The big liner was running like a ghost, with all lights out on deck and every porthole shrouded. This might seem to the layman almost humorously inconsistent; for, every minute or two the blast of her foghorn went bellowing away into the night, loudly enough to disturb the slumbers of any U-boat lying "doggo" within five miles.

Duncan Drew and I were alone in the smoking-room when the steward brought us our coffee. There were very few passengers; and the first cabin-folk were curiously different from those of peace-time. Most of them, I fancied, were crossing the Atlantic on some business directly connected with the war. There was a Belgian professor from Louvain, for instance, who was taking his family over to the new post that had been found for him at an American University; and there was the wife of an Italian statesman, an American woman, who was returning home to raise funds for the Red Cross of her adopted country. There were others whom it was not so easy to place; and Duncan Drew would have been among them, I think, if I had not known him. Nobody could have looked more like a civilian and less like an officer of the British Navy than Duncan did at this moment. But I knew the job on which he was engaged. When he found that I knew the Maine coast, he asked me to help him in a certain matter.

It was in the days before America entered the war; and his mission was to present certain evidence of a widespread German conspiracy to the United States Government. If they approved, he was to cooperate in unearthing the ring-leaders. The conspiracy was a very simple one. It seemed likely, at the time, that the U-boats would soon be unable to operate from European bases; and the German admiralty, always looking a few months ahead, though perhaps ignoring remoter possibilities, was calmly planning, with the help of its agents in America, to work from the other side of the water. The thousand-mile coast line of the United States had many advantages from the German point of view, especially in its lonelier regions, where there are hundreds of small islands, either uninhabited or privately owned, and not necessarily owned by American citizens. The U-boats, it is true, would have to travel further if they were to work in European waters. But already they had been forced by the British patrols to travel more than fifteen hundred miles from their European bases, far to the north of Scotland and west of Ireland, before they could operate against the Atlantic shipping. The slight increase in the distance would be more than repaid by the comparative safety of the submarines. They planned, in short, to work from American bases, while a dull-witted British Navy should be vainly endeavoring to close European doors, which the enemy was no longer using.

We didn't talk "shop" in the smoking-room, even when we were alone, for the ground had been covered so often. On this particular evening, I remember, we talked chiefly about food. The dinner had been excellent; and it had been a curious sensation to pass from the slight but obvious restrictions of London, to a ship which seemed to possess all the resources of the United States.

"I've only been in Berlin once," said Duncan, "but I was there long enough to know that they will feel the pinch first, and feel it worst. They are rum beggars, the Boches. Think of the higher command marking out the early stages of the war by the dinners it was going to have,—every menu carefully planned, one for Brussels, one for Paris, and probably one for London! I remember lunching at a hotel when I was in Berlin, and seeing rather a curious thing. There was a table in the center of the room, laid for what was evidently going to be a very grand affair. It was laid for about twenty people, and I saw a thing I had never seen before. Every champagne glass contained a peach. I asked my waiter what it meant, and he said that von Schramm, the fellow who is one of the moving spirits behind this new submarine campaign, was entertaining some of his pals that day; and this was one of his pretty little fads. He thought it improved the wine, and also that it prevented gout, or some rot of that sort."

"How very German! My chief objection would be that there wouldn't be much room left for the champagne."

"Trust the German for that, my lad. The glasses were extra large, and of a somewhat unusual pattern. As a matter of fact, the decorative effect was rather pretty. It's queer—the way some things stick in your memory and others vanish. I believe that my most vivid impression of the few months I passed in Germany is that blessed table, waiting for its guests, with the peaches in the champagne glasses. I didn't see the guests arrive. Wish I had now. There's always something a little stagey, don't you think, about a table waiting for its guests; but this was more so. It affected me like the throne of melodrama waiting for its emperor. Funny that it should have made such an impression, isn't it?"

I thought not; for it was part of Duncan's business to be impressed by unusual things—more especially when they were symptomatic of something else. It was this that made him so useful, for instance, in that exciting little episode of the cargo of onions which was intercepted—owing to one of his impressions—in a Scandinavian ship. They were perfectly good onions, the first few layers of them; and they looked like perfectly good onions when you burrowed into the lower layers. But Duncan had been seized by an absurd desire to see whether they would bounce or not; and when he experimented on the deck, they did bounce, bounce like cricket balls, as high as the ship's funnels.

This capture of one of the largest cargoes of contraband rubber was due to an impression he got from two innocent cablegrams which had been intercepted and brought to him at the Admiralty,—one of them apparently concerning an operation for appendicitis, and the other announcing the death of the patient. His intuitions, indeed, resembled those of the artist; and, though he was one of the smartest sailors in the Navy, he looked more like a pre-Raphaelite painter's conception of Galahad than any one I had ever seen in the flesh. He looked exceedingly youthful, and the dead whiteness of his face, which his Philistine brethren described as lantern-jawed, was lighted by the alert eyes of the new age. They had that peculiar glitter which one sees in the eyes of aviators, and sometimes in those of the business men accustomed to the electric cities of the new world. His hands were like those of a musician, long and quick and nervous. But I could easily imagine them throttling an enemy.

We turned in early that night, and I dozed fitfully, revolving fragments of our somewhat disconnected conversation. The beautiful sea-cry "All's well" came to me from the watch in the bow, as the bell tolled the passage of the hours; and it was not till daybreak that I slept, only to dream of that table in Berlin, waiting for its guests, with a peach in every champagne glass.

II

As we waited in the cold brilliance of New York harbor, a few mornings later, and looked with considerable satisfaction at the German steamers that were huddled like gigantic red and black cattle in the docks of the Hamburg-Amerika and North German-Lloyd, a telegram was brought aboard which settled our plans.

Duncan was to go down to Washington that night, while I was to go up to Rockport, a little fishing village on the coast of Maine. At this place I was to take a motor-car and drive some fifteen miles to a certain lonely strip of pine-clad coast. There we were to camp out in a tiny cottage, which we could rent from an old sea-captain whom I knew before the war. Two artists, in quest of a quiet place for work, could hardly find a happier hunting-ground. I was particularly glad to find that we could hire a trim little motor-launch, in which we could go exploring among the islands that dotted the blue sea for scores of miles. It was a beautiful coast, and their dark peaks of pine were printed like tiny black feathers against a sky of unimaginable sapphire. Nothing could seem more remote from the devilries of modern war.

Duncan joined me, a week later, in Captain Humphrey's cottage—it was a small white-painted wooden house among the pine trees on the main land, built on the rocks which overhung a deep blue inlet of the Atlantic. We discussed our plans on the little veranda, from which we could see half a dozen of those pine-crowned islands, which were the objects of suspicion. There were scores of others we could not see, to north and south of us, and we checked them off on the map as we sat there under the dried sunfish and the other queer marine trophies, which the old skipper had brought back with him from the South Seas.

The nights were quite cold enough for a fire, though it was only mid-July; and we finished all our plans that evening round the big stove, the kind of thing you see in the foc'sle of a steam trawler, which stood in the center of Captain Humphrey's parlor. We were more than a little glad indeed to let our pipes and the good-smelling pine logs waft their incense abroad; for—like all the dwellers in those parts—the old skipper subsisted through the winter on the codfish which he had salted and stored during the summer in his attic; and though his abode was clean and neat as himself, it had the healthy reek of a trawler, as well as its heating apparatus. A large oil lamp, which hung from the ceiling, was none the worse, moreover, for the moderating influence of a little wood-smoke.

"To-morrow, then," said Duncan, "we take the motor-launch and have a look at all the islands between this place and Rockport. They've been awfully decent down in Washington about it. The only trouble is that they don't and can't believe it. Exactly the state of mind we were in, before the war. Everybody laughing at exactly the same things, from spy-stories to signals on the coast. I met a man in the Government who had been taken to a window at midnight to see a light doing the Morse code, off this very coast, and he laughed at it. Didn't believe it. Thought it was the evening-star. We were like that ourselves. No decent man can believe certain things, till they are beyond question.

"It's our own fault. We told them all was well before the war; and I don't see how we can blame them for thinking their own intervention unnecessary now. We keep on telling America that it's all over except the shouting. We paint the rosiest kind of picture to-day about the prospects of the allies; and then we grumble amongst ourselves because Americans don't turn the whole of their continent upside down to come and help us. We deliberately lulled America to sleep, and then we kicked because we heard that she had only one eye open.

"Well,—they've given us a blessing on our wild-goose chase. We may do all the investigating we like, as I understand the position, so long as we leave any resultant action to the United States. This means, I suppose,—in old Captain Humphrey's language—that we may be 'rubber-necks,' but we mustn't shoot. All the same, I brought the guns with me." He laid two automatic pistols on the table. "It's more than likely, from what I've been able to gather, that we may have to defend our own skins; and I suppose that's permissible. Oh, damn that mosquito!" He slapped his ankle, and complained bitterly that the old sea-captain's faith in his own tough exterior had prevented him from providing his doors and windows with mosquito netting.

It was on the fourth morning of our search that things began to happen. For my own part, I had already begun to be so absorbed in the peace of the world about us, that the whole business of the war seemed unreal and our own quest futile. I could no longer wonder at those inhabitants of the new world who were said to look upon our European Armageddon as a bad dream, or a morbid tale in a book, which it was better not to open. As we chug-chugged along the coast, close under the thick pine woods, which grew almost to the edge of the foam, I thought I had never breathed an air so fragrant, or seen color so brilliant in earth and sky and sea. Once or twice, as we shut off the motor and lay idle, we heard a hermit-thrush in the woods, breaking the silence with a peculiarly plaintive liquid call, quite unlike the song of our thrushes at home, but very beautiful. Here and there we passed the little red, blue and green buoys of lobster-pots, shining like jewels as the clear water lapped about them in that amazing sunlight.

We were making for a certain island about which we had obtained some interesting details from Captain Humphrey himself. He told us that it had been purchased two or three years ago by a New Yorker who was building himself quite a fine place on it. He seemed to be a somewhat mysterious character, for he was never seen on the mainland, and all his supplies were brought up to him on his own large private yacht.

"There's a wharf on the island," said Captain Humphrey, "with deep water running up to it, so that a yacht can sail right up to his porch, as you might say, and you wouldn't know it was there. The cove runs in on the slant, and the pines grow between it and the sea. You wouldn't notice it, unless you ran right in at the mouth. It makes a fine private harbor for a yacht, and I believe it has held two at a time. There's a good beach for clams on the west shore, but of course, it's private."

We certainly saw no sign of yacht or harbor as we approached the island from the landward side; but we made no departure from our course to look for either. We were bound for clam-beach, where we intended to do a little clam-poaching.

"It doesn't look promising," said Duncan, as we approached the shore. "There doesn't seem to be anybody to warn trespassers off. But perhaps clam-beach is not regarded as dangerous, and the trespassing begins further on."

In a few moments we had moored the launch in four feet of water, and were ashore with a couple of clam-rakes. We had dug a hundred, as we walked towards the pine-wood, when Duncan straightened up and said:

"This makes my back ache, and it's blazing hot. I'm going to have a pipe in the shade, up there."

I shouldered my rake, and followed him into the wood. As soon as we were well among the trees, we began to walk quickly up the thin winding path, which we supposed would lead us to the neighborhood of the house.

"Not at all promising," said Duncan. "They would never let us ramble about like this if they had anything to conceal. Just for the fun of it, we'll go up to the house, and ask if Mr. Chutney Bilge, the novelist, doesn't live there. You want his autograph, don't you?"

In five minutes, we had emerged from the pines, and saw before us a very pleasant looking wooden house with a wide veranda, screened all round with mosquito-netting, and backed by glimpses of blue sea between dark pine-trunks. There was not a soul to be seen, and no sign of its occupants anywhere. We walked up to the porch, pulled open the netted door in the outer screen, and knocked on the door of the house, which stood wide open. We waited and listened; but there was no sound except the ticking of a clock. There was another open door on the right side of the hall. Duncan felt a sudden impulse to look through it, and tip-toed quietly forward. He had no sooner looked than he stood as if turned to stone, with so queer an expression on his face that I instantly came to his side to see what Medusa had caused it. It seemed a very harmless Medusa; but I doubt if anything could have startled me more at the moment. We stood there, staring at a table, laid for lunch. There were twelve champagne glasses, of a somewhat unusual pattern; and each of these glasses contained a peach.

III

Before I could be quite sure whether I was dreaming or waking, Duncan had dashed into the room on the other side of the hall, and grabbed up a bundle of papers that had been dropped as if by some one in a great hurry, all over the table. He glanced at one or two.

"But this,—this—settles it," he cried. "Come out of it quickly." And, in a few seconds, we were in the cover of the woods again.

"Schramm himself is over here, apparently. He must have come by U-boat," Duncan muttered, as we hurried down the path towards our launch. "If they catch us, we're simply dead and buried, and past praying for."

"But what does it mean? Where are they? Why the devil have they left everything open to the first-comer?"

"Beats me completely. But we'd better not wait to inquire. The next move is up to Washington."

"Look here, Duncan, we'd better be careful about our exit from the woods. If any one happens to have spotted the launch, we may run our heads into a trap."

I had an uneasy feeling that we were being watched, and that every movement we made was plainly seen by a gigantic but invisible spectator, very much the kind of feeling, I suppose, that insects must have under the microscope. I felt sure that we were not going to have it all our own way with this quiet island. Duncan hesitated for a moment, but I was insistent that we should take a look at our landing place before we left our cover. It was a characteristic of Duncan that as soon as he had discovered what he wanted, he became as forthright a sailor as you could wish to find; and I knew that if we were to escape with whole skins, or even to make use of our discovery, I should have to exercise my own wits. Fortunately, my own "impressions" began when his finished; for, after he had yielded to my persuasion, we made a slight circuit through the woods, and crept out through the long grass on the top of the little cliff, overlooking the beach where we had landed. Our clams were still there, in two neat little dumps. So was the launch, but in the stern of it there sat a tall red-bearded man, who looked like a professor, and a couple of sailors. They were all three talking German in low, excited tones, and they were all three armed with rifles.

The launch lay almost directly below us, and we could hear some of their conversation. I gathered that the luncheon party had gone on board a U-boat which had just arrived, to inspect the latest improvements. Something had gone wrong. They had submerged; and it seemed to be doubtful whether they could get her up again. That, of course, was why the house was deserted and our trespassing unforbidden. It was probably also the reason why the sentries had been absent, and had only just discovered our launch on their rounds. One of the sailors was aggrieved, it seemed to me, that no effort was being made to obtain other help for the submerged men than the island itself could lend. His best friend was aboard; and he thought it wicked not to give them a chance, even if it meant their internment. The red-bearded professor was explaining to him, however, in the most highly approved style of modern Germany, that his feelings were by no means logical; and that it was far nobler to sacrifice one's friends than to endanger the State.

"But, if the State is a kind of devil," said the sailor, who was a bit of a logician himself, "I prefer my friends, who in the meantime are being suffocated."

"That is a fallacy," the professor was answering. Then, from the direction of the house, there came a confused sound of shouting.

A fourth sailor came tearing down the beach like a maniac.

"Where are the clam-fishers?" he called to the three philosophers. "They are to be taken, dead or alive."

At the same moment, I saw the glint of the sun on the revolvers of several other men, who were advancing through the woods towards the beach, peering to right and left of them. Without a whisper between us, Duncan and I crawled off along the cliff, through the thick undergrowth.

Obviously, the submarine had come to the surface again, and the whole merry crowd was on our track. The island was not more than a quarter of a mile in diameter; and I saw no hope of evading our pursuers, of whom there must be at least twenty, judging from the cries that reached us. There was nothing for it, but to choose the best place for putting up a fight; and, as luck would have it, we were already on the best line of defense. The undergrowth between the cliff's edge and the woods was so thick that nobody could discover us, except by crawling up the trail by which we had ourselves entered. It proved to be the only way by which the cliff's edge could be explored, and we had a full half-mile of the island's circumference, a long ledge, only a few feet wide, on which we could crawl in security for the time being, till the hunt came up behind us. I remember noticing—even in those moments of peril—that the ground and the bushes were littered with big crab claws and clam shells that had been dropped and picked there by the sea gulls and crows; and I was thinking—in some queer way—of the easy life that these birds lead, when I almost put my hand on a human skull, protruding from a litter of loose earth, white flakes of shell and crabs' backs. Duncan pulled a heap of the evil-smelling stuff away with his clam-rake, and bared the right side of the skeleton. There was a half-rotten clam-rake in the bony clutch of the dead man. Evidently, somebody else had paid the penalty before us. The body had been buried, and rain, snow, or the insatiable sea-gulls had uncovered the yellow-toothed head.

A few yards further on, the cliff projected so far out that even when one hung right over the edge, it was only just possible to see where it met the swirling water, which seemed very deep here. About fifteen yards out, there was a big boulder of rock, covered with brown sea-weed.

"Look here, Duncan," I said, "there's only one real chance for us. We've got to swim to the mainland, but we can't do it by daylight. We've got to pass six hours till it's dark enough, and there's only one way to do it. How far can you swim under water?"

"About fifty feet," he said. "You're going crazy, old man, it's a mile and a half to the mainland."

"Duncan, you're a devil of a man for getting into a scrape. But when it comes to getting out of one, I feel a little safer in my own hands. Can you get as far as that rock under water?"

"I think so," he said, and caught on to the suggestion at once.

The cries were coming along the cliff's edge now, and it was a question of only half a minute before some of our pursuers would be on the top of us.

"Hurry, then. Swim to the north of the rock, and don't come up till you're on the other side. If you feel yourself rising, grab hold of the sea-weed, and keep yourself down till you've hauled round the rock. Quick!"

There was a crashing in the bushes, not fifty yards away, along the cliff, as we dived into the clear green water. The plunge carried one further than I expected, and four or five strokes along the bottom of the sea brought me to the base of the rock. It was quite easy to turn it, and I was relieved to find that there was a good ledge for landing on the further side, only an inch or two above the level of the water, and quite screened from the island by the rock itself, which was about ten feet in length, and curved in a half-moon shape, with the horns pointing towards the mainland. In fact, it was like a large Chesterfield couch of stone, covered with brown sea-weed, and resolutely turning its back on the island. We were luckier than I had dared to hope; and when, in a few seconds, Duncan had coiled himself on the ledge beside me, I saw by his grin that he thought we had solved the problem of escape. For five minutes we lay dead still, listening to the clamor along the cliff from which we had just dived.

"Thank the Lord, we get the sun here," said Duncan at last, as the sounds died away. "There's only one thing that worries me now. What are we to do when they come round in a boat?"

"They won't think of that for some time," I said, "but when they do, we must take to the water again, and work round behind the rock. We ought to be able to keep it between us and the blighters, with any luck. We've only got to keep enough above water to breathe with; and I've seen some fine camouflage done with a little sea-weed before now."

We looked at the yard-long fringes of brown sea-weed, and decided that it would be possible to defy anything but the closest inspection of our rock by the simple process of sliding down into the water and pulling the sea-weed over our heads, on the side next to the island. There was a reef which would prevent a boat passing on that side.

Our clothes were almost dried by the blazing sun before we were disturbed again. Duncan was ruefully contemplating a corn-cob pipe, which he affirmed had been ruined by the salt water. He poked the stem at a huge sea-anemone, which immediately sucked it in, and held it as firmly as a smoker's mouth, with so ludicrous an effect that Duncan's risible faculties were dangerously moved. I was half afraid of one of his volcanic guffaws, when we both heard a sound that struck us dumb,—the sound of oars coming steadily in our direction. We slipped into the water, according to plan, hauled ourselves round behind the rock, and drew the long thick fringes of sea-weed over our heads. We held ourselves anchored there by the brown stems, and kept little more than our noses above the water. No concealment could have been more complete. The boat passed on; and in five minutes we were back again on our ledge, and drying in the sun.

"Good Lord," said Duncan, suddenly, "that was a near shave. I'd forgotten that beastly thing."

He pointed to the sea-anemone, which was still sucking at the yellow corn-cob pipe. It looked like the bristling red mouth of some drunken and half-submerged sea-god, and could hardly have been missed by the boat's crew, if they had been looking for anything like it.

"Lord, what a shave!" he said again. "What would Schramm have said if he had seen it!"

Then, as we stared at the absurd marine creature, we rocked in silent spasms of mirth—human beings are made of a very queer clay—picturing the bewildered faces of the Boches at a sight which would have meant our death.

The sense of humor was benumbed in both of us before long. The sun was dropping low, and we did not dry as quickly as before. There was a stillness on the island, which boded no good, I thought, though our pursuers evidently believed that we had escaped them.

"They probably think we swam ashore earlier in the game," said Duncan. "They must be sick at not having spotted us."

"I wonder what they are up to now?"

"Probably destroying evidence, and getting ready to clear out, if they really have a notion that their big men over here may be involved. Unfortunately, these papers don't give anything away, so far as I can see except that they're addressed to Schramm; but it's quite obvious what they were doing."

We lay still and waited, listening to the strangely peaceful lapping of the water round our rock, and watching the big sea-perch and rock-cod that moved like shadows below.

"I wonder if that fellow suspects mischief," said Duncan, pointing over the cliff. "By Jove! isn't he splendid?"

Over the highest point of the island a white-headed eagle was mounting, in great, slow, sweeping circles, without one beat of the long, dark wings that must have measured seven feet from tip to tip.

"It's too splendid to be the German eagle. Praise the Lord, it's the native species; and he's taking his time because he has to take wide views. He has to soar high enough to get his bearings."

Up and up, the glorious creature circled, till he dwindled in the dazzling blue to the size of a sea-gull; and still he wheeled and mounted, till he became a black dot no bigger than an English sky-lark. Then he moved, like a bullet, due east.

"I almost believe in omens," said Duncan. "Ah, look out! There they come!"

The masts of a large yacht, which must have emerged from the private harbor of which Captain Humphrey spoke, came slowly round the island. We had only just time to slip into the water, behind our rock, before she came into full view. She passed so near to us that the low sun cast the traveling shadows of her railing almost within reach of my hand; and the shadows of her two boats on the port side came along the clear green water between us and the island, like the gray ghosts of some old pirate's dinghies.

She must have been still in sight, and we were still in our hiding-place, when it seemed as if the island tried to leap towards the sky, and we were deafened by a terrific concussion. Fragments of wood, and great pieces of stone, dropped all round us in the poppling water, and more than one deadly missile struck the rock itself.

"They've blown up the whole show!" cried Duncan. "There can't be anybody left alive on the island!"

We waited—ten minutes or more—to see if other explosions were to follow. Then we swam for clam-beach to investigate. It was littered with fragments of the buildings that had been destroyed. The tarred roof of a shed had been dropped there almost intact, as if from the claws of some gigantic eagle. The pine-wood looked as if it had been subjected to a barrage fire; and, in many places, the undergrowth was burning furiously.

We dashed up the path, with the smoke stinging our eyes, towards the dull red glow, which was already beginning to rival the deepening crimson of the Maine sunset. The central portion of the house was still standing, though much of it had been blown bodily away, and the fire was laying fierce hands upon it from all sides. We turned to the north, where we supposed the wharf had been. The remains of half a dozen sheds were burning on one side of the cove, and it looked as if half the cliff had been tumbled into it on the other.

The heat of the fire along the wharf was so fierce that we turned back to the house again.

"Well," said Duncan, "there's evidence enough to give a few good headlines to the neutral press,—'Gasoline Explosion on Maine Coast! Wealthy New Yorker Escapes Death in Fiery Furnace!' Fortunately, there's also enough for Washington to lay up in its memory."

Another section of the house fell as we looked at it; and we saw the interior of the dining-room, with the flames licking up the three remaining walls. By one of those curious freaks of high-explosive, the table was hardly disarranged; and our last glimpse of it, through a fringe of fire, showed us those twelve queer champagne glasses. They stood there, flickering like evil goblins, a peach in every glass....

We watched them for five minutes. Then the whole scintillating fabric collapsed; and we sat down to wait for the frantic motor-boat, which was already thumping towards us, with the reporter of the Rockport Sentinel furiously writing in her bows.