"Not so loud," warned Tom. "Some one may hear you, Jack. But tell me what you've learned."
"Why, first of all, Tom, it was Bessie who wrote that warning message I had, and attached it to that little balloon, hoping the favorable breeze would carry it over the front to the French lines. So that mystery is explained. Then, Tom, there are two we've got to take out of this place, instead of just one, as we thought."
"I don't get you!" Tom ejaculated. "What do you mean by two?"
"It's a story in itself, I guess," whispered Jack. "I don't wholly understand it myself. But it seems that Bessie's mother didn't drown after all when the Lusitania went down, as Potzfeldt reported she did."
"You surprise me, Jack! How could that be?" demanded the other youth, thrilled by the startling information.
"Oh, that slick rascal managed it somehow," came the soft if indignant reply. "We'll learn more about it later on. He was picked up by a fishing boat. The lady was temporarily out of her mind, so he gave it out later that she had gone down. How he ever got her over here in Germany beats me. But he managed to do it it seems. And she's been kept a prisoner in this old château of his ever since!"
"But what was his object?" asked the amazed Tom.
"It had a heap to do with finances," Jack told him. "While he held a paper that gave him charge over her daughter over in America, and a part of the big Gleason fortune also, there were valuable papers he had been unable to get his greedy hands on. She absolutely refused to tell him where they were hidden. As a last resort what did the wretch do but go all the way back to America."
"You mean to fetch his ward across with him, Jack?"
"Yes, just to use Bessie as a lever to compel her mother to give up those valuable papers. I always said, you remember, Tom, that man was hugging some secret to his heart. And so he was."