"By George! that's so! A variation of the 'clock code' as well as Verne's idea. Here, read off the letters and I'll put them on the board with the figures representing Hohenzollern underneath. Take the first fifteen as before."

When they had finished, the blackboard bore the following, the first line being the original code letters, the second the letter figures of these, and the third the figures of the word "Hohenzollern" with the first "h" repeated for the fifteenth letter:

I i i t f b b t t x o r q w s b b

I ii t f bb tt x o r q w s bb 9 35 20 6 28 46 24 15 18 17 23 19 28 8 15 8 5 14 26 15 12 12 5 18 14 8

"Why thirty-five for that double 'i' and twenty-eight for the double 'b's'?" asked Barlow.

"Add twenty-six--the total number of letters in the alphabet--to the letter figure for the letter itself," said Thurber. "That's the one beauty of this code, one of the things which helps to throw you off the scent. Now subtracting the two lines we have:

"1 20 12 1 14 20 9 3 6 12 5 5 20

"We've got it!" he cried an instant later, as he stepped back to look at the figures and read off:

"A t l a n t i c f l e e t

"It was a double code, after all," Thurber stated when he had deciphered the entire message by the same procedure and had reported his discovery to the Secretary of the Navy over the phone. "Practically infallible, too, save for the fact that I, as well as Doctor Albert, happened to be familiar with Jules Verne. That, plus the doctor's inability to rely on his memory and therefore leaving his key words in his brief case, rendered the whole thing pretty easy."

"Yes," thought Gene, "plus my suggestion of the September word, rather than the October one, and plus Paula's quick wit--that's really all there was to it!" But he kept his thoughts to himself, preferring to allow Thurber to reap all the rewards that were coming to him for the solution of the "double code."

"Do you know what the whole message was?" I inquired, as Quinn stopped his narrative.

"You'll find it pasted on the back of that copy of _The Giant Raft_,"

replied the former operative. "That's why I claim that the book ought to be preserved as a souvenir of an incident that saved millions of dollars and hundreds of lives."

Turning to the back of the Verne book I saw pasted there the following significant lines:

Atlantic Fleet sails (from) Hampton Roads (at) six (o'clock) morning of seventeenth. Eight U-boats will be waiting. Advise necessary parties and be ready (to) seek safety. Success (of) attack inevitable.

"That means that if Thurber hadn't been able to decipher that code the greater part of our fleet would have been sunk by an unexpected submarine attack, launched by a nation with whom we weren't even at war?" I demanded, when I had finished the message.

"Precisely," agreed Quinn. "But if you'll look up the records you'll find that the fleet did not sail on schedule, while Dr. Heinrich Albert and the entire staff from the house on Ma.s.sachusetts Avenue were deported before many more weeks had pa.s.sed. There was no sense in raising a fuss about the incident at the time, for von Bernstorff would have denied any knowledge of the message and probably would have charged that the whole thing was a plant, designed to embroil the United States in the war. So it was allowed to rest for the time being and merely jotted down as another score to be wiped off the slate later on.

"But you have to admit that a knowledge of Jules Verne came in very handy--quite as much so, in fact, as did a knowledge of the habits and disposition of white mice in another case."

"Which one was that?"

Quinn merely pointed to the top of his bookcase, where there reposed a stuffed white mouse, apparently asleep.

"That's a memento of the case," replied the former operative. "I'll tell you of it the next time you drop in."

XIII

THE TRAIL OF THE WHITE MICE

"The United States Secret Service," announced Bill Quinn, "is by long odds the best known branch of the governmental detective bureaus. The terror which the continental crook feels at the sound of the name 'Scotland Yard' finds its echo on this side of the Atlantic whenever a criminal knows that he has run afoul of the U. S. S. S. For Uncle Sam never forgives an injury or forgets a wrong. Sooner or later he's going to get his man--no matter how long it takes nor how much money it costs.

"But the Secret Service, strictly speaking, is only one branch of the organization. There are others which work just as quietly and just as effectively. The Department of Justice, which had charge of the violation of neutrality laws, banking, and the like; the Treasury Department, which, through the Customs Service and the Bureau of Internal Revenue, wages constant war on the men and women who think they can evade the import regulations and the laws against illicit manufacture of alcohol; the Pension Bureau of the Interior Department, which is called upon to handle hundreds of frauds every year; and the Post Office Department, which guards the millions of dollars intrusted to the mails.

"Each of these has its own province. Each works along its own line in conjunction with the others, and each of them is, in reality, a secret organization which performs a vastly important service to the nation as a whole. When you speak of the Secret Service, the Treasury Department's organization comes immediately to mind--coupled with a panorama of counterfeiters, anarchists, revolutionaries, and the like. But the field of the Secret Service is really limited when compared to the scope of the other organizations.

"Look around this room"--and he made a gesture which included the four walls of the library den in which we were seated, a room in which the usual decorations had been replaced by a strange collection of unusual and, in a number of instances, gruesome relics. "Every one of those objects is a memento of some exploit of the men engaged in Secret Service," Quinn went on. "That Chinese hatchet up there came very close to being buried in the skull of a man in San Diego, but its princ.i.p.al mission in life was the solution of the mystery surrounding the smuggling of thousands of pounds of opium. That water-stained cap was fished out of the Missouri after its owner had apparently committed suicide--but the Pension Bureau located him seven years later, with the aid of a fortune teller in Seattle. At the side of the bookcase there you will find several of the original poison-pen letters which created so much consternation in Kansas City a few years ago, letters which Allison of the Postal Inspection Service finally traced to their source after the local authorities had given up the case as impossible of solution.

"The woman whose picture appears on the other wall was known as Mrs.

Armitage--and that was about all that they did know about her, save that she was connected with one of the foreign organizations and that in some mysterious way she knew everything that was going on in the State Department almost as soon as it was started. And there, under that piece of silk which figured in one of the boldest smuggling cases that the Treasury Department ever tackled, is the blurred postmark which eventually led to the discovery of the man who murdered Montgomery Marshall--a case in which our old friend Sherlock Holmes would have reveled. But it's doubtful if he could have solved it any more skillfully than did one of the Post Office operatives."

"What's the significance of that white mouse on the mantelpiece?" I inquired, sensing the fact that Quinn was in one of his story-telling moods.

"It hasn't any significance," replied the former government agent, "but it has a story--one which ill.u.s.trates my point that all the nation's detective work isn't handled by the Secret Service, by a long shot. Did you ever hear of H. Gordon Fowler, alias W. C. Evans?"

"No," I replied, "I don't think I ever did."

"Well, a lot of people have--to their sorrow," laughed Quinn, reaching for his pipe.

No one appears to know what Fowler's real name is [continued the former operative]. He traveled under a whole flock of aliases which ran the gamut of the alphabet from Andrews to Zachary, but, to save mixing things up, suppose that we a.s.sume that his right name was Fowler. He used it for six months at one time, out in Minneapolis, and got away with twenty thousand dollars' worth of stuff.

For some time previous to Fowler's entrance upon the scene various wholesale houses throughout the country had been made the victims of what appeared to be a ring of bankruptcy experts--men who would secure credit for goods, open a store, and then "fail." Meanwhile the merchandise would have mysteriously vanished and the proprietor would be away on a "vacation" from which, of course, he would never return.

On the face of it this was a matter to be settled solely by the Wholesalers' Credit a.s.sociation, but the Postal Inspection Service got into it through the fact that the mails were palpably being used with intent to defraud and therefore Uncle Sam came to the aid of the business men.

On the day that the matter was reported to Washington the chief of the Postal Inspection Service pushed the b.u.t.ton which operated a buzzer in the outer office and summoned Hal Preston, the chap who later on was responsible for the solution of the Marshall murder mystery.

"Hal," said the chief, with a smile, "here's a case I know you'll like.

It's right in the line of routine and it ought to mean a lot of traveling around the country--quick jumps at night and all that sort of stuff."

Preston grunted, but said nothing. You couldn't expect to draw the big cases every time, and, besides, there was no telling when something might break even in the most prosaic of a.s.signments.

"Grant, Wilc.o.x & Company, in Boston, report that they've been stung twice in the same place by a gang of bankruptcy sharks," the chief went on. "And they're not the only ones who have suffered. Here's a list of the concerns and the men that they've sold to. You'll see that it covers the country from Hoquiam, Washington, to Montclair, New Jersey--so they appear to have their organization pretty well in hand. Ordinarily we wouldn't figure in this thing at all--but the gang made the mistake of placing their orders through the mail and now it's up to us to land 'em.

Here's the dope. Hop to it!"

That night, while en route to Mount Clemens, Michigan, where the latest of the frauds had been perpetrated, Preston examined the envelope full of evidence and came to a number of interesting conclusions. In the first place the failures had been staged in a number of different localities--Erie, Pennsylvania, had had one of them under the name of "Cole & Hill"; there had been another in Sioux City, where Immerling Brothers had failed; Metcalf and Newman, Illinois, had likewise contributed their share, as had Minneapolis, Newark, Columbus, White Plains, and Newburg, New York; San Diego, California; Hoquiam, Washington, and several other points.

But the point that brought Hal up with a jerk was the dates attached to each of these affairs. No two of them had occurred within six months of the other and several were separated by as much as a year.

"Who said this was a gang?" he muttered. "Looks a lot more like the work of a single man with plenty of nerve and, from the amount of stuff he got away with, he ought to be pretty nearly in the millionaire cla.s.s by now. There's over two hundred thousand dollars' worth of goods covered by this report alone and there's no certainty that it is complete. Well, here's hoping--it's always easier to trail one man than a whole bunch of 'em."

In Mount Clemens Preston found further evidence which tended to prove that the bankruptcy game was being worked by a single nervy individual, posing under the name of "Henry Gerard."

Gerard, it appeared, had entered the local field about a year before, apparently with plenty of capital, and had opened two prosperous stores on the princ.i.p.al street. In August, about two months before Preston's arrival, the proprietor of the Gerard stores had left on what was apparently scheduled for a two weeks' vacation. That was the last that had been heard of him, in spite of the fact that a number of urgent creditors had camped upon his trail very solicitously. The stores had been looted, only enough merchandise being left to keep up the fiction of a complete stock, and Gerard had vanished with the proceeds.