t Dollmann?' I asked.

'Of course,' said Davies, 'what about him? I didn't get at much that
night. It was all so sudden. The only thing I could have sworn to
from the first was that he had purposely left me in the lurch that
day. I pieced out the rest in the next few days, which I'll just
finish with as shortly as I can. Bartels came aboard next morning,
and though it was blowing hard still we managed to shift the
'Dulcibella' to a place where she dried safely at the mid-day low
water, and we could get at her rudder. The lower screw-plate on the
stern post had wrenched out, and we botched it up roughly as a
make-shift. There were other little breakages, but nothing to matter,
and the loss of the jib was nothing, as I had two spare ones. The
dinghy was past repair just then, and I lashed it on deck.

'It turned out that Bartels was carrying apples from Bremen to
Kappeln (in this fiord), and had run into that channel in the sands
for shelter from the weather. To-day he was bound for the Eider
River, whence, as I told you, you can get through (by river and
canal) into the Baltic. Of course the Elbe route, by the new Kaiser
Wilhelm Ship Canal, is the shortest. The Eider route is the old one,
but he hoped to get rid of some of his apples at Toenning, the town at
its mouth. Both routes touch the Baltic at Kiel. As you know, I had
been running for the Elbe, but yesterday's muck-up put me off, and I
changed my mind--I'll tell you why presently--and decided to sail to
the Eider along with the 'Johannes' and get through that way. It
cleared from the east next day, and I raced him there, winning hands
down, left him at Toenning, and in three days was in the Baltic. It
was just a week after I ran ashore that I wired to you. You see, I
had come to the conclusion that _that chap was a spy_.

In the end it came out quite quietly and suddenly, and left me in
profound amazement. 'I wired to you--that chap was a spy.' It was the
close association of these two ideas that hit me hardest at the
moment. For a second I was back in the dreary splendour of the London
club-room, spelling out that crabbed scrawl from Davies, and
fastidiously criticizing its proposal in the light of a holiday.
Holiday! What was to be its issue? Chilling and opaque as the fog
that filtered through the skylight there flooded my imagination a
mist of doubt and fear.

'A spy!' I repeated blankly. 'What do you mean? Why did you wire to
me? A spy of what--of whom?'