Was it by her connivance that the steel bolt in my machine had been withdrawn, and one of wood substituted?
In this terrible war men laughed, and women wept. The men went out to the front in Flanders with all the fine patriotic sentiment of Britons, singing gaily the various patriotic songs of war. But alas! how many went to their death, and the women wept in silence in the back streets of our dear old London, and of every town in the work-a-day kingdom.
In official circles it was known—known indeed to the public at large—that the Zeppelin menace was a real and serious one. Teddy and I had, in secret, striven our best to discover a means by which to combat these sinister attacks upon our non-combatants.
Yet upon that leather-covered table before me lay that puzzling cryptic message found among the belongings of my missing beloved.
The whole affair was, indeed, a mystery. After a few moments of silence I raised my head and, looking again at Pollock, said:
“All this is, of course, very interesting from the point of view of a police problem, but the hard, real fact remains.”
“What fact?” he asked.
“That I, with my friend Ashton, am in possession of certain discoveries by which we can, under given conditions, bring Zeppelins to the ground.”
The red-tabbed captain curled his lip in a rather supercilious smile.
He was evidently one of those persons imported into the Department after the outbreak of war and, in comparison with Barton as an investigator, was a nonentity.