Had Tom really been killed? Had Helen learned his fate by this time? Ruth wished she was back in Paris with her chum that they might institute a search for Tom Cameron.
Nor was the girl of the Red Mill free from worry regarding those at home. Uncle Jabez’s letter, which she had received before leaving the hospital, had filled her heart with forebodings. She had written at once to assure him and Aunt Alvirah that she was returning soon.
But now the time of that return seemed very doubtful indeed. If she was sent to Germany as a prisoner—or kept aboard this steamship which the Germans intended to make into a “mother ship” for U-boats—it might be long months, even years, before she reached home.
Tom had said the war would soon be over; but there was no surety of that. It was only a hope. Ruth might never again see the dear little old woman whose murmured complaint of, “Oh, my back! and oh, my bones!” had become the familiar quotation of Ruth and her young friends.
Aunt Alvirah was dear to Ruth. The girl desired more strongly than ever before in her life to be with the poor old woman again.
She could no longer hear the snapping of the radio, now that daylight had come. Either Krueger, the assistant and traitorous radio operator, had managed to communicate with the commander of the German U-boat 714, or further effort to this end was considered useless now. Another attempt might be made again when night came. Ruth knew it to be a fact that the German submersibles seldom rose to the surface of the sea and put up their radio masts except at night.
It was during the dark hours that those sharks of the sea received orders from Nauen, the great German radio station, and communicated with each other, as well as with such supply ships as might be working in conjunction with the submarines.
If these mutineers were successful in carrying out their plan, and made a junction with the U-boat that carried a crew to supplement those Germans already aboard the Admiral Pekhard, the enemy might succeed in putting into commission a craft that would greatly aid in the submarine warfare.
Thus far it had been so daringly conceived and well carried through that the conspiracy promised to rise to one of the very greatest German intrigues of the war. Its final success, however, rested on time and place. The submarine and the stolen steamer must come together soon, or the latter would surely run across one of the innumerable patrol ships with which the Allies were scouring this part of the Atlantic.
It was noon before the beat of the Admiral Pekhard’s propellers announced that she was again under control. The rolling motion that had finally become nauseating to even as good a sailor as Ruth, was now overcome. The ship plowed through the sea steadily, if slowly.