The captain paused.
There was something about Tom's blunt, plain-speech and slow manner which amused the first officer, and he listened with rather more patience, than the others.
"There was a man tried to get off the ship last night," said Tom. "He——"
"Oh, yes, that was Doctor Curry from Ohio," laughed the first officer indulgently. "I hunted him up on the purser's list—he's all right. He flew off the handle because his baggage didn't come. He's all right, boy."
"The man that started the English scouts," said Tom, undaunted, "says if you want to find out if a person is foreign, you got to get him mad. Even if he talks good English, when he gets excited he'll say some words funny like."
The captain turned upon his heel.
"But that ain't what I was going to say, either," said Tom dully. "Anybody that knows anything about wireless work knows that operators have to have exactly the right time. That's the first thing they learn—that their watches have got to be exactly right—even to the second. I know, 'cause I studied wireless and I read the correspondence catalogues."
"Well?" encouraged the Secret Service man.
But it was pretty hard to hurry Tom.
"The person that put that bomb there," said he, "probably started it going and set it after he got it fixed on the shelf; and he'd most likely set it by his own watch. You can see that clock is over an hour slow. I was wonderin' how anybody's watch would be an hour slow, but if that Doctor Curry came from Ohio maybe he forgot to set his watch ahead in Cleveland. I know you have to do that when you come east, 'cause I heard a man say so."