and
of the growing danger that England, too, might be involved.

And all of Sunday and all of Monday supplies of all sorts poured through
the little village in an unceasing stream. Motor cars and trucks were to
be seen in abundance, and Fred caught his first glimpse, which was not
to be his last, of the wonderful German field kitchens, in the mighty
ovens of which huge loaves of bread were being baked even while the
whole clumsy looking apparatus was on the move. But it only looked
clumsy. Like everything else about the German army, this was a practical
and efficient, well tried device.

Then suddenly, early on Tuesday, he was told that he was free to go, or
would be by nightfall. And that day all signs of the German army, save a
small force of Uhlans, vanished from the village. That evening,
refreshed and ready for the road again, Fred set out. And that same
evening, though he did not know it until the next day, England entered
the war against Germany.

CHAPTER III

A STRANGE MEETING

As he walked west Fred noticed, even in the night, a change in the
country. It was not that he passed once in a while a solitary soldier
guarding a culvert, as he neared a railway, or a patrol, with its
twinkling fire, watching this spot or that that needed special guarding.
That was part of war, the part of war that he had been able to foresee.
It wasn't anything due to the war that made an impression on his mind so
much as a sort of thickening of the country. Though he had traveled so
short a distance from the Russian border, there seemed to be more people
about.

Great houses, rising on high ground, with small, contented looking
villages nestling, as it were, under their protection, were frequent. He
was, as a matter of fact, in a country of great aristocratic
landholders, the great nobles of Prussia, the men who are the real
rulers of the country, under the Prussian King, who is also the German
Kaiser. And in many of these great houses lights were burning, even
after midnight, when all signs of life in the villages had ceased. The
country was stirring, and there was more of it to stir. Now from time to
time he heard the throbbing hum of an automobile motor. Only one or two
of these passed him, going in either direction, on the road along which
he was traveling. But there were parallel roads, and he could hear the
throbbing motors on these, and often see the pointing shafts of light
from their lights, searching out the