The satisfactory answer did not come. The Germans in San Francisco had spent all they were willing to spend without getting any result. Smith got a job in an automobile factory in Detroit, and his wife returned to her vocation as a _masseuse_ in a Turkish bath. Pretty soon they both began to “see things”--Mrs. Smith in particular. First she thought she saw Crowley following her in disguise on the street one night. Smith began to suspect also that they were being trailed by detectives in the employ of the Germans, and finally he feared both bodily harm and violence, and the possibility of the American Government having gotten wind of some of his activities and dogging his steps to arrest him. He finally decided that the safe thing to do was to turn State’s evidence, and hence he wandered into the office of the United States Attorney and started various trains of investigation that ultimately sent Bopp, Crowley, Von Brincken, and Von Shack to two years in prison, and Mrs. Cornell to one year. Smith and his wife were given immunity for turning State’s evidence. CHAPTER VII GERMAN CODES AND CIPHERS Secrecy is, of course, the most important consideration in the German plots in this country. When Bernstorff wished to arrange with Berlin to give Bolo Pasha ten million francs to betray his country, he naturally did not write out his messages in plain English for every wireless station on both sides of the Atlantic to read them as they went through the air. He did, to be sure, write the messages in English, and they looked plain enough--and innocent enough--but they meant something very different from what they seemed to mean. And when it got down to the actual transfer of the money, another German agent in New York signed the messages, which likewise were not what they seemed. Those messages were in _code_. (They are reproduced and explained in this chapter.) Now _code_ should not be confused with _cipher_. When some Hindus in New York, subsidized by Berlin, wished to write their plans to some other Hindus in San Francisco, concerning their common purpose of fomenting revolution against British rule in India, they wrote out messages that consisted entirely of groups of Arabic numerals. Those messages were in _cipher_. To any one but an expert, many code messages look simple and harmless, and cipher messages usually look unintelligible and suspicious. Yet, oddly enough, the cipher messages are by far the easier to make out. Indeed, unless you have a copy of the code, code messages can almost never be translated, whereas a straight cipher message can almost invariably be unraveled by an expert, if you give him enough time and material. Hence, by people who know the subject (and nobody had mastered it so thoroughly as the Germans), codes are used for secrecy, and ciphers are used simply as an added precaution and to _delay_ the unraveling of a message if, by any chance, the enemy has gotten possession of a copy of the code.