"It's no game," he retorted, in his quick and decisive tones. "It's damn near a tragedy. But now I've found him! I've placed him! And that's the man I'm after!"
"I don't doubt it," I languidly admitted. "But am I to assume that this little bench scene was a sort of, well, a sort of carefully studied out trap?"
"It was the only way I could clinch the thing," he admitted.
"Clinch what?" I asked, conscious of his hesitation.
"Oh, you've got to know," he finally conceded, "now you've seen this much! And I know you're—you're the right sort. I can't tell you everything. But I'm off the Connecticut. She's the flagship of our Atlantic fleet's first division, the flagship of Rear-Admiral Shrodder. I was sent to confer with Admiral Maddox, the commandant of the Navy Yard. Then I was to communicate with Rear-Admiral Kellner, the supervisor of Naval Auxiliaries. It was in connection with the navy's new Emergency Wheel-Code. I can't explain it to you; there's a lot of navy-department data I can't go into. But I was ashore here in New York with a list of the new wireless code signals."
"And you let them get away?"
"There was no letting about it. They were stolen from me, stolen in some mysterious way I can't understand. I've only one clue. I'd dined at the Plaza. Then I'd gone to the ballroom and sat through the amateur theatricals for the French Hospital. I'd been carrying the code forms and they'd been worrying me. So I 'split the wheel,' as we say in the service. I mean I'd divided 'em and left one half locked up at my hotel while I still carried the other half. Each part, I knew, would be useless without the other. How or when they got the half I was carrying I can't tell, for the life of me. I remember dancing two or three times in the ballroom after the theatricals. But it couldn't have been any of those women. They weren't that sort."
"Then who was it?" For the first time a sense of his boyishness had crept over me.
"That's just it; I don't know. But I kept feeling that I was being shadowed. I was almost positive I was being trailed. They would be after the second half, I felt. So I made a dummy, and loafed about all day waiting for a sign. I kept it up until to-night. Then, when I actually found I was being followed, every move I made, I—"
His voice trailed off and he caught at my arm again.