Page:Gibbs--The yellow dove.djvu/246

 any help from such a source was out of the question. If Udo had been caught in England as Hammersley was caught in Germany, Hammersley knew that he could do nothing to save him.

But Lindberg! Here the case was different. It was Lindberg whose life Hammersley had saved three years ago in this very forest, when the Forester had stumbled and fallen in the path of an angry boar who would have gored him to death, if Hammersley had not shot the beast. Lindberg the Forester it was, who, in his hours off duty, had been Hammersley’s chosen companion in many a hunt up through the rocky gorges of these very mountains, every stick and stone of which he knew as he knew his own rugged face in the mirror. It was Lindberg who had been so useful in keeping him informed of the exact state of affairs at Blaufelden. It was Lindberg who had learned of the microphone that von Stromberg had installed and it was Lindberg who had listened at the receiver upstairs in von Stromberg’s room to the conversation when the Councilor had told Captain Wentz the nature of the documents from Berlin and the hour of their arrival.

Already Lindberg had repaid a hundredfold the debt of Hammersley’s service and it was quite possible, now that Hammersley’s actual mission had been discovered, that he would take to cover, his mind clear in the thought that he had done all that could be expected of him. But there was a warm affection between the two, born of many a long day in the open and many a night by the campfire where the old man had taught him the Foresters’ secrets of the trees, the birds in their branches and of the many four-legged things that scurried beneath them. They had often talked, too, of many other things, and Hammersley had