on useless, as they supposed."

"It need not remain useless," said Ivan. "Everything needful I have
brought. The station may be working by to-night. Except that there can
not be anything worth sending for a few hours, it might be set up now.
Better not to use it and risk betraying our secret until there is real
need of it."

Boris turned to Fred to explain.

"We have spies all through East Prussia, and through Galicia and
Silesia, too, of course," he said. "They can find out a good many things
of interest and importance to our army. But it is one thing to obtain
such knowledge and quite another to find some means of sending it back
to our people. We hope, if we are not sent away from here too soon, that
we can make this house very useful that way. It stands high, you see,
and we have a very powerful wireless. The Germans knew this and they
thought they had made it useless."

"Oh, that's great!" said Fred. "Perhaps I can help, too, because I can
send by wireless. I don't know whether I would be much good with the
Continental code, because I've learned only with Morse. But I might be
of some use."

"Another operator will be of the greatest use," said Boris. "I know a
little, a very little, about it. And there is a man here. But I am
afraid that they will come very soon and take every man who is of
fighting age away."

"But your men aren't soldiers!"

"Most of them have served their term in the army. But, even if they had
not, the Germans would take every able-bodied man. That is all right.
We are probably keeping back all Germans who might go home and go into
the army, and all the other countries will do the same with men of a
nation with which they are at war."

"Vladimir has all that I brought," said Ivan, breaking in now. "As for
me, I must go again."

"Go? Now? Aren't you going to stay?"

"No! I have much to do. I may be back. But if I return, I shall come
through the cellar--you understand? There are strange movements of
troops in this region that I cannot understand at all. There are far
fewer soldiers here than I thought there would be. I have not been able
to find traces of more than a single corps of Germans--and we had
expected them to have three or four, at the very least, concentrated in
East Prussia as soon as the war broke out. At Augustowo they were even
expecting an attack."

"Then if there are so few as that, won't we advance?"

"Ah, that I don't know! The Austrians, I hear, are very busy.