Sometimes they would vary their tune and pleasantly chide him with being a secret agent of the Kaiser, “Baron von Slade,” and so on and so on. He only smiled in that stolid way of his and went about his duties. In his heart he was proud. Sometimes they would assume to be serious and ply him with questions, and he would fall into their trap and proudly tell about poor old Uncle Job and of how his father had licked him, by way of proving the stanch Americanism of the Slades.
In their hearts they all liked him; he seemed so “easy” and bluntly honest, and his patriotism was so obvious and so sincere.
“You’re all right, Whitey,” they would say.
Then, suddenly, that thing happened which shocked and startled them with all the force of a torpedo from a U-boat, and left them gasping.
It happened that same night, and little did Tom Slade dream, as he went along the deck in the darkening twilight, carrying the captain’s empty supper dishes down to the galley, of the dreadful thing which he would face before that last night in the danger zone was over.
He washed his hands, combed his hair, put on his dark coat, and went up on deck for an hour or two which he could call his own. In the companionway he passed his friend, the deck steward, talking with a couple of soldiers, and as he squeezed past them he paused a moment to listen.
It was evidently another slice of the same gossip with which he had regaled Tom earlier in the day and he was imparting it with a great air of confidence to the interested soldiers.
“Don’t say I told you, but they had two of them in the quartermaster’s room, buzzing them. It’s more’n rule breaking, I think.”
“German agents, you mean?”
The deck steward shrugged his shoulders in that mysterious way, as if he could not take the responsibility of answering that question.