Page:Biggers and Ritchie - Inside the Lines.djvu/348

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INSIDE THE LINES

however—after we left your house and when the moment for action arrived. A cable to Sir Ludlow-Service, in the Downing Street office, will confirm my story. Meanwhile I am willing to go under arrest if you think best."

"But—but I don't understand, Captain—er—Cavendish. You posed as a German—as an Englishman."

"Briefly, General, a girl secretly in the pay of the Downing Street office—Louisa Schmidt,—Josepha, the cigar girl, whom you ordered locked up a few hours ago—is the English representative in the Wilhelmstrasse at Berlin. She learned of a plan to get a German spy in your signal tower a month before war was declared, reported it to London, and I was summoned from Khartum to London to play the part of the German spy. At Berlin, where she had gone from your own town of Gibraltar to meet me, she arranged to procure me a number in the Wilhelmstrasse through the agency of a dupe named Capper——"

"Capper! Good Lord!" Crandall stammered.

"With the number I hurried to Alexandria. Woodhouse—Captain Woodhouse, from Wady