“Here we are!” he cried at last, unrolling one of them. “This is a special one, evidently! Someone has marked it all over with red ink.”
Jensen snatched it from him, spread it out. In fact, as Lyngstrand said, it was marked in many places with little red-ink crosses, and under each was a date. Jensen ran his finger across it, stopped just off the south coast of Ireland.
“By all that’s wonderful!” he cried in a slow, long-drawn accent of amazement, raising his head and looking at his companion. “He has marked our wreck! Look!—Fifty-fifty-five North, Nine-fourteen West—and there’s the date under it 20/9/18!”
“Then all those other crosses——?” queried Lyngstrand, in a voice of puzzled interest.
“They must be—— Wait a minute!” He compared some of them with the indications on his list. “Yes! They are wrecks, too—all torpedoed ships—look! this and this and this are marked on the chart! There are others not marked—but there are many more marks than there are ships on our list. They must be all torpedoed ships!”
“But why?” asked Lyngstrand. “Why has he got them all marked like this?—Where did he get this chart, I wonder?”
Jensen glanced to the bottom of the sheet.
“This is a German chart!” he exclaimed.
Lyngstrand stared at him.
“German——!” he began, and stopped. They looked into each other’s eyes in a long moment when suspicion defined itself as almost certitude. For that moment they forgot the sickly rolling of the ship threshing and wallowing on her way to one of those tragic little red crosses. They forgot everything except the slowly dawning possible corollaries of this discovery.