th old man Gresson at the back
of them. First thing, I started out to get the cipher. It took some
looking for, but there's no cipher on earth can't be got hold of
somehow if you know it's there, and in this case we were helped a lot
by the return messages in the German papers. It was bad stuff when we
read it, and explained the darned leakages in important noos we've been
up against. At first I figured to keep the thing going and turn
Gussiter into a corporation with John S. Blenkiron as president. But it
wouldn't do, for at the first hint of tampering with their
communications the whole bunch got skeery and sent out SOS signals. So
we tenderly plucked the flowers.'

'Gresson, too?' I asked.

He nodded. 'I guess your seafaring companion's now under the sod. We
had collected enough evidence to hang him ten times over ... But that
was the least of it. For your little old cipher, Dick, gave us a line
on Ivery.'

I asked how, and Blenkiron told me the story. He had about a dozen
cross-bearings proving that the organization of the 'Deep-breathing'
game had its headquarters in Switzerland. He suspected Ivery from the
first, but the man had vanished out of his ken, so he started working
from the other end, and instead of trying to deduce the Swiss business
from Ivery he tried to deduce Ivery from the Swiss business. He went to
Berne and made a conspicuous public fool of himself for several weeks.
He called himself an agent of the American propaganda there, and took
some advertising space in the press and put in spread-eagle
announcements of his mission, with the result that the Swiss Government
threatened to turn him out of the country if he tampered that amount
with their neutrality. He also wrote a lot of rot in the Geneva
newspapers, which he paid to have printed, explaining how he was a
pacifist, and was going to convert Germany to peace by 'inspirational
advertisement of pure-minded war aims'. All this was in keeping with
his English reputation, and he wanted to make himself a bait for Ivery.

But Ivery did not rise to the fly, and though he had a dozen agents
working for him on the quiet he could never hear of the name Chelius.
That was, he reckoned, a very private and particular name among the
Wild Birds. However, he got to know a good deal about the Swiss end of
the 'Deep-breathing' business. That took some doing and cost a lot of
money. His best people were a girl who posed as a mannequin in a
milliner's shop in