he said
the way of bringing the code key was L.'s idea. I read about a dentist
that had a piece of paper with writing on it rolled up in his tooth. He
was a spy. So that made me think maybe L.'s idea had something to do
with eyes or glasses, as you might say."

"Hmm! Go on. Anything else?"

"But, anyway, that ain't the idea I had. In Temple Camp there was a
scout that had a little pocket looking-glass and you couldn't see
anything on it but your own reflection. But all you had to do was to
breathe on it and there was a picture--all mountains and a castle, like.
Then it would fade away again right away. Roy Blakeley wanted to swap
his scout knife for it, but the feller wouldn't do it. On the back of it
it said _Made in Germany_. It just came to me sudden-like that maybe
that was L.'s idea and they'd have it on a pair of spectacles. Maybe
it's a kind of crazy idea, but----"

He looked doubtfully at Mr. Conne, who still sat tilted back, hat almost
hiding his face, cigar sticking out from under it like a camouflaged
field-piece. He was whistling very quietly, "_Oh, boy, where do we go
from here?_" He had whistled that same tune more than a year before when
he was waiting for a glimpse of "Dr. Curry," spy and bomb plotter,
aboard the vessel on which Tom was working at that time. He had whistled
it as he escorted the "doctor" down the companionway. How well Tom
remembered!

"Come on, Tommy," he said, jumping suddenly to his feet.

Tom followed. But Mr. Conne did not speak; he was still busy with the
tune. Only now he was singing the words. There was something portentous
in the careless way he sang them. It took Tom back to the days when it
was the battle hymn of the transport:

"And when we meet a pretty girl, we whisper in her ear,
Oh, Boy! Oh, Joy! Where do we go from here?"

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

"NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON'T"

The big transport _Texas Pioneer_ came slowly about in obedience to her
straining ropes and rubbed her mammoth side against the long wharf. Up
and down, this way and that, slanting-wise and curved, drab and gray and
white and red, the grotesque design upon her towering freeboard shone
like a distorted rainbow in the sunlight. Out of the night she had come,
stealing silently through the haunts where murder lurks, and the same
dancing rays which had run ahead of the dispatch-rider and turned to
mock him, had gilded her mighty prow as if to say, "Behold, I have
reached you