellow-haired girl seated beside him leaned back in her place indifferently to relax her limbs.

From the time she and the young man had left Glenark in Scotland their progress had been a series of similar interruptions.  Everywhere on every road soldiers, constables, military policemen, and gentlemen in mufti had displayed, with varying degrees of civility, a persistent curiosity to inspect such papers as they carried.

On the Channel transport it was the same; the same from Dieppe to Paris; from Paris to Belfort; and now, here within a pebble’s toss of the Swiss frontier, military curiosity concerning their papers apparently remained unquenched.

The sous-officier of dragoon-lancers sat his splendid horse and gravely inspected the papers, one by one.  Behind him a handful of troopers lolled in their saddles, their lances advanced, their horses swishing their tails at the murderous, green-eyed bremsers which, like other bloodthirsty Teutonic vermin, had their origin in Germany, and raided both French and Swiss frontiers to the cruel discomfort of horses and cattle.

Meanwhile the blond, perplexed boy who was examining the papers of the two motorists, scratched his curly head and rubbed his deeply sunburned nose with a sunburned fist, a visible prey to indecision.  Finally, at his slight gesture, his troopers trotted out and formed around the touring-car.

The boyish sous-officier looked pleasantly at the occupants of the car:  “Have the complaisance to follow me—­rather slowly if you please,” he said; wheeled his horse, and trotted eastward toward the roofs of a little hamlet visible among the trees of the green and rolling countryside.

The young man threw in his clutch and advanced slowly, the cavalry trotting on either side with lances in stirrup-boots and slanting backward from the arm-loops.

There was a barrier beyond and some Alpine infantry on guard; and to the left, a paved street and houses.  Half-way down this silent little street they halted:  the sous-officier dismounted and opened the door of the tonneau, politely assisting the girl to alight.  Her companion followed her, and the sous-officier conducted them into a stucco house, the worn limestone step of which gave directly on the grass-grown sidewalk.