“Couldn’t be anything else. And what a depôt! Look at this inlet—shut in by the headlands, with a perfect sandy bottom: a submarine could come in here and lie in complete safety, and no one would ever dream of looking for her. The cave is not five minutes from the water’s edge, even at low tide—of course, no one could get in to it at all unless the tide were right out: when it is in there’s a foot of water over the entrance.”
“Yes—and at low tide the sand is as hard as iron,” Wally said, excitedly. “They could fill their collapsible boat with petrol tins in ten minutes with two or three men to fish them out of the water and a few more to carry them down. Oh, Jimmy, we’ve got to bag them!”
“Rather!” Jim answered. “The question is, how?”
He thought deeply.
“We must be awfully careful,” he said, at last.
“It’s much too big and important for us to mess up by trying to keep it to ourselves. But there isn’t a policeman in the district, and if there were, he might mess it up as badly as ourselves. We’ve got to get a patrol-boat round to the inlet somehow; you know they’re all round the coast, and it wouldn’t take long to bring one here. But one doesn’t know whom to trust. The Germans may be getting help from on shore, for all we can tell.”
“Of course they may,” Wally cried. “People say there are plenty of pro-Germans about; and they’d pay well enough to tempt these peasantry. But all the people we’ve talked to in Carrignarone seem just as keen as we are about the war. I don’t believe they’re in it.”
“Neither do I, but it’s hard to tell,” Jim answered. “Oh, it’s maddening!—the brutes may come in to-night, for all we know! We can telegraph to the nearest coastguard station, of course, or wherever one can catch a patrol-boat—there are some sort of instructions about submarines and aeroplanes posted up in every post-office. But she might not be in time.”
“I suppose we can trust the postmistress?”
“If we can’t, we’re done,” Jim said. “If only the motor were all right we needn’t trust anyone. Isn’t it simply sickening to think we may do the wrong thing altogether? And if we make a mistake, and the submarine gets away with a fresh supply of petrol, she may sink half a dozen Lusitanias before she is caught!”