“Not necessarily, Mr. Bayne,” was the cool response of the Englishman. “The trouble with you neutrals is that you laugh too much at German spies. We warn you sometimes, and then you grin and say that it’s hysteria. But by and by you’ll change your minds, as we did, and know the German secret service for what it is—the most competent thing, the most widely spread, and pretty much the most dangerous, that the world has to fight to-day.”
“You don’t mean,” I inquired blankly, “that you believe me?”
It looks odd enough as I set it down. Ordinarily I expect my word to be accepted; but then, as a general thing I don’t suddenly discover that I have been chaperoning a set of German code-dispatches across the seas.
“I mean,” he corrected with truly British phlegm, “that I can’t say positively your story is untrue. Here’s the case: Some one—probably Franz von Blenheim—wants to send these papers home by way of Italy and Switzerland. Your hotel manager tells him you are going to sail for Naples; you are an American on your way to help the Allies; it’s ten to one that nobody will suspect you and that your baggage will go through untouched. What does he do? He has the papers slipped into your wallet. Then he sends a cable to some friend in Naples about a sick aunt, or candles, or soap. And the friend translates the cable by a private code and reads that you are coming and that he is to shadow you and learn where you are stopping and loot your trunk the first night you spend ashore!”
“I don’t grasp,” I commented dazedly; “why they should weave such circles. Why not let one of their own agents bring over the papers?”
The lieutenant smiled a faint, cold, wintry smile.
“Spies,” he informed me, “always think they are watched, and generally they’re not wrong in thinking so. If they can send their documents by an innocent person, they had better. For my part, I call it a very clever scheme.”
“I believe I am dreaming,” I muttered. “Somebody ought to pinch me. You found those infernal things nestling among my coats and hose and trousers—and you don’t think I put them there?”
“I didn’t say that,” he denied as unresponsively as a brazen Vishnu. “I simply say that I wouldn’t care to order you shot as things stand now. But you’ll remember that I have only your word that all this happened or that you are really an American or even that this passport is yours and that your name is—ah—Devereux Bayne. We’ll have to know quite a bit more before we call this thing settled. How are you going to satisfy his Majesty the King?”
I plucked up spirit.