sports sail and spreading the news is only one of many
of their activities. Somewhere in this country there is a master-council
of German plotters, directing the secret movements of many hundreds,
perhaps many thousands of spies and secret agents. They have their work
well mapped out. They have men fomenting strikes in the government
shipyards and stirring up all kinds of labor troubles. Others are busy
making bombs and contriving diabolical methods of crippling the
machinery in munition plants. A flourishing trade in false passports is
being carried on, enabling their spies to travel back and forth across
the Atlantic in the guise of American business men, ambulance drivers,
Red Cross workers and what not. Still others of their agents are
detailed to arrange for the shipping of the supplies Germany needs to
neutral countries. By watching shipping closely they gather information,
too, that is of value to the U-boat commanders. Every time there is any
sort of activity against the draft, or peace meetings, or Irish
agitation, we find traces of German handiwork. We have dismantled and
sealed up every wireless plant we could find in America except those
under direct government control, yet we are positive that every day
wireless messages go from this country somewhere--perhaps to Mexico or
South America, and from there are relayed to Germany, probably by way of
Spain. Think of the enormous amount of money required to finance these
operations and keep all these spies under pay. While we try to thwart
their plans as we find them, all our efforts are constantly directed
toward discovering who controls and finances their damnable system. We
seldom if ever arrest any of the spies we track down, but keep watching,
watching, watching, hoping that sooner or later the master-spy will be
betrayed into our hands."

"You don't think then," said Jane disappointedly, "that old Mr. Hoff is
one of the important spies."

"We can't tell yet. He may be just one of the cogs--perhaps what they
call a control-agent. We don't know yet. Germany has been building up
her spy system forty years, and it is ingenious beyond imagination. Her
codes are the most difficult in the world. It took the French three
years and a half to decipher a code despatch from Von Bethmann Hollweg
to Baron von Schoen. By the time they had it deciphered in Paris the
Germans had discovered what they were doing and had changed the code. It
is seldom any one of the German spi