er of his mouth.
Then he cocked his head slightly sideways.

"H'lo, Tommy," said he.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

SMOKE AND FIRE

Mr. Carleton Conne, of the United States Secret Service, had come over
from Liverpool _via_ Dover on a blind quest after an elusive spy. There
had been a sort of undercurrent of rumor, with many extravagant
trappings, that a mysterious agent of the Kaiser was on his way to
Europe with secrets of a most important character. Some stories had it
that he was intimately related to Bloody Bill himself; others that he
gloried in a kinship with Ludendorf, while still other versions
represented him as holding Mexico in the palm of his hand. Dark stories
floated about and no one knew just where they originated.

One sprightly form this story took, which had been whispered in New York
and then in Liverpool, was that a certain young lady (identity unknown)
had talked with a soldier (identity unknown) in the Grand Central
Station in New York, and that the soldier had told her that at his
cantonment (cantonment not identified) there was a man in a special
branch of the service (branch not mentioned) who was a cousin or a
brother or a nephew or a son or something or other to a German general
or statesman or something or other, and that he had got into the
American army by a pretty narrow squeak. There seemed to be a unanimity
of opinion in the lower strata of Uncle Sam's official family in
Liverpool that the soldier who had talked with the young lady was coming
over on the transport _Manchester_ and it was assumed (no one seemed to
know exactly why) that the mysterious and sinister personage would be
upon the same ship.

But no soldier had been found upon the _Manchester_ who showed by his
appearance that he had chatted with a young lady. Perhaps several of
them had done that. It is a way soldiers have.

As for the arch spy or propagandist, he did not come forward and
introduce himself as such, and though a few selected suspects of German
antecedents were searched and catechised by Mr. Conne and others, no one
was held.

And there you are.

Rumors of this kind are always in circulation and the Secret Service
people run them down as a matter of precaution. But though you can run a
rumor down and stab it through and through you cannot kill it. It now
appeared that this German agent had sailed from Mexico and would land at
Brest--with a message to some French statesman. Also it appeared that he