The spy remained until the car stopped at the terminus; then he started to walk briskly inland, reproving himself for his bad manoeuvre in taking a car bound for a coast town. A four hours' stiff walk brought him to a desolate moor, standing well on eight hundred feet above the sea. Sheltering from possible observation behind an overhanging rock, he made the necessary change from Captain Broadstone, R.A.F., to plain Thomas Smith, commercial traveller, representing Collar & Grab, wholesale provision merchants (and incidentally profiteers), of Liverpool. For the next four days he remained at Galashiels, lying low and explaining his presence by the plausible statement that the samples his firm had dispatched had gone astray. On the fifth he decided to go to York, where he knew of a Polish Jew, Polinski by name, who was in reality a German Secret Service agent. At Newcastle he caught a fast train bound for London. He now travelled third class, finding himself in the company of four bluejackets proceeding "on leaf." Within a few minutes of the train leaving the station the commercial traveller was apparently fast asleep. He was keenly on the alert to gather information, and his wishes were realised. "S'elp me," exclaimed one of the men. "We'd got a blanked U-boat blazing away at us like mad. 'Course we didn't reply, an' they didn't 'arf give us a dustin'. Then up comes another of the swine an' starts firin', only 'er shells goes wide. Still our owner sticks it without so much as winkin'. Hopin', you see, to bag 'em both." "And did 'e?" inquired another. "Not 'e, worse luck," replied the other. "Just as we was about ter drop our false bulwarks an' give 'em perishin' socks, one of the U-boats slipped in a couple o' tawpedas into t'other an' blew 'er to blazes." "Wot for?" asked a bearded petty officer. "Wot for?" snorted the other. "To do us out of our bloomin' prize money, of course. There was we, with our decks littered with sheep and cattle, stickin' it for four mortal hours in the hope we'd put it abaft the swine, an' all for nothin'. The U-boat was one of our own mystery ships, rigged up to bamboozle Fritz. She was orf right into Heligoland Bight to do 'er dirty work, if I remember right." Von Preussen chuckled inwardly. Here indeed was a "scoop." Before eight that evening the information, transmitted in the form of an apparently genuine business telegram to a firm in Amsterdam, was in the hands of the German Admiralty. CHAPTER XVII MUTINY "HANS!" whispered Seaman Kaspar Krauss of U 247. "Do you know what our swine-headed kapitan has made up his mind to do?" "How should I?" responded Hans Furst with a grunt. "Something that has upset your apple-cart."