"Not me, my boy. That won't come off. It's your job, and I would not deprive you of the honour and glory of it for worlds." "Ah, Nixie, my dear fellow, we may get the jobs, but all the honour and glory is appropriated by the gentlemen who remain at home. I think we both appreciate that point; but what I want to debate with you are possibilities, actualities, and probabilities. If either of us, for example, were on a small island and we received a warning that a German had had orders to shift us--what would you fear most?" "I should fear nothing." "I don't mean it that way. What I mean is, wherein would you be most careful, or most on your guard?" "He would not get a dog's chance with me, anyway," snapped N. P. Then he added in a petulant tone, "I want some more whiskey and another cigar. It helps one to think better." "How about your line of communications?" I queried. "No living soul would ever get hold of mine," Nixie replied. "Of course not; but don't you see it's a danger, it's a weak spot that can be shot at." "No, I don't," said Nixie, stretching himself at full length on the sofa until it creaked again and again. I was lying on a bed, and the room was in darkness. One can think better in the dark. There is no counter-attraction for the sense of sight to divert any stray thought from the objective in being. The brain becomes more active and more concentrative accordingly. "If you flatter yourself you can touch his lines of communication--after he has been established some time, as the message says, you are apt to get your fingers burnt in the trying. Won't do, Jim, my boy. Try and think of something else." "Bide a wee. Don't you see where we are drifting to? My idea is that we don't try to touch him at all, but that _we make a line of communication in order to be able to break it_. Twiggez vous?" A short silence ensued, which Nixie broke, in an emphasised drawling tone: "You diabolical devil! You mean you will send a note to him which you will take good care is intercepted before he gets it, and in such a manner that the local authorities will do the rest to complete the _coup de grâce_." "That's my suggestion," I exclaimed in a deliberate tone. "Also that's where you come in. You, being a garrison expert, will weave the strands and splice the knot of rope that will eventually hang him. Think it out. Ponder over how it will work." For a long time we both smoked in silence, and we smoked in the dark, which somehow seems entirely different from smoking when one can see the blue clouds drifting. How long the interval lasted neither of us could tell. It seemed an age. Then Nixie Pixie demanded lights up. He wanted to get on with the business. He was keenly interested. His instincts foretold success, and, what was far sweeter to both of us, we imagined one more dictatorial militarist would shortly be driven back to stew in the kultured juice of Teutonic concentrated cruelties, in the Fatherland.