The wildest storm that had been known on that coast for years had been raging steadily ever since daybreak and was raging still. A howling wind, coming straight over the Channel from France, was piling ink-black seas against an ink-black shore, and all the devils of the pit seemed to be loose in the noisy darkness.
In the suspended dock master’s house the Admiral Superintendent, Sir Charles Fordeck, together with his private secretary, Mr. Paul Grimsdick, and the auditor, Mr. Alexander MacInery, who had been continuing their investigations since morning, were now coming within sight of the work’s end—the only occupants of a locked and guarded room, outside of which a sentry was posted, while round about the house in the stormy outer darkness other guards patrolled ceaselessly. Over the books Sir Charles and the auditor bent at one end of the room; at the other Paul Grimsdick tapped on his typewriter and made transcripts from the shorthand notes beside him. It was at this instant, just when the clock on the mantel was beginning to chime the half-hour after seven, that such a crash of thunder ripped out of the heavens that the very earth seemed to tremble with the force of it, and the three men fairly jumped in their seats.
“Gad! that was a stunner, if you like!” exclaimed Sir Charles with a laugh. “Something went down that time, or I miss my guess.”
Something had “gone down”—gone down in black and white, too, at that—and before another half-hour had passed the mystery and the appalling nature of that something was made known to him and to his two companions.
The operator at the central telegraph office, sitting beside a silent instrument with the key open deciphering a message which a moment before had come through, jumped as they had jumped when that crash of thunder sounded; then without hint or warning up spoke the open instrument, beginning a sentence in the middle and chopping it off before it was half done.
“Hullo! that deflected something—crossed communication or I’m a Dutchman!” he said, and bent over to “take it.” In another moment he got more of a shock than twenty thunderbolts could possibly have given him. For, translated, that interrupted communication ran thus:
“... and eight-inch guns. The floating conning tower’s lateral plates of ...”
And there, as abruptly as it began, the communication left off.
“Good God! There’s another damned German spy at it!” exclaimed the operator, jumping from his seat and grabbing for his hat. “Gawdermity, Hawkins, take this instrument and watch for more. Somebody’s telegraphin’ naval secrets from the dockyard, and the storm’s ‘tapped’ a wire somewhere and sent the message to us!” Then he flung himself out into the storm and darkness and ran and ran and ran.
But the mystery of the thing was all the greater when the facts came to be examined. For those two parts of sentences were found to be verbatim copies of the shorthand notes which Mr. Paul Grimsdick had just taken down. These notes had never left the sight of the three men in the guarded room of that guarded house for so much as one second since they were made. No one but they had passed either in or out of that room during the whole seven days of the inquiry. There was no telegraph instrument in the room—in the house—or within any possible reach from it. Yet somebody in that building—somebody who could only know the things by standing in that room and copying them, for never once had they been spoken of by word of mouth—some invisible, impalpable, superhuman body was wiring State secrets from it. How? And to whom?