“Why, Katie,” Dick said, “that’s no spy’s work, that’s a joke.” But it took much explanation for Katie to see it. “Don’t buy a bond”—that to her was treason. “The Kaiser says so,” more treason. Finally she gave in to Dick’s persuasion, and she went off saying, “It’s a fool I am,” but Dick always had a feeling that he had not quite convinced her.
Katie’s watchfulness and her self-imposed task of bringing every suspicious person to justice was known to everybody in Sabinsport. It had long been known particularly well to the strange young man who had appeared in Reuben Cowder’s office early in March and warned him of approaching changes in the force at his munition factory. Other things concerning Katie were known to this same young man, and one of them was that she had a room to rent on her first floor.
The floor opening onto the upper level, ever since Mikey went away, had been rented by Mr. Max Dalberg. Downstairs, opening onto the lower level by a little side door, was an extra room which Katie had said recently for the first time to herself she would rent if she had a chance. She had not put out a shingle but she had told her neighbors, so it was not surprising that one morning when she was busy in the rectory that there should have been a knock at the door, a call for Mrs. Flaherty, an inquiry about a room to rent, and a bargain promptly made.
Katie took to the applicant—a jolly, clean, keen-eyed American boy, older than Mikey but with something about him that suggested Mikey. Himself a grand fighter, too, Katie had said to herself. Her new tenant was John Barker, by name.
“I’m only at home through the daytime, Mrs. Flaherty,” he said. “I’m in the mines, an engineer, running night shifts. I won’t be in before eight or half-past in the morning for I get my breakfast over there. I want a quiet place to sleep through the day, and I will be off by five in the afternoon. If you want any references I can give them, and here’s a week’s rent in advance.”
And Katie, to whom paper references meant little, and the look in a man’s eye everything, had said, “It’s all right, Mr. Barker, I will have the room ready to-night and you can come in in the morning. You will find the key with Mary O’Sullivan next door.”
And Katie that night, when she went home, made the little room clean and tidy, put the key to the outside door with Mary O’Sullivan, describing her new tenant with enthusiasm.
He proved a good tenant, none better. He came as regularly as the morning and went as regularly. His presence in the house was quite unknown to the gentleman who occupied the top floor, and who had long congratulated himself on his luck in having a lodging over which he had such absolute control. As a matter of fact there was only one entrance to his upper floor, save that on the street. A rude little staircase ran up from the kitchen into a tiny square hall, and a door opened into the room which had been Mikey’s. It was by this door that every afternoon, when Katie came home from Dick’s, she went upstairs to make the rooms. Max’s habits were very regular—exemplary person that he was. He was at the munition works at seven and never left until five. His doors were carefully locked behind him. He had no need to concern himself about anything in Katie Flaherty’s house.
But in this secure dwelling, strange things were going on in those hours when Max was at his laboratory and Katie at the rectory. Every morning, promptly at 8:30, a quiet, tired looking young engineer unlocked the side door of Katie Flaherty’s house, and drew his curtains.
But once the curtains were drawn, an extraordinary transformation took place. The fatigued face became relaxed, the heavy, dirty boots were replaced by the softest of slippers; two very dangerous looking weapons were slipped into his belt; and in the big pockets of his soft sack coat something that looked like a pair of handcuffs. And then, with keys in hand, he quietly slipped up the back stairs, opened this door and began an investigation of the belongings of Mr. Max Dalberg, Reuben Cowder’s “wonder of the laboratory.”