manner and the cockney accent disappeared when Smith sat
down. He talked to Donovan as one man of the world to another.

"Still," said Donovan, "you've got some sort of idea."

"Last December," said Smith, "I was in London keeping an eye on King
Konrad Karl. The Emperor liked to know what he was doing. One day I
got orders to take delivery of some large cisterns from a firm in
Germany, paying for them by cheque drawn on my own account. They were
consigned to me as water cisterns. My business was to ship them to
Hamburg and hand them over to Captain von Moll. That's all I was told.
But I happened to find out what von Moll's orders were. He was to land
those cisterns in Salissa. I satisfied myself that they were here as
soon as I arrived with you on the _Ida_. Von Moll concealed them very
well; but he was a bit careless in other ways. He seems to have lived
in the palace while he was here and he left some papers lying about,
torn up but not burnt. One of them was a letter from Steinwitz.
Phillips, the officer of the _Ida_, had his eye on those papers. I
swept them up and destroyed them."

"And the cisterns?" said Donovan. "What are they for?"

"If you consider the geographical position of Salissa, you'll see in a
moment. The island lies a bit off the main steamer route between
Marseilles and the Suez Canal; but not too far off. Now I happen to
know that the Emperor places great reliance on submarines. In the
event of a war with England he depends on submarines to cut the trade
routes and sink transports. But submarines operating in the
Mediterranean require bases of supply."

"Petrol?" said Gorman.

"And spare parts," said Smith. "That was the idea, I think. So long as
the island was under the Crown of Megalia there was no difficulty.
Megalia wasn't in a position to interfere with the Emperor's plans."

"The Megalian navy certainly isn't first-rate," said Donovan.

"But when you purchased the island," Smith went on, "things were
different. You might object to the use the Emperor proposed to make of
it. Your Government might have backed you up. How far do you think
your Government will back you?"

"Darned little," said Donovan.

"So Steinwitz seemed to think. But the Emperor wasn't taking any
unnecessary risks. He preferred that the island should return to the
Crown of Megalia. I think that's the whole story so far as I know it.
Perhaps now I ought to be getting off to see that admiral."

"You can make sure of