Gorman was watching von Moll closely. At the mention of an English ship the man’s eyes flickered suddenly. For an instant his face changed. A shadow of uneasiness appeared on it. But this passed at once, and the look of insolence took its place. Donovan was also watching.
“There may be one or two left,” he said. “I don’t say the one that turns up here will be a first-class battle cruiser; but I guess the men on her will be up to the little job of hanging you, Captain. And they’ll come. Sure. And you’ll be here, just waiting for them.”
“I shall be gone,” said von Moll. “Not that I fear your English ship. But to-morrow I go, and before I go, to-day—I shoot the spy.”
“You misapprehend the situation,” said Donovan. “As a warship of a belligerent Power entering a neutral harbour you are liable——”
Von Moll laughed aloud.
“You intern me,” he said.
“Well,” drawled Donovan, “I do. Say, Captain, you didn’t drop in here just for the pleasure of shooting Smith and carrying off the King. Those weren’t your main purposes. I’m not an observant man, but I did happen to notice as I left my room that your ship was shifting her anchorage a bit. Now I wouldn’t say that it’s particularly healthy, with a wind like this blowing, for a ship to lie right under those cliffs, slap up against the mouth of a cave. I give you credit, Captain, for knowing your trade as a sailor, and I don’t think that you’d put your ship there unless you wanted something out of that cave, and wanted it pretty bad. What’s more, Captain, you want it in a hurry. Now I may be wrong, but it’s my opinion that what you expect to find there is petrol. That so?”
It was plain—so plain that even King Konrad Karl saw it—that von Moll was disturbed. His confidence was not what it had been earlier in the interview. Donovan went on, speaking with irritating deliberation.
“Now when I said that you were interned in the harbour of this neutral State, Captain, I wasn’t counting on your respect for international law. I wouldn’t risk a dollar on that. What I meant was this. The petrol’s not there. Your darned tanks are empty. I’m not defending the action on economic grounds. It was waste. But that petrol is gone. We ran it off.”
“You have not dared,” said von Moll. “You could not dare——No one but a madman would touch the Emperor’s war stores.”