Espionage, German -- United States -- Fiction; Germans -- United States -- Fiction; Spy stories
"I know all about it," the watchman answered. "The foreman left
instructions for me. We're crating automobile ambulances for shipment
to France. I want to show you something that we found today."
He led the way into the stevedoring shop, there to point out the axle
of a great chassis--and to swear quietly as he looked at it.
"German spies done it!" he announced. "Nobody else would have been so
dirty and low. These are ambulances, y'know--ambulances for use on
the battlefields. And you know what'd happen if that ever got on a
shell-torn field."
He pointed to the axle of the car. There, where the putty had been
removed by the workmen who had discovered it, was a great, jagged
hole in the steel of the axle, a hole burnt by an acetylene torch,
converting the axle into a weak, shallow shell, doomed to break with
the first holting strain. Grant frowned as he looked at it.
"So that's the game, eh?" he said. "That's why so many ambulances have
been breaking down in France! That's why--"
He turned sharply, the watchman with him. Far at one side of the
opposite dock they had seen the shadow of a man as it slunk along,
hiding behind the boxes and bales as he made his way from light to
darkness. Grant sped forward, the watchman beside him. A moment more
and the shadow leaped forth, to seek escape in the maze of shipping on
the docks.
But impossible. Headed off by closed doors, he veered, dodged, swerved
in his course and leaped past the guard of an interned liner, seeking
to spring from it to the next in his effort to escape.
An effort that failed. Blocked again, he veered once more, crashed his
way through the door of the ship's wireless room, then whirled, a chair
lifted high over his head. But the blow: did not descend. The tactics
of the football field had come into play for Grant--and with a quick
motion he had blocked the blow of the spy, disarmed him and forced
him against the wall. Fifteen minutes later, he was listening to the
confession, forced in jerky sentences from the spy's lips:
"A guy gave me $100. to set fire to the docks," he was saying. "That's
all I know. He was some fellow who worked around the waterfront here.
I'd gotten a lot o' money offen him and I wanted more. I belonged to
his magneto and axle gang."
"His what?" Harrison Grant bent forward.
"His magneto gang. We'd steal the magnetos offen automobiles that
was goin' to France. He'd give us five dollars for every one we
stole--then let us have 'em to sell."
"Another little system of harming ambulances, eh?" said Grant slowly.
"What about the axles?"
"We burned 'em with an acetylene torch--so they'd break down when they
hit the battlefields--"
"So they'd break down, when they were filled with wounded!" The words
came from Grant's lips in scathing denunciation. "And you confess to
it--you mongrel!" His hands clenched--it was all he could do to keep
them from the throat of the craven being before him. "Now you tell your
story and tell it quick!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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