Adventure, February 1917 — page 182: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

— dressed like a French doll. 180 — Instead of answering Ragan shrugged his shoulders irritably. I didnot urge him. He was in one of those moods when, if you let him alone, a man will eventually tell every- thing, but when trying to drive him is apt to provoke an explosion. Morton, the purser, entered with a paper and handed it to Ragan who signed and re- turned it without a word. Then, as the door closed behind the officer, he threw his pen down on the desk and wheeled toward me. “Brock is a fool,” he said. “Why they should have chosen him for such a mission gets me. You want to know whether he got through with those papers. Well he did, but it would have been better if he had dropped them off the dock in Manila and never made the trip at all. “Listen, Ill tell you what happened. “We were on the point of sailing from Nagasaki when he came aboard. I was on the bridge and happened to notice him, be- cause his sampan coolie had difficulty in get- ting up to the ship. I had met Brock at dinner at the Polo Club near Manila once, but I did not recognize him in the seedy lit- tle figure in a blue serge suit and shabby golf cap that climbed out of the sampan and lugged a brand-new leather bag up the stairs. A missionary, I thought, or per- haps a clerk from one of the China coast firms, and from the way he clung to that bag I judged he must have in it his other suit of clothes. “T didn’t waste much thought on him, however, for a few minutes later the quar- -termaster’s launch made its way up to the landing-stage, and from it stepped a wo- man about whom I had also been doing a good deal of wondering since I had caught - sight of her in Nagasaki on my last trip. “Her name was Mrs. Carew and she With her were Captain Beekman, the quartermaster whom the army keeps in N agasaki, and a beefy major named Brooks who, I understood, had come over from Manila for his health, and was going home on the transport Thomas which had pulled in that morning and was lying some distance off our star- board quarter, her sides black with the coo- lies loading her with coal. I learned later that Brock had come from Manila on the transport and transshipped to the Peruma without going ashore. “Mrs. Carew was an old friend of mine, ~pickin Adventure our acquaintance dating back to the Russo- Japanese war, during which, as Agnes Cai- ther, she had hung around the China coast g up information for the Japs. In a word she was a spy, and I suspect a good one; for she disappeared after the war, and T heard was evan in considerable luxury in | Paris. “As I say, I had found her, although I hadn’t spoken to her in N agasaki on my last trip; and the sight of her more than anything else made me feel the seriousness of the situation between. our country and . ~Japan. Birds like Agnes Caither only leave their nests when the picking is good, and the picking is best when trouble is brew- ing. “She was posing as the wife of a govern- ment agent who had been sent to Thibet on a secret mission; and while she pretend- ed to wait for him in Nagasaki, she put in her time making friends with army people traveling back and forth between that port and the Philippines. I suspected that she was one of the main links in the chain of leaks that were constantly occurring, and I tried to warn Beekman; but you know how silly our people are about such things. If you talk to them about spies and secret” agents, they simply laugh and put you down as a scaremonger. __ “J wondered what she was doing on the Peruvia, but I did not suspect the truth un- til that night after dinner when, Brock came to see me in my cabin and with a good deal of mystery and hesitation told me that he had papers for Admiral Willing in Shang- hai, and there was a chance the Japanese had learned of it and might try to intercept him. He wanted me to put a man on duty to watch his cabin, without raising the sus- picion that I had done so. “‘T am traveling incognito,’-he said. ‘I don’t want any one to spot me in case they have learned that messages are being sent.’ “T agreed, of course. And, knowing how thoroughly ‘the Japanese have the Philip- pines covered with their spies, I guessed— what turned out to be the fact—that they had learned of the mission. A little later I guessed—what also turned out to be a fact - —that they had spotted Brock. “He told me that for the trip he had taken the name of E. Martin, a traveling salesman for the Eastern Asbestos Company, and he took from his pocket a long, bulky envelope, whose flap had been roughly torn as though AMIEL EON) (S KS (C@ (€()