, broken only by the wind outside and the
occasional voice of the lookout, thin and spent as from another world,
and the scarcely audible, long-drawn-out answer from the bridge.

"'To the day,'" said Cattell, sticking his feet upon the shelf, "means
to the day the Kaiser will own the earth--emperor of the world. In the
German navy, whenever they take a drink they always say, 'To the day.'
The day that poor Austrian guy was murdered in Serbia--you know, that
prince--and the Kaiser saw his chance to start the ball rolling, all the
high dinkums in the German navy had a jambouree, and some old gink--von
Somebody or other--said: 'Now, to the day.'

"Well, it got to be a kind of password or slogan, as you might say. If a
German spy wants to let another German know that he's all right, he uses
a sentence with those three words in. And the sub-commanders are all the
time slinging it around the ocean--testing their instruments sometimes,
I dare say. It don't do any harm, I suppose. Talk's cheap."

"I wondered what it meant," said Tom.

"That's all it means. When you hear that you'll know some sub-captain is
taking a drink of wine or something. When the _Emden_ captured an
English ship a couple of years ago, it happened there was a nice,
gentlemanly German spy on board the Britisher. The German captain was
just going to pack him off with the others as a prisoner when he said
something with those three words in it. The German commander understood,
and they didn't take any of his things, but just let him stay among the
English, and the English weren't any the wiser."

"Huh," said Tom.

Again there was silence.

"I think the other operator is all right, don't you?" Tom asked.

"Sure--is or _was_. He may have been killed down there and thrown
overboard. He was straight as a bee-line. You put Conne on the right
track, all right."

"Do you think they'll ever find out about the rest of it?" Tom asked.

Cattell shrugged his shoulders. "Search _me_," he said.

All night long the wind blew and the swell broke noisily against the
ship and beat over the rail. At intervals, when Tom climbed down and
stumbled over to open the door for a glimpse of the sullen night, the
slanting rain blew in his face, and he closed the door again with
difficulty. It would have been a ticklish business to make one's way
along the deck then, he thought.

It was a couple of hours before dawn, and Tom, lulled by the darkness,
had fallen into a doze, w