Irving arose at daybreak next morning. In spite of his uneasy night, he was much refreshed and felt confident that he had good command of his nerves. This was an important reassurance, and the young spy decided that he would not let it get away from him.
"I'll tie it down with a string of self-confidence and a knot of determination," he told himself resolutely.
This way of putting the idea amused him a little and added to his strength of purpose.
"First of all, how about breakfast?" he asked himself as he combed his hair with a pocket comb which he carried with him and regarded the puzzled wrinkling of his brow in the wash-room mirror.
"Well," he added, as he returned the comb to its case-and the case to his pocket, "I guess I'll have to go without breakfast. Not a very comfortable idea, either, but there seems to be no way out of it. That fellow Vollmer seemed to take a malicious delight in forgetting every one of my comforts. I wish I had something to do between now and 9 or 10 o'clock. I don't like to stroll around any more than is necessary in this uniform."
But there seemed to be nothing for him to do except remain in his room and wait for his wristwatch to tick several thousand seconds. It seemed, too, as if all of these ticks hammered away right in the center of his brain, always striking on the same pin-point spot and irritating his nervous system almost beyond endurance. At 8:30 o'clock he decided to wait no longer and grabbed his hat and hastened from the hotel. Without making particular note of his surroundings, he set out at a brisk pace for the building that contained the intelligence offices which he had visited the day before.
Meanwhile he had forgotten all about the middle-aged man in civilian clothes who had followed him through the streets. It had not occurred to him that the fellow might return to the hotel and continue his espionage next day. He had presumed that the man would make a report to his superiors and the affair would be taken up again in some other manner if, indeed, there should be any resumption at all of the investigation.
"If I'm suspected of being a British spy, they'll probably arrest me when I report back at the baron's office," he mused before leaving the hotel.
After walking a square or two, Irving slowed his pace considerably, realizing that it was still early and that he probably would have to wait an hour or more for "the baron" after his arrival at the latter's office if he continued to walk as rapidly as he had started. To "kill" a little of the surplus time ahead of him, therefore, he stopped and looked into several shop windows, the last being an "eat shop," which teased his appetite not a little and caused him to feel that he could chew a piece of army meat of the consistency of leather, or rubber, with a good deal of relish at that moment.
The suggestion contained in the word rubber, for which there seemed to be no appropriate reason in connection with a steaming breakfast, revived his burlesque musings of the night before as he was drifting away into a nervous slumber. The semi-dream pictures in his mind of a government sleuth on rubber heels brought him back to his startling experience of the previous day so suddenly that he turned almost involuntarily and gazed in the direction from which he had come.
If he had been a person of superstitious susceptibility wandering through a country cemetery in the ghostly moonlight, he could not have been more apprehensively thrilled by what he saw. Half a square up the street was the mysterious middle-aged man in civilian clothes who had followed him from the intelligence building to the hotel.
"Gee! I must hustle along and get to the baron's office as soon as possible," he decided as he quickened his steps. "I must bluff this thing through as I never bluffed before. I must put the matter up to him and find out what it means."
He hurried on more rapidly than the pace with which he started from the hotel and did not slow up again until he reached the building in Wilhelmstrasse for which he was headed.
He decided not to pretend to be ignorant of the fact that he was being followed; indeed, he would have retraced his steps and accosted his shadower if it had not seemed probable that such a course would have been futile. So, just as he was passing through the pillared entrance, he turned and looked again up the street.
Yes, there he was, 150 feet away, sauntering along as if his greatest object in life was the sniffing of the damp April ozone. One look was enough, and the shadowed spy entered the building and walked up the flagstone stairway.
"I'm going to find out who that fellow is and what he's up to if such a thing is possible," he resolved. "I'm going to put it up to the baron right now and if I'm under suspicion I'll soon find out and, I hope, drive the suspicion away."
The young spy was now exhibiting real qualities necessary to make a successful army secret service man.