the time. But
at that precise moment he couldn't have spoken his own name correctly
for the life of him.

Freddy Farmer, however, rushed to his rescue. The English youth looked
the Jap Admiral straight in the eye, and shook his head.

"Too late, now," he said quietly. "Neither of us knows where our force
is now. It may still be up north off your Japanese coast, or perhaps it
is now steaming back to Pearl Harbor."

"That is too bad," the Jap said without a single change of expression.
"I was hoping that perhaps I could detach one or two of my destroyers to
go meet them and sink them."

Both boys got the full meaning of the "one or two destroyers" crack, but
both refused to rise to the bait. They simply shrugged and waited for
the Jap Navy big shot to take the lead again. They thought they saw a
faint flicker of anger cross his flat, shiny face, indicating that he
was a little annoyed. But that's all the sign he gave. He stared at them
each in turn for several more minutes, then seemed to fix his gaze on
Dawson's face.

"You say there are _five_ carriers?" he asked.

"Yes, five carriers and--" Dawson replied, and then stopped dead as the
walls of the room seem to come tumbling down around his ears.

He heard Freddy Farmer's startled gasp, and wished in that moment that
he possessed a gun so that he could shoot his brains out. Of all the
stupid, dumb fools, he took the prize. With his bare face hanging out he
had walked straight into the Jap Admiral's trap, and had been caught
cold. In short, the Jap had suddenly addressed him in _German_, and
without thinking, fathead that he was, he had started to reply in the
_same_ tongue.

"And you Americans boast of being so very, very clever!" the Jap Navy
big shot was now sneering at him. "Fools! Little children! You are all
soft, and eaten away in the brain. You are finished. Do you not realize
that?"

Dawson didn't say anything. He was mentally kicking himself too much to
bother about speaking words. And God knows he had spoken too many words
as it was--in the wrong tongue. Fathead of fatheads. Of course that Jap
pilot rat had reported the entire conversation aboard the U-boat. Had
mentioned, no doubt, that he and the Nazi had spoken in German so that
the two prisoners wouldn't understand. But they had understood
everything spoken. And now the Jap Admiral _knew_ that they had
understood. In short, he had only to add two and two to make a pretty
sure guess that they ha