the incident passed by and public attention
refocussed itself upon the conflict on the plains of Chalons-sur-Marne.
Only Bill Hood, Thornton, and a few others in the secret, together with
the President, the Cabinet, and the members of Conference No. 1 and of
Conference No. 2, truly apprehended the significance of what had
occurred, and realized that either war or the human race must pass away
forever. And no one at all, save only the German Ambassador and the
Imperial German Commissioners, suspected that one of the nations had
conceived and was putting into execution a plan designed to result in
the acquirement of the secret of how the earth could be rocked and in
the capture of the discoverer. For the _Sea Fox_, bearing the German
expeditionary force, had sailed from Amsterdam twelve days after the
conference held at Mainz between Professor von Schwenitz and General von
Helmuth, and having safely rounded the Orkneys was now already well on
its course toward Labrador. Bennie Hooker, however, was ignorant of all
these things. Like an immigrant with a tag on his arm, he sat on the
train which bore him toward Quebec, his ticket stuck into the band on
his hat, dreaming of a transformer that wouldn't--couldn't--melt at only
six thousand degrees.

When Professor Hooker awoke in his room at the hotel in Quebec the
morning after his arrival there, he ate a leisurely breakfast, and
having smoked a pipe on the terrace, strolled down to the wharves along
the river front. Here to his disgust he learned that the Labrador
steamer, the _Druro_, would not sail until the following Thursday--a
three days' wait. Apparently Labrador was a less-frequented locality
than he had supposed. He mastered his impatience, however, and
discovering a library presided over by a highly intelligent graduate of
Edinburgh, he became so interested in various profound treatises on
physics which he discovered that he almost missed his boat.

Assisted by the head porter, and staggering under the weight of his new
rod cases and other impedimenta, Bennie boarded the _Druro_ on Thursday
morning, engaged a stateroom, and purchased a ticket for Seven Islands,
which is the nearest harbour to the mouth of the River Moisie. She was a
large and comfortable river steamer of about eight hundred and fifty
tons, and from her appearance belied the fact that she was the
connecting link between civilization and the desolate and ice-clad
wastes of the Far North, as in fact sh