wled the indignant Jack.

"Not so loud," warned Tom. "Some one may hear you, Jack. But tell me
what you've learned."

"Why, first of all, Tom, it was Bessie who wrote that warning message I
had, and attached it to that little balloon, hoping the favorable breeze
would carry it over the front to the French lines. So that mystery is
explained. Then, Tom, there are _two_ we've got to take out of this
place, instead of just one, as we thought."

"I don't get you!" Tom ejaculated. "What do you mean by two?"

"It's a story in itself, I guess," whispered Jack. "I don't wholly
understand it myself. But it seems that Bessie's mother didn't drown
after all when the _Lusitania_ went down, as Potzfeldt reported she
did."

"You surprise me, Jack! How could that be?" demanded the other youth,
thrilled by the startling information.

"Oh, that slick rascal managed it somehow," came the soft if indignant
reply. "We'll learn more about it later on. He was picked up by a
fishing boat. The lady was temporarily out of her mind, so he gave it
out later that she had gone down. How he ever got her over here in
Germany beats me. But he managed to do it it seems. And she's been kept
a prisoner in this old chateau of his ever since!"

"But what was his object?" asked the amazed Tom.

"It had a heap to do with finances," Jack told him. "While he held a
paper that gave him charge over her daughter over in America, and a part
of the big Gleason fortune also, there were valuable papers he had been
unable to get his greedy hands on. She absolutely refused to tell him
where they were hidden. As a last resort what did the wretch do but go
all the way back to America."

"You mean to fetch his ward across with him, Jack?"

"Yes, just to use Bessie as a lever to compel her mother to give up
those valuable papers. I always said, you remember, Tom, that man was
hugging some secret to his heart. And so he was."

"He's been treating Bessie badly then, half starving her, I think you
said?" continued Tom.

"Just what he has, poor girl," growled his chum, savagely. "It's an
awful thing to be hungry! I don't see how any one can stand it. But he
hasn't broken the spirit of either of them yet, though Bessie's getting
so weak she finds herself crying every now and then, just as we heard
her. And it was that which brought us over to find out what it meant.
But Tom, tell her we mean to stand by, and see that both her mother and
herself are taken to a pla