They had been traveling sixteen hours. Allowing for their detention by the ill-omened _Wyvern_, they should dock at Amsterdam in five or six hours more.
He tried to sleep; but his nerves were very much alive and his excited brain refused to subscribe to the body's fatigue.
All that had happened since he first saw Karen Girard he now went over and over in his mind in spite of himself. He strove to stop thinking, and could not; and sometimes the lurid horror of the _Wyvern_ possessed him with all its appalling details made plain to his imagination--details not visible from the liner's decks, yet perhaps the more ghastly because hidden by distance and by the infernal glare that fringed the doomed ship like a very nimbus from hell itself.
This obsessed him, and the villainous information which he had wrested from the papers which this young girl had been carrying--information amply sufficient to convict her and to make inevitable the military execution of the man Grätz and the grinning chauffeur, Bush.
And if the wretched maid, Anna, had been arrested with papers similar to these on her person, her case, too, was hopeless. Because the very existence of England depended upon extinguishing forever people who dealt in secret information like that which lay folded and buttoned under his belted coat of tweed.
He knew it, knew what his fate must have been had the satchel been searched on Fresh Wharf--knew what Karen's fate must have been, also, surely, surely!
And had those papers been taken aboard the _Wyvern_ it had not been very long before the simplicity of the cipher had been discovered by anybody trained in code work.
For, in spite of its surface complexity, the cipher was a singularly simple one, even a stupid code, based on simple principles long known and understood in all of their hundreds of variations.
And all such ciphers, granted time and patience, could be solved by the same basic principles. The only function of that kind of code was to so multiply its intricacies and variations that, with a time limit for delivery understood, measures could be taken at the other end to minimize the effect of discovery, the elapsing of the time limit serving as an automatic warning that message or messenger were under forcible detention within the enemy's lines.