“No signs of a camp, and the only horse here is mine, Tante Gretchen,” Giselle replied, truthfully. “And surely, if anyone had been hunting for food, we would have heard the shots.”
“And surely, if someone had been afoot and on the run, and had come across this cottage, he would have stolen Giselle’s horse,” the old woman concluded. “I think you’ve been chasing a wild goose, at least in this direction.” She surveyed them all. By now, they really were starting to wilt—both from the hot sun they’d been standing in and Tante Gretchen’s forbidding expression. Giselle wondered what she would do next—after all, now she and the Earth Master had all the information they needed . . .
Tante Gretchen, however, had other things in mind. She sighed dramatically, and threw up her hands. “But I can’t let you boys go all the way back empty. How about some beer and sausages? That should keep you filled up all the way back to Mittelsdorf.”
All four of them brightened considerably at that. “Yes, please,” said Hans, and so bits of wood were set up in the yard for them to sit on, and Tante Gretchen brought them wooden cups of beer from a cask that held a brew of her own making. Giselle brought them fried sausages, and they flirted clumsily with her. At least, she thought it was flirtation. They called her a “pretty maid,” and thanked her far more than was necessary for being given a couple of sausages and a bread roll, and were careful not to do so when Tante Gretchen was within earshot. She feigned shyness, but it was mostly to hide the fact that she was so relieved that none of them recognized her, or even considered she might have been “Gunther,” that she felt a little giddy. And while they ate, they dropped plenty more information. How the chief of police was determined to blame someone for the Hauptmann’s death, for instance. How they suspected he was under pressure from his superiors to do so. How no one in the small garrison was at all unhappy that the Hauptmann had died, since their new officer was a vast improvement—“I’d give the man a medal, if it were up to me!”—but it wasn’t up to them, and they felt that “Gunther” was going to hang, guilty or not.
“It’s not right,” Hans said, after enough beer to loosen his tongue. “But the authorities want someone to answer for it, and they won’t take our word for it that the old b—I mean, that the Hauptmann probably died because he got worked up over the idea of another public lashing and broke a vein in his brain. And if it had been me that had been locked in there with him, I’d have run, too.” The other three all nodded solemnly, though Giselle had felt chilled by their revelations.
When they were done eating, they bade a very respectful farewell to Tante Gretchen, a seemingly regretful one to Giselle, and mounted up and rode back down the way they had come.
“Peas,” said Tante Gretchen, as Giselle stood in the yard, peering after them, to make sure they were really going, and not, say, sneaking back to spy on them. Because at this point she was rattled enough to suspect almost anyone of anything.
“Oh! Of course!” she said, starting a little, and went back to her interrupted chore, although she could not see how shelling peas was going to help her situation in the least.
“Well,” the old woman said, going back to her dough as calmly as if they’d never been interrupted at all. “Now we know quite a bit. We know no one will recognize you now that you’re wearing skirts, we know they don’t even know you had a horse, much less that it looked like Lebkuchen, and we know that they have no idea what direction you traveled in. These are all good things.”
“Yes, but . . .” Giselle didn’t want to seem at all ungrateful to Tante Gretchen, but this only worsened her situation. “We also know that the chief of police ordered I be found, which means he has probably telegraphed to every town and village that has a telegraph about me. Every single stranger that turns up in hunting gear to join the shooting contests will be stopped and questioned. So what am I to do now? I must earn some money, somehow, if I am