There was.

Clearly over the wire from Toul came the information:  “Captain Herts’s naked body was discovered an hour ago in a thicket beside the Delle highway.  He has been dead two weeks.  Therefore the man you saw in Delle was impersonating him.  Probably also he was Captain Herts’s murderer and was wearing his uniform, carrying his papers, and riding his motor-cycle.  Do your best to get him!”

Recklow, deadly cold and calm, asked a few questions.  Then he hung up the instrument, turned and went out, locking the door behind him.

A few people were in the quiet street; here an Alpine soldier strolling with his sweetheart, there an old cure on his way to his little stone chapel, yonder a peasant in blouse and sabots plodding doggedly along about some detail of belated work that never ends for such as he.  A few lanterns set in iron cages projected over ancient doorways, lighting the street but dimly where it lay partly in deep shadow, partly illuminated by the silvery radiance of the moon.

Recklow turned into an alley smelling of stables, traversed it, and came out behind into a bushy pasture with a cleared space beyond.  The place was rather misty now in the moonlight from the vapours of a cold little brook which ran foaming and clattering through it between banks thickset with fern.

And now Recklow moved very swiftly but quietly, down through the misty, ferny valley to the filbert and hazel thicket just beyond; and went in among the bushes, treading cautiously upon the moist black mould.

There glimmered the French wires—­merely a wide mesh and an ordinary barbed barrier overhead; but the fence was deeply ditched on the Swiss side.  A man could climb over it; and Recklow started to do so; and came face to face in the moonlight with the French patrol.  The recognition was mutual and noiseless: 

“You passed my two people over?” whispered Recklow.

“An hour ago, mon Capitaine.”

“You’ve seen nobody else?”

“Nobody.”

“Heard nothing?”

“Not a sound.  They must have gone over the Swiss wire without interference, mon Capitaine.”

“You sometimes talk across with the Swiss sentinels?”

“Oh, yes, if I’m in that humour.  You know, mon Capitaine, that they’re like the Boche, only tame.”

“Not all.”

“No, not all.  But in a wolf-pack who can excuse sheepdogs?  A Boche is always a Boche.”

“All the same, when the Swiss sentry passes, speak to him and hold him while I get my ladder.”

“At your orders, Captain.”

“Listen.  I am going over.  When I return I shall leave with you a reel of wire and a cowbell.  You comprehend?  I do not wish anybody else to cross the French wire to-night.”

“C’est bien, mon Capitaine.”

Recklow went down into the bushy gulley.  A few moments later the careless Swiss patrol came clumping along, rifle slung, pipe glowing and humming a tune as he passed.  Presently the French sentry hailed him across the wire and the Swiss promptly halted for a bit of gossip concerning the pretty girls of Delle.