CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN.
SMOKE AND FIRE Mr.Carleton Conne, of the United States Secret Service, had come over from Liverpool _via_ Dover on a blind quest after an elusive spy.

There had been a sort of undercurrent of rumor, with many extravagant trappings, that a mysterious agent of the Kaiser was on his way to Europe with secrets of a most important character.

Some stories had it that he was intimately related to Bloody Bill himself; others that he gloried in a kinship with Ludendorf, while still other versions represented him as holding Mexico in the palm of his hand.

Dark stories floated about and no one knew just where they originated.
One sprightly form this story took, which had been whispered in New York and then in Liverpool, was that a certain young lady (identity unknown) had talked with a soldier (identity unknown) in the Grand Central Station in New York, and that the soldier had told her that at his cantonment (cantonment not identified) there was a man in a special branch of the service (branch not mentioned) who was a cousin or a brother or a nephew or a son or something or other to a German general or statesman or something or other, and that he had got into the American army by a pretty narrow squeak.

There seemed to be a unanimity of opinion in the lower strata of Uncle Sam's official family in Liverpool that the soldier who had talked with the young lady was coming over on the transport _Manchester_ and it was assumed (no one seemed to know exactly why) that the mysterious and sinister personage would be upon the same ship.
But no soldier had been found upon the _Manchester_ who showed by his appearance that he had chatted with a young lady.