Again there was silence, broken only by the wind outside and the occasional voice of the lookout, thin and spent as from another world, and the scarcely audible, long-drawn-out answer from the bridge.
"'To the day,'" said Cattell, sticking his feet upon the shelf, "means to the day the Kaiser will own the earth—emperor of the world. In the German navy, whenever they take a drink they always say, 'To the day.' The day that poor Austrian guy was murdered in Serbia—you know, that prince—and the Kaiser saw his chance to start the ball rolling, all the high dinkums in the German navy had a jambouree, and some old gink—von Somebody or other—said: 'Now, to the day.'
"Well, it got to be a kind of password or slogan, as you might say. If a German spy wants to let another German know that he's all right, he uses a sentence with those three words in. And the sub-commanders are all the time slinging it around the ocean—testing their instruments sometimes, I dare say. It don't do any harm, I suppose. Talk's cheap."
"I wondered what it meant," said Tom.
"That's all it means. When you hear that you'll know some sub-captain is taking a drink of wine or something. When the Emden captured an English ship a couple of years ago, it happened there was a nice, gentlemanly German spy on board the Britisher. The German captain was just going to pack him off with the others as a prisoner when he said something with those three words in it. The German commander understood, and they didn't take any of his things, but just let him stay among the English, and the English weren't any the wiser."
"Huh," said Tom.
Again there was silence.
"I think the other operator is all right, don't you?" Tom asked.
"Sure—is or was. He may have been killed down there and thrown overboard. He was straight as a bee-line. You put Conne on the right track, all right."
"Do you think they'll ever find out about the rest of it?" Tom asked.