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I listened eagerly, even if I were not an electrical engineer.

“The same oscillator,” he went on, “is used for sending and receiving, for, like the ordinary electric motor it is also capable of acting as a generator, and a very efficient one, too. All I have to do is to throw a switch in one direction when I want to telegraph or telephone under water, and in the other direction when I want to listen in.”

I could scarcely credit what I heard. Craig had circumvented even the spectacular wireless. He was actually talking through water. Craig had virtually endowed himself with a sixth sense!

I watched him spellbound. Would he succeed in whatever it was that he was planning? I waited anxiously.

“There’s the answer!” he exclaimed in sudden exultation. “Burke is on the Uncas. He tells me that he went to see Mrs. Petzka and she is with him–insisted on going, when she heard that her husband had been engaged by the Furious.”

He waited a moment.

“You see, Walter,” he resumed, “what I am doing is to send out signals by which the Uncas can locate and follow us. She is fast, but, thank heaven, this yacht has to go slow tonight. Sound travels in water at a velocity of about four thousand feet a second. For instance, I find that I get an echo in about one-twentieth of a second. That is the reflected sound wave from the bottom, and indicates that we are in water of about one hundred feet depth. Then I get another echo in something over two seconds. That is the waves reflected from the Uncas, which has been hovering about, waiting for something to happen. They can’t be much more than a mile and a half away, now. I had expected to signal them from the shore, a dock or something of the sort, using this oscillator to get around that fellow’s wireless. But we’re much better off on the boat.”

I looked at him in amazement. “Surrounded by all this junk that may blow us to kingdom come any second?” I demanded.

“Burke says steam is still up on all the ships tied up in the harbor so that they can make a dash for it. They are evidently waiting for that S O S signal.”

“That’s all right,” I said in desperation, “But suppose they blow us up, first?”

“Blow us up first?” he repeated. “Why, don’t you understand? It is not the Furious that they are after. The whole war fleet that is hanging around in this part of the Atlantic is to be blown up in mid-ocean, as part of the plan to aid the escape of the interned ships in New York.”

“Oh,” I breathed, with a sigh of relief, “that’s it, is it?”

“Yes. We’ll get in bad all around if we can’t stop it–Burke with the Secret Service and ourselves with Gaskell, who doesn’t dream that his yacht is being used for the exact opposite of the purpose for which he thinks he has lent it–to say nothing of the mess that our government will have to face for letting these precious schemers play ducks and drakes with our neutrality.”

We waited eagerly, Kennedy sending out and receiving the submarine signals, and I peering out anxiously into the almost impenetrable fog.

Suddenly, apparently from nowhere in the shifting mist, lights seemed to loom up. Instead of stopping, however, the Furious put on a sudden burst of reckless speed.

The Uncas was no match for her at that game. Would she escape finally, after all?

A sharp report rang out. The Uncas had sent a shot across our bows, so dangerously close that it snapped one of the cables that held the mast.

The vibration of our engine slowed, and ceased, and we lay, idly wallowing in the waves as the revenue cutter, bearing our friend Burke and help, came up.