A word, a sign, the slightest aid to such a prisoner, and he would be
as guilty as his cousin. Hammersley knew that he did Udo no injustice
in supposing that 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 learned
that Lindberg’s politics were those that one learns under the open
sky--the eternal peace of Nature, before which war and men, its armed
instruments, were a blasphemy.
Perhaps Lindberg would find a way. But what way? How? Udo von Winden,
too, was aware of the woodcraft fellowship, for often he had made their
duet a trio. Hammersley knew that Udo von Winden as yet suspected
nothing of the services Lindberg had rendered him and he wondered
whether in this pass the ties of kinship would be strong enough to keep
him silent as to the possible capabilities of the old Forester for
mischief in Hammersley’s behalf.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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