The White Lie. William Le Queux
of mysterious-looking electrical appliances with a tangle of connecting wires, while below the tables stood a row of fully fifty large batteries, such as are used in telegraph work.
On the table, amid that bewildering assortment of queer-looking instruments, all scrupulously clean and highly polished, were two small brass lamps burning behind a long, narrow strip of transparent celluloid whereon was marked a minute gauge. On the edge of the table, before these lamps, was a switch, with black ebonite handle.
As the two Englishmen entered, the German’s eyes caught the small, round brass clock and noted that it was time to make the test—every five minutes, night and day, while the cable was in process of completion.
Therefore, without further word to his visitors, he carefully pulled over the long ebonite handle of the switch, and, at the same instant, a tiny spot of bright light showed upon the transparent gauge.
This the engineer examined to see its exact place upon the clearly-defined line, afterwards noting it in his book in cryptic figures, and then carefully switching off again, when the tell-tale light disappeared.
“Well?” asked Barclay. “How are you getting along? Not quite so much excitement in this place as yesterday—eh?”
“No,” laughed the engineer. “Der people here never see a shore-end floated to land wiz bojes (buoys) before. Dey have already buried der line in der trench, as you see. Ach! Your English workmen are far smarter than ours, I confess,” he added, with a pleasant accent.
“Is it being laid all right?” the airman asked.
“Ja, ja. Very good work. Der weather, he could not be better. We have laid just over one hundert mile in twenty-four hours. Gut—eh?”
As he spoke the Morse-sounder at the end of the green baize-covered table started clicking calling him.
In a moment his expert hand was upon the key, tapping a response.
The ship tapped rapidly, and then the engineer made an enquiry, and received a prompt reply.
Then tapped out the short-long-short-long and short, which meant “finish,” when, turning to the pair, he said:
“Dey hope to get it am Ufer (ashore) at daybreak to-morrow. By noon there will be another through line between Berlin and London.”
Lieutenant Barclay was silent. A sudden thought crossed his mind. At Bacton, a couple of miles farther down the coast, the two existing cables went out to the German shore. But this additional line would prove of immense value if ever the army of the great War Lord attempted an invasion of our island.
As a well-known naval aviator, and as chief of the whole chain of air-stations along the East Coast, the lieutenant’s mind was naturally ever set upon the possibility of projected invasion, and of an adequate defence. That a danger really existed had at last been tardily admitted by the Government, and now with our Navy redistributed and centred in the North Sea, our destroyer-flotillas exercising nightly, and the establishment of the wireless at Felixstowe, Caister, Cleethorpes, Scarborough, and Hunstanton, as well as the construction of naval air-stations, with their aeroplanes and hydroplanes from the Nore up to Cromarty we were at last on the alert for any emergency.
When would “Der Tag” (“The Day”)—as it was toasted every evening in the military messes of the German Empire—dawn? Aye, when? Who could say?
CHAPTER II.
CONCERNS A PRETTY STRANGER.
A short, puffy, red-faced man in grey flannels went past.
It was Sir Hubert Atherton, of Overstrand—that little place declared to be the richest village in all England—and Francis Goring, recognising him, bade a hurried farewell to his naval friend, and with a hasty word of thanks to the German, went out.
The naval airman and the German were left alone.
Again the round-faced cable engineer pulled over the double-throw switch, examined the tiny point of light upon the gauge, and registered its exact position.
“You remember, Herr Strantz, the gentleman who accompanied me here yesterday,” exclaimed Barclay, when the engineer had finished writing up his technical log.
“Certainly. Der gentleman who was a motor-cyclist?”
“Yes. He was found on the road last evening, murdered.”
“Zo!” gasped the German, staring at his visitor. “Killed!”
“Yes; stabbed to death fifteen miles from here, and his motor-cycle was missing. It is a mystery.”
“Astounding!” exclaimed Herr Strantz. “He took tea mit a lady over at the hotel. I saw them there when I went off duty at half-past three o’clock.”
“I know. The police are now searching for that lady.”
“Dey will not have much difficulty in finding her, I suppose—hein?” the engineer replied. “I myself know her by sight.”
“You know her!” cried the Englishman. “Why, I thought you only arrived here from Germany two days ago. Where have you met her?”
“In Bremen, at the Krone Hotel, about three months ago. She call herself Fräulein Montague, and vos awaiting her mother who vos on her way from New York.”
“Did she recognise you?”
“I think not. I never spoke to her in the hotel. She was always a very reserved but very shrewd young lady,” replied Herr Otto Strantz, slowly but grammatically. “I was surprised to meet her again.”
“Montague!” the airman repeated. “Do you know her Christian name?”
“Jean Montague,” was the German’s response as he busied himself carefully screwing down one of the terminals of an instrument.
Noel Barclay made a quick note of the name in a tiny memorandum-book which he always carried in his flying-jacket.
He offered the German one of his cigarettes—an excellent brand smoked in most of the ward-rooms of His Majesty’s Navy—and then endeavoured to obtain some further information concerning his dead shipmate’s visitor.
But Herr Strantz, whose sole attention seemed centred upon the shore-end of the new cable which was so soon to form yet another direct link between Berlin and London, was in ignorance of anything connected with the mysterious young person.
The statement that Harborne—the motor-cyclist who had spoken the German language so well when he had accompanied the pretty young girl the day before to watch the testing—was dead, seemed to cause the cable-engineer considerable reflection. He said nothing, but a close observer would have noticed that the report of the murder had had a distinct effect upon him. He was in possession of some fact, and this, as a stranger on that coast, and a foreigner to boot, it was not, after all, very difficult to hide.
Noel, however, did not notice it. His mind was chiefly occupied in considering the best and most diplomatic means by which the missing lady, who lived in Bremen as Miss Montague, could be traced.
The two men smoked their cigarettes; Strantz pulling over the switch every five