Page:Gibbs--The yellow dove.djvu/249

 “Ja. I obey my orders, that is all. I do not care what others do.”

“Therefore you will shoot me tomorrow.”

“Perhaps,” he shrugged. “I am but an instrument of Providence.” He waved his hand. “But I talk too much, and so do you. It is not seemly in a soldier and a prisoner.”

Hammersley laughed. “You have a fine sense of the fitness of things.”

“Ja. It was so written.”

He relapsed into silence and in spite of efforts on Hammersley’s part refused to speak further. It was only after Hammersley badgered him for his unsociability that he spoke with some asperity.

“I will trouble you to be quiet. When I am relieved, my successor may let you speak and laugh as much as you please. But it is unnatural in a man at the point of death. It would be better if you were saying your prayers.”

“I am sure that you are right. But I still have a few hours. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me the hour at which you are to be relieved—the hour when we are both of us to be relieved?”

The man gazed at him uncomprehendingly.

“After supper.” He finished indifferently, “Eight o’clock, perhaps.”

Hammersley was silent. Two hours or more to wait before a change of guards, and then only a chance that Lindberg would be able to do something. Even then if he managed to get loose, there was left little more than an hour in which to reach the road by which the machine would come from Berlin, and even then what should he do without Doris? His case was desperate. Only a miracle it seemed could make a success