“Ask us an easier one,” begged Al Torrance.
“You kids are letting your imaginations run away with you,” put in Phil Morgan.
But in secret the two older boys—Belding and Whistler—did not consider the idea of the spy reaching New York before the Redbird sailed at all impossible.
“That chap with the broken arm we took off the wrecked Zep,” Belding remarked once to Morgan, “told you his cousin, the ‘super-spy,’ was bound for America, didn’t he?”
“He dropped such a hint,” admitted the Seacove lad. “But pshaw! we don’t even know that Franz Eberhardt referred to the fellow we had our adventure with.”
“I know! I know!” muttered George Belding. “But I do wish Willum Johnson, the strong man, had got his hands on that spy.”
“‘If wishes were horses——’”
“Sure! And perhaps it is all right. At any rate, father must have got my letter before he sailed, in which I told him all about losing the papers and warning him about German plotters. Of course he must have got that letter.”
But this thought would have afforded them little comfort had the two friends known that the ship which bore George Belding’s letter of warning had been sunk off the Irish coast by a German U-boat, and that that particular freight or mail for the United States would probably not be recovered until after the war.
The Colodia touched at St. Michael and then at Fayal, receiving in both ports information of the escapades of the new raider. Lastly she had been heard of far to the west.