THE YELLOW DOVE
were missin’. Jolly fine mess—what? They got off at the next stop, went back to Schöndorf and looked for the papers, but neither there nor at the lodge was there hair or hide of ’em. So they went back to England hopin’ that by some fortunate accident the papers had been destroyed.”
“And these—” asked the girl, “are they?”
He nodded. “To make the story short, I found out where they had gone. My flights to Germany have been made for this purpose. Don’t you see? The papers came into the hands of the Emperor of Germany and he was plannin’ to have ’em sent to the President of the French Republic—England’s ally. It wouldn’t do, you know, to have such papers at such a time fall into the hands of France. Hardly a credit to English diplomacy. What? Might even result in a new entente.”
“But where were the papers in the meanwhile?” she asked.
“That is what took me so bally long to find out. After many hunts away from Windenberg at night, I traced ’em to a Socialist by the name of Gottschalk at Schöndorf, who had received ’em from a pensioner of the Imperial Forest Service, one of the attendants at the huntin’ lodge where the conference was held. Whether he found ’em or stole ’em I don’t know, but I frightened him and he confessed. I was on the very point of stealing ’em from Gottschalk when I found out that he had been writin’ to the Wilhelmstrasse, and when I tried to get ’em they were gone. If I’d got ’em then, you would not be here, Doris, and I”
“But how did you learn what the Wilhelmstrasse proposed to do with them?”
“Oh, that was quite clear. The English Foreign
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