nd dirigible torpedoes. All the details of
the story were suggestive: the 'small local company'; the 'engineer
from Bremen' (who, I wondered, was he?); the few shares held by von
Bruening, enough to explain his visits; the stores and gear coming
from Wilhelmshaven, a naval dockyard.

Try as I would I could not stir Davies's imagination as mine was
stirred. He was bent on only seeing the objections, which, of course,
were numerous enough. Could secrecy be ensured under pretext of
salving a wreck? It must be a secret shared by many--divers, crews of
tugs, employees of all sorts. I answered that trade secrets are often
preserved under no less difficult conditions, and why not imperial
secrets?

'Why the Ems and not the Elbe?' he asked.

'Perhaps,' I replied, 'the Elbe, too, holds similar mysteries.'
Neuerk Island might, for all we knew, be another Memmert; when
cruising in that region we had had no eyes for such things, absorbed
in a preconceived theory of our own. Besides, we must not take
ourselves too seriously. We were amateurs, not experts in coast
defence, and on such vague grounds to fastidiously reject a clue
which went so far as this one was to quarrel with our luck. There was
a disheartening corollary to this latter argument that in my new-born
zeal I shut my eyes to. As amateurs, were we capable of using our
clue and gaining exact knowledge of the defences in question? Davies,
I knew, felt this strongly, and I think it accounted for his lukewarm
view of Memmert more than he was aware. He clung more obstinately
than ever to his 'channel theory', conscious that it offered the one
sort of opportunity of which with his peculiar gifts he was able to
take advantage. He admitted, however, that it was under a cloud at
present, for if knowledge of the coastwise navigation were a crime in
itself we should scarcely be sitting here now. 'It's something to do
with it, anyhow!' he persisted.

XVIII. Imperial Escort

MEMMERT gripped me, then, to the exclusion of a rival notion which
had given me no little perplexity during the conversation with von
Bruening. His reiterated advice that we should lose no time in picking
up our anchor and chain had ended by giving me the idea that he was
anxious to get us away from Bensersiel and the mainland. At first I
had taken the advice partly as a test of our veracity (as I gave the
reader to understand), and partly as an indirect method of lulling
any suspicions which Grimm'