Who Goes There!

It was the last link! – the last but one.

"A Fleet Lough Swilly. Hecht (Pike) follow birds."

A pike, with little pike following her, was to follow the flight of the birds – the dotted line on his outline map. The dotted line curved up out of Cuxhaven, around the Orkneys and Hebrides and into Lough Swilly —where there was a fleet!

Out of Cuxhaven —Cuxhaven! where lay the German submarines! – A pike, and young! A parent ship and submarines!

The last link was forged; the chain complete – not quite – not entirely. The Japanese dancing girl? And under the number of the sketch, 3, – were three symbols. They were junks with latten sails.

Perhaps there were three Japanese battleships at Lough Swilly. It didn't matter; the chain was complete enough for him.

CHAPTER XI

STRATEGY

As he rose from the sofa, stretching his arms to ease his cramped muscles, Guild became conscious that he was very tired.

He had had little sleep the night before and none at all this night. He glanced at his watch; it was four o'clock in the morning. He went to the port, unscrewed it, and looked out into pitch darkness. There was not a light to be seen on the sea, no flare from any headland, no spark which might indicate a lighthouse, not a star overhead, not a sparkle save for the splintered reflection of the vessel's own lights running over the water alongside, through which foaming, curling waves raced and fled away into the black obscurity astern.

He turned and looked gravely at Karen. The girl still lay unstirring among the pillows on the sofa. One arm covered her head as though to shield it from some blow.

He bent beside her, listening to her breathing. It was quiet and regular, and on her cheek was a flush like the delicate colour of a sleeping child.

He had no mind to disturb her, yet he could not make her more comfortable without awaking her.

All he dared do was to unbutton her spats very cautiously, and slip off the little brown suede shoes.

Over her he laid the blankets from the bed, lightly, then opened wide the port.

His own toilet for the night was even simpler; he folded together the batch of damning papers, originals, his own notes, the forged passports, strapped them with an elastic band, buttoned them inside his breast pocket, reached over and extinguished the electric globe, and, fully dressed, lay down on the stripped bed in darkness.

They had been traveling sixteen hours. Allowing for their detention by the ill-omened Wyvern, they should dock at Amsterdam in five or six hours more.

He tried to sleep; but his nerves were very much alive and his excited brain refused to subscribe to the body's fatigue.

All that had happened since he first saw Karen Girard he now went over and over in his mind in spite of himself. He strove to stop thinking, and could not; and sometimes the lurid horror of the Wyvern possessed him with all its appalling details made plain to his imagination – details not visible from the liner's decks, yet perhaps the more ghastly because hidden by distance and by the infernal glare that fringed the doomed ship like a very nimbus from hell itself.

This obsessed him, and the villainous information which he had wrested from the papers which this young girl had been carrying – information amply sufficient to convict her and to make inevitable the military execution of the man Grätz and the grinning chauffeur, Bush.

And if the wretched maid, Anna, had been arrested with papers similar to these on her person, her case, too, was hopeless. Because the very existence of England depended upon extinguishing forever people who dealt in secret information like that which lay folded and buttoned under his belted coat of tweed.

He knew it, knew what his fate must have been had the satchel been searched on Fresh Wharf – knew what Karen's fate must have been, also, surely, surely!

And had those papers been taken aboard the Wyvern it had not been very long before the simplicity of the cipher had been discovered by anybody trained in code work.

For, in spite of its surface complexity, the cipher was a singularly simple one, even a stupid code, based on simple principles long known and understood in all of their hundreds of variations.

And all such ciphers, granted time and patience, could be solved by the same basic principles. The only function of that kind of code was to so multiply its intricacies and variations that, with a time limit for delivery understood, measures could be taken at the other end to minimize the effect of discovery, the elapsing of the time limit serving as an automatic warning that message or messenger were under forcible detention within the enemy's lines.

Yes, it had been a stupid cipher, and an easy one.

A trained man would have solved it in half the time he had required.

Nothing about the message remained really obscure except the Japanese dancing girl playing with her butterfly and fan, and the lack of information concerning the "fleet" at anchor or cruising near "Lough Swilly" on the Irish coast.

As far as the fleet was concerned, Guild was very confident that he understood. The whereabouts of the British battleship fleet was not known, had been carefully guarded. Without a doubt Lough Swilly was its rendezvous; and the German spy system in England had discovered it and was sending the information to Berlin with a suggestion that submarines "follow the birds," i. e., take that dotted course around the northern Scottish coast, slip south into Lough Swilly, and attack the first line of battle squadron where it had been supposed to lurk in safety, awaiting its call to action. That was as clear as daylight, but the Japanese figure he could not understand.

He was utterly unable to sleep. After an hour's staring into the darkness he rose cautiously, opened the stateroom door and stepped into the lighted corridor.

Here he lighted a cigarette against regulations and began to pace up and down.

Presently the sharp nose of a steward detected the aroma of tobacco, and he came prowling into the corridor.

So Guild nodded and tossed the cigarette out of the open port at the end of the corridor.

"We ought to dock by nine," he said.

"About nine, sir."

"We're lucky to have run afoul of nothing resembling a mine."

"God, sir! Wasn't it awful about the Wyvern! I expect some passenger steamer will get it yet. Mines by the hundreds are coming ashore on the coast of Holland."

"Have you had any news by wireless?" asked Guild.

"A little, sir. They've been fighting all night south of Ostend. Also, we had a wire from London that a German light cruiser, the Schmetterling, is at Valparaiso, and that a Japanese cruiser, the Geisha, and a French one, the Eventail, have been ordered after her."

Guild nodded carelessly, stretched his arms, yawned, and returned to the stateroom, knowing that now, at last, he was in possession of every item in the secret document.

For the Japanese dancing girl was the Geisha, the fan in her hand was the French cruiser Eventail and the butterfly fluttering about her was the German light cruiser Schmetterling– which in that agreeable language means "butterfly," and which no doubt had made an attempt upon the Geisha and had been repulsed.

And this warning was sent that the Schmetterling had better keep her distance, because the Eventail had now joined the Japanese ship, and the two meant mischief.

As for the drawing of the Pike, perhaps on the German naval list there might have been a vessel named the Hecht. He did not know. The symbol of the most ferocious fresh-water fish in Europe was sufficient to indicate the nature of the craft even had the flight of the "birds" not made it unmistakable. There could be no doubt about it that the Hecht with the three little Hechts following had been explicitly invited to cruise in the North Sea and have a look-in at Lough Swilly. And that was quite enough to understand.

He turned on the cabin light, went to Karen's side and looked at her.

She had moved, but only in her sleep apparently. The back of one hand lay across her forehead; her face was turned upward, and on the flushed cheeks there were traces of tears.

But she still slept. He arranged her coverings again, stood gazing at her for a moment more, then he extinguished the light and once more lay down on the bare mattress, using his arm for a pillow.

But sleep eluded him for all his desperate weariness. He thought of Grätz and of Bush and of the wretched woman involved by them and now a prisoner.

The moment he turned over these papers to the British Consul in Amsterdam the death warrant of Grätz and Bush was signed. He knew that. He knew also that the papers in his possession were going to be delivered to British authority. But first he meant to give Grätz and Bush a sporting chance to clear out.

Not because they had aided him. They cared nothing about him. It was Karen they had aided, and their help was given to her because of von Reiter.

No, it was not in him to do the thing that way. Had he been a British officer on duty it had been hard enough to do such a thing.