The Colonel burst out laughing. "Chew away, old fellow!" he said when he could speak. "In the meantime let's get ready to leave."
"But, Colonel," wailed Porky, who never forgot anything and who had an amount of curiosity that later nearly lost the Colonel one of his "tools," "—but, Colonel, what about the mate?"
"By Jove, I forgot I promised to tell you about him! Well, two or three times Captain Greene thought his traps looked as though some one had been going through them, but he had everything locked up, and special keys made. These were on him night and day. But, you see, the mate knew a trick worth two of that. As he had the run of everything, he simply doped the cup of coffee the Captain always took before going to bed, and, while the man was under the influence of the drug, he simply went through things. Fortunately he was unable to find some papers that he was most anxious to got hold of, and in the meantime the Captain spoke to the ship's doctor about feeling queer and lazy in the morning.
"Because everybody is suspicious of everything out of the beaten track these days, the doctor took to watching things a little on his own hook. He finally analyzed some of the coffee, and that put him on tile right track. A smart lad, that doctor, I can tell you! But it looked as though the mate smelled a mouse. For days the Captain slept normally, while I commenced to get a dose of the same medicine. I did not know what was happening in the Captain's cabin, and no one was watching me. One night the doctor came in just after I had had my last cigar and sat talking to me. Blamed if I didn't go to sleep sitting bolt upright talking to him! He laid me down on the bunk, and my cigar stub came in for analysis. There was more dope! Fact! Things got pretty thick along about then. No one suspected the mate, but we suspected everybody else on the ship almost. Then little things commenced to happen to the ship's machinery. One little thing after another broke down. We seemed to be regular bait for submarines. He had some way of signaling them other than the ship's wireless. It is certain that he never got hold of that, and he did not succeed in putting it out of commission if he tried to do so. We don't know whether he did try or not.
"Then one night or one morning, rather, the doctor was found unconscious just outside the Captain's door. When he came to, he said he had felt uneasy about things, because nothing had happened for several days, so he thought he would take a look around. He was in his stocking feet, and just as he reached the Captain's cabin, he saw a form ahead of him against the white door. He approached cautiously, but could not tell whether the person saw him or not. He did, all right. As soon as the doctor was within striking distance, the shadow struck and down went the doctor. He was hit with some padded weapon a glancing blow that merely knocked him out for a few hours. If it had struck full— well, we would have been shy one good doctor.
"When he was all right again, we put our heads together, and decided to bait the midnight visitor with some bogus papers. Of course we still did not have the least suspicion as to the real source of the trouble.
"That mate was in our confidence, and was at all our consultations. We followed clew after clew suggested by him. And I will say they were good ones. We found part of the missing papers sewed into the bedding roll of a soldier who happened to be saddled with a jaw-breaking German name, the hangover from some ancestors. We trotted him off to the brig, intending to execute him later. Then we found a trinket belonging to the Captain in the pocket of one of the sailors, a Swede. The idea was, you see, to scatter our attention.
"I don't know where we would have ended if it hadn't been for a trick of the Captain's. He told the mate, and everybody else he could get hold of, that he had an ulcerated tooth, and was going to take a sleeping powder. He had some powdered sugar all fixed up. The mate was the only man in the cabin at the time, and the Captain said all at once something came over him as though a voice had shouted, 'Here is the man!'
"Yet not a line of the fellow's face changed. It was just sheer intuition. When the mate left the room, the Captain got hold of the doctor, who was the only one we were really trusting then, and tipped him off. He in turn came to me and I did my part by declaring loudly that I was dead tired and was going to turn in.
"Well, boys, at four this morning we caught our bird. The mate, of all men on the ship! They caught him red-handed, as they say, at the Captain's locker, and the doctor laid him out with a neat little tap from a billy, and when he came to we put him through the third degree. And we overhauled his things and found enough information to get him a string of German crosses a yard long.