"Hullo! that deflected something--crossed communication or I'm a Dutchman!" he said, and bent over to "take it." In another moment he got more of a shock than twenty thunderbolts could possibly have given him. For, translated, that interrupted communication ran thus:
"... and eight-inch guns. The floating conning tower's lateral plates of ..."
And there, as abruptly as it began, the communication left off.
"Good God! There's another damned German spy at it!" exclaimed the operator, jumping from his seat and grabbing for his hat. "Gawdermity, Hawkins, take this instrument and watch for more. Somebody's telegraphin' naval secrets from the dockyard, and the storm's 'tapped' a wire somewhere and sent the message to us!" Then he flung himself out into the storm and darkness and ran and ran and ran.
But the mystery of the thing was all the greater when the facts came to be examined. For those two parts of sentences were found to be verbatim copies of the shorthand notes which Mr. Paul Grimsdick had just taken down. These notes had never left the sight of the three men in the guarded room of that guarded house for so much as one second since they were made. No one but they had passed either in or out of that room during the whole seven days of the inquiry. There was no telegraph instrument in the room--in the house--or within any possible reach from it. Yet somebody in that building--somebody who could only know the things by standing in that room and copying them, for never once had they been spoken of by word of mouth--some invisible, impalpable, superhuman body was wiring State secrets from it. How? And to whom?
Naturally, this state of affairs set the whole country by the ears and evoked a panicky condition which was not lessened by the Press' frothing and screaming.
Thus matters stood on the evening of Wednesday, the twenty-second of May, and thus they still stood on the morning of the twenty-third, when the telephone rang and Dollops rushed into Cleek's bedroom crying excitedly and disjointedly:
"Mr. Narkom, sir. Ringing up from his own house. Wants you in a hurry. National case, he says, and not a minute to lose."
Cleek was out of bed and at the instrument in a winking; but he had no more than spoken the customary "Hello!" into the receiver, when the superintendent's voice cut in cyclonically and swept everything before it in a small tornado of excited words.