es 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 instru