nt.

'That's more or less my view,' I said. 'We ought to hold, but it'll be
by our teeth and nails. For the next six months we'll be fighting
without any margin.'

'But, my friends, you put it too gravely,' cried the Frenchman. 'We may
lose a mile or two of ground--yes. But serious danger is not possible.
They had better chances at Verdun and they failed. Why should they
succeed now?'

'Because they are staking everything,' Blenkiron replied. 'It is the
last desperate struggle of a wounded beast, and in these struggles
sometimes the hunter perishes. Dick's right. We've got a wasting margin
and every extra ounce of weight's going to tell. The battle's in the
field, and it's also in every corner of every Allied land. That's why
within the next two months we've got to get even with the Wild Birds.'

The French Colonel--his name was de Valliere--smiled at the name, and
Blenkiron answered my unspoken question.

'I'm going to satisfy some of your curiosity, Dick, for I've put
together considerable noos of the menagerie. Germany has a good army of
spies outside her borders. We shoot a batch now and then, but the
others go on working like beavers and they do a mighty deal of harm.
They're beautifully organized, but they don't draw on such good human
material as we, and I reckon they don't pay in results more than ten
cents on a dollar of trouble. But there they are. They're the
intelligence officers and their business is just to forward noos.
They're the birds in the cage, the--what is it your friend called them?'

'_Die Stubenvogel,_' I said.

'Yes, but all the birds aren't caged. There's a few outside the bars
and they don't collect noos. They do things. If there's anything
desperate they're put on the job, and they've got power to act without
waiting on instructions from home. I've investigated till my brain's
tired and I haven't made out more than half a dozen whom I can say for
certain are in the business. There's your pal, the Portuguese Jew,
Dick. Another's a woman in Genoa, a princess of some sort married to a
Greek financier. One's the editor of a pro-Ally up-country paper in the
Argentine. One passes as a Baptist minister in Colorado. One was a
police spy in the Tzar's Government and is now a red-hot revolutionary
in the Caucasus. And the biggest, of course, is Moxon Ivery, who in
happier times was the Graf von Schwabing. There aren't above a hundred
people in the world know of their existence, and these hundr