the body of the
ship; the arc was plain, starting from mid-air to hiss against the
armored side; the arc shortened--went to nothing--vanished.... A puff
of smoke from an open port proved its presence inside. Delamater had
the conviction that a deadly something had gone through the ship's
side--was insulated from it--was searching with its blazing, arcing
end for the ammunition rooms....

The realization of that creeping menace came to Delamater with a
gripping, numbing horror. The seconds were almost endless as he
waited. Slowly, before his terrified eyes, the deck of the great ship
bulged upward ... slowly it rolled and tore apart ... a mammoth turret
with sixteen-inch guns was lifting unhurriedly into the air ... there
were bodies of men rocketing skyward....

The mind of the man was racing at lightning speed, and the havoc
before him seemed more horrible in its slow, leisurely progress. If he
could only move--do something!

The shock of the blasted air struck him sprawling into the bottom of
the boat; the listener was hammered almost to numbness by the
deafening thunder that battered and tore through the still air. At top
speed the helmsman drove for the shelter of a hidden cove. They made
it an instant before the great waves struck high upon the sand spit.
Over the bay hung a ballooning cloud of black and gray--lifting for an
instant to show in stark ghastliness the wreckage, broken and twisted,
that marked where the battleship _Maryland_ rested in the mud in the
harbor of New York.

* * * * *

The eyes of the Secret-Service men were filled with the indelible
impress of what they had seen. Again and again, before him, came the
vision of a ship full of men in horrible, slow disintegration; his
mind was numbed and his actions and reactions were largely automatic.
But somehow he found himself in the roar of the subway, and later he
sat in a chair and knew he was in a Pullman of a Washington train.

He rode for hours in preoccupied silence, his gaze fixed unseeingly,
striving to reach out and out to some distant, unknown something which
he was trying to visualize. But he looked at intervals at his hand
that held three metal pellets.

He was groping for the mental sequence which would bring the few known
facts together and indicate their cause. A threat--a seeming spying
within a closed and secret room--the murder on the ninth floor, a
murder without trace of wound or weapon. Weap