Within two hours, shaved, bathed, and inconspicuously dressed
in a cheap suit of ready-made clothing, he was breakfasting famously upon
the plain fare of a commercial tavern.
The town, he learned, was the one-time important whaling port of Edgartown.
He would be able to leave for the mainland on a ferry steamer sailing early
in the afternoon.
Ten minutes before going abroad he filed a long telegram in code addressed
to the head of the British Secret Service in New York....
Consequences manifold and various ensued.
When the telegram had been delivered and decoded--both transactions being
marked by reasonable promptitude--the head of the British Secret Service
in New York called the British Embassy in Washington on the long distance
telephone.
Shortly thereafter an attache of the British Embassy jumped into a
motor-car and had himself driven to one of the cardinal departments of the
Federal Government.
When he had kicked his heels in an antechamber upward of an hour, he was
received, affably enough, by the head of the department, a smug, open-faced
gentleman whose mood was largely preoccupied with illusions of grandeur,
who was, in short, interested far more in considering how splendid it was
to be himself than in hearing about any mare's-nest of a German U-boat base
on the south shore of Martha's Vineyard.
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