“That’s right! The world doesn’t even know how many submarines have been sunk and captured, already yet,” declared Ikey excitedly. “And we _won’t_ know, it’s likely, till the end of the war.” “What’s the odds?” growled Al. “You got to hand it to them,” sighed Whistler. “The British have great powers of self-restraint.” “You said it!” again put in Frenchy. “Well,” Ikey said, more moderately, “if that chap that came near sending Belding here west, was that schmardie’s brother----” “Cousin!” interposed Whistler. “Well--anyhow and anyway--Emil Eberhardt--I say!” cried Ikey, “he might have got free and gone over to New York by submarine, or someway, like Whistler says.” “What do you suppose he’d do if he wanted to get that money off the _Redbird_?” asked Frenchy, big-eyed. “Ask us an easier one,” begged Al Torrance. “You kids are letting your imaginations run away with you,” put in Phil Morgan. But in secret the two older boys--Belding and Whistler--did not consider the idea of the spy reaching New York before the _Redbird_ sailed at all impossible. “That chap with the broken arm we took off the wrecked Zep,” Belding remarked once to Morgan, “told you his cousin, the ‘super-spy,’ was bound for America, didn’t he?” “He dropped such a hint,” admitted the Seacove lad. “But pshaw! we don’t even know that Franz Eberhardt referred to the fellow we had our adventure with.” “I know! I know!” muttered George Belding. “But I do wish Willum Johnson, the strong man, had got his hands on that spy.” “‘If wishes were horses----’” “Sure! And perhaps it is all right. At any rate, father must have got my letter before he sailed, in which I told him all about losing the papers and warning him about German plotters. Of course he must have got that letter.” But this thought would have afforded them little comfort had the two friends known that the ship which bore George Belding’s letter of warning had been sunk off the Irish coast by a German U-boat, and that that particular freight or mail for the United States would probably not be recovered until after the war. The _Colodia_ touched at St. Michael and then at Fayal, receiving in both ports information of the escapades of the new raider. Lastly she had been heard of far to the west. Perhaps she was going across the ocean to prey on the American coastwise trade! This was a suggestion that put the Seacove boys and Belding on edge. There was, however, something rather uncertain about the stories regarding the _Sea Pigeon_. Some of the merchant crews that had already met her, declared her to be a huge new submarine--a submersible that looked like a steam freighter when she was afloat, and that she was all of three hundred feet long. “Some boat, that!” observed Mr. MacMasters. “We’ve seen ’em with false upperworks, boys. But you know, even the _Deutschland_ was no such submarine as this one they tell about.”