Page:Gibbs--The yellow dove.djvu/148

 form, for not far from the house and stables, unobtrusive buildings of brick and stone, were aviation sheds, a well-supplied garage and storage houses, which indicated at almost any hour of the day or night a military activity.

Within the farmhouse of Blaufelden, rather late in a night in March a tall iron-gray figure, slender, buttoned to the neck in a close-fitting uniform coat, paced slowly up and down. A plain wooden table stood in the center of the room. It was lighted by a lamp with a green shade and covered with papers arranged in orderly piles. There were chairs, strongly but simply made, and a sad-colored rug, and the walls were decorated with pictures of hunting scenes, while over the stone fireplace in which the pine logs intermittently blazed, there was a colored lithograph of the Emperor of Germany. It was the kind of room, and the kind of furniture one would expect to find in any of the rural districts of the great empire, with the one difference that nowhere was there visible the touch of a woman’s hand. Whatever its original purpose the room at the present moment contained only the essentials of the barest comfort. And the figure of the man in uniform, erect, silent and austere, completed the impression which the barrack-like simplicity of his surroundings created—order, cleanliness, efficiency expressed in the simplest terms.

The German officer stopped pacing the room and touched a bell upon the table. His brows were furrowed and his broad capable hands tapped impatiently among the documents. His summons was answered almost immediately by a man in the uniform of the Jägers, the Imperial Forest Service, who stood silently his heels together awaiting orders.