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“Where is the Japanese fleet bound?” he asked, sternly.

“I do not know.”

“And would not tell, whether you knew or not. But you said you were helpless. What has happened to you? You can tell that.”

“A simple thing, Captain Metcalf. My supply of oil leaked away, and my engines must work slowly. Your signal was useless; I could not have turned on the light.”

“You have answered the first question. You are far from home without a mother-ship, or she would have found you and furnished oil before this. You have come thus far expecting the fleet to follow and strike a helpless coast before your supplies ran out.”

Again the Jap’s eyes dropped in confusion, and Metcalf went on.

“I can refurnish your boat with oil, my engineer and my men can handle her, and I can easily learn to manipulate your–or shall I say our–invisible searchlight. Hail your craft in English and order all hands on deck unarmed, ready for transshipment to this boat. I shall join your fleet myself.”

A man was lounging in the hatchway of the submersible, and this man Saiksi hailed.

“Ae-hai, ae-hai, Matsu. We surrender. We are prisoner. Call up all men onto the deck. Leave arms behind. We are prisoner.”

They mustered eighteen in all, and in half an hour they were ironed in a row along the stanchioned rail of the torpedo-boat.

“You, too, Saiksi,” said Metcalf, coming toward him with a pair of jingling handcuffs.

“Is it not customary, Captain Metcalf,” said the Jap, “to parole a surrendered commander?”

“Not the surrendered commander of a craft that uses new and deadly weapons of war unknown to her adversary, and before the declaration of war. Hold up your hands. You’re going into irons with your men. All Japs look alike to me, now.”

So Lieutenant Saiksi, of the Japanese navy, was ironed beside his cook and meekly sat down on the deck. With the difference of dress, they really did look alike.

Metcalf had thirty men in his crew. With the assistance of his engineer, a man of mechanics, he picked eighteen of this crew and took them and a barrel of oil aboard the submersible. Then for three days the two craft lay together, while the engineer and the men familiarized themselves with her internal economy–the torpedo-tubes, gasoline-engines, storage-batteries, and motors; and the vast system of pipes, valves, and wires that gave life and action to the boat–and while Metcalf experimented with the mysterious searchlight attached to the periscope tube invented by himself, but perfected by others. Part of his investigation extended into the night. Externally, the light resembled a huge cup about two feet in diameter, with a thick disk fitted around it in a vertical plane. This disk he removed; then, hailing Smith to rig his fire-hose and get off the deck, he descended the hatchway and turned on the light, viewing its effects through the periscope. This, be it known, is merely a perpendicular, non-magnifying telescope that, by means of a reflector at its upper end, gives a view of the seascape when a submarine boat is submerged. And in the eyepiece at its base Metcalf beheld a thin thread of light, of such dazzling brilliancy as to momentarily blind him, stretch over the sea; but he put on his smoked glasses and turned the apparatus, tube and all, until the thin pencil of light touched the end of the torpedo-boat’s signal-yard. He did not need to bring the two-inch beam to a focus; it burst into flame and he quickly shut off the light and shouted to Smith to put out the fire–which Smith promptly did, with open comment to his handful of men on this destruction of Government property.

“Good enough!” he said to Smith, when next they met. “Now if I’m any good I’ll give the Japs a taste of their own medicine.”

“Take me along, captain,” burst out Smith in sudden surrender. “I don’t understand all this, but I want to be in it.”