With his first cigar Blenkiron got to business.

’You want to know about the staff-work we’ve been busy on at home.  Well, it’s finished now, thanks to you, Dick.  We weren’t getting on very fast till you took to peroosing the press on your sick-bed and dropped us that hint about the “Deep-breathing” ads.’

‘Then there was something in it?’ I asked.

’There was black hell in it.  There wasn’t any Gussiter, but there was a mighty fine little syndicate of crooks with old man Gresson at the back of them.  First thing, I started out to get the cipher.  It took some looking for, but there’s no cipher on earth can’t be got hold of somehow if you know it’s there, and in this case we were helped a lot by the return messages in the German papers.  It was bad stuff when we read it, and explained the darned leakages in important noos we’ve been up against.  At first I figured to keep the thing going and turn Gussiter into a corporation with John S. Blenkiron as president.  But it wouldn’t do, for at the first hint of tampering with their communications the whole bunch got skeery and sent out SOS signals.  So we tenderly plucked the flowers.’

‘Gresson, too?’ I asked.

He nodded.  ’I guess your seafaring companion’s now under the sod.  We had collected enough evidence to hang him ten times over . . .  But that was the least of it.  For your little old cipher, Dick, gave us a line on Ivery.’

I asked how, and Blenkiron told me the story.  He had about a dozen cross-bearings proving that the organization of the ‘Deep-breathing’ game had its headquarters in Switzerland.  He suspected Ivery from the first, but the man had vanished out of his ken, so he started working from the other end, and instead of trying to deduce the Swiss business from Ivery he tried to deduce Ivery from the Swiss business.  He went to Berne and made a conspicuous public fool of himself for several weeks.  He called himself an agent of the American propaganda there, and took some advertising space in the press and put in spread-eagle announcements of his mission, with the result that the Swiss Government threatened to turn him out of the country if he tampered that amount with their neutrality.  He also wrote a lot of rot in the Geneva newspapers, which he paid to have printed, explaining how he was a pacifist, and was going to convert Germany to peace by ‘inspirational advertisement of pure-minded war aims’.  All this was in keeping with his English reputation, and he wanted to make himself a bait for Ivery.

But Ivery did not rise to the fly, and though he had a dozen agents working for him on the quiet he could never hear of the name Chelius.  That was, he reckoned, a very private and particular name among the Wild Birds.  However, he got to know a good deal about the Swiss end of the ‘Deep-breathing’ business.  That took some doing and cost a lot of money.  His best people were a girl who posed as a mannequin in a milliner’s shop in Lyons