I called Bradley and Olson on deck and told them what had happened, but for the
life of me I couldn’t bring myself to repeat what Wilson had reported to me the
previous night. In fact, as I had given the matter thought, it seemed
incredible that the girl could have passed through my room, in which Bradley
and I slept, and then carried on a conversation in the crew’s room, in which
Von Schoenvorts was kept, without having been seen by more than a single man.
Bradley shook his head. “I can’t make it out,” he said. “One of those boches
must be pretty clever to come it over us all like this; but they haven’t harmed
us as much as they think; there are still the extra instruments.”
It was my turn now to shake a doleful head. “There are no extra instruments,” I
told them. “They too have disappeared as did the wireless apparatus.”
Both men looked at me in amazement. “We still have the compass and the sun,”
said Olson. “They may be after getting the compass some night; but they’s too
many of us around in the daytime fer ’em to get the sun.”
It was then that one of the men stuck his head up through the hatchway and
seeing me, asked permission to come on deck and get a breath of fresh air. I
recognized him as Benson, the man who, Wilson had said, reported having seen
Lys with von Schoenvorts two nights before. I motioned him on deck and then
called him to one side, asking if he had seen anything out of the way or
unusual during his trick on watch the night before. The fellow scratched his
head a moment and said, “No,” and then as though it was an afterthought, he
told me that he had seen the girl in the crew’s room about midnight talking
with the German commander, but as there hadn’t seemed to him to be any harm in
that, he hadn’t said anything about it. Telling him never to fail to report to
me anything in the slightest out of the ordinary routine of the ship, I
dismissed him.
Several of the other men now asked permission to come on deck, and soon all but
those actually engaged in some necessary duty were standing around smoking and
talking, all in the best of spirits. I took advantage of the absence of the men
upon the deck to go below for my breakfast, which the cook was already
preparing upon the electric stove. Lys, followed by Nobs, appeared as I entered
the centrale. She met me with a pleasant “Good morning!” which I am afraid I
replied to in a tone that was rather constrained and surly.
“Will you breakfast with me?” I suddenly asked the girl, determined to commence
a probe of my own along the lines which duty demanded.
She nodded a sweet acceptance of my invitation, and together we sat down at the
little table of the officers’ mess.
“You slept well last night?” I asked.
“All night,” she replied. “I am a splendid sleeper.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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