True to his word, a moment later the vessel began to draw slowly ahead, but her speed was so slow as to be scarcely perceptible. As I stood at the wheel I wondered what they were doing on board the other vessel. Fully half-an-hour had elapsed since they had left the ship, and yet there had been no explosion. I could distinguish the boats lying alongside her, and could well imagine how puzzled their occupants must feel. Then a thought came into my mind which almost brought my heart into my mouth. What if they should suppose that something had gone wrong with the mechanism of the bomb, and should return to the vessel to make sure of our destruction by scuttling her themselves? Under the impulse of this new fear I applied my mouth to the speaking tube again. "For Heaven's sake, get all the speed you can on her," I cried. "I am afraid of their coming back." "We are doing our best," was the reply. "The pressure is rising steadily." I prayed that it might rise in time to save us, and turned my attention to the wheel once more. Then a sudden and very natural curiosity came over me to discover, if possible, our whereabouts on the seas. When I had first come on board they had talked about the North Sea, but I had now quite convinced myself that this was not the case. At the slow pace at which she was travelling, the vessel required little or no watching, so, leaving her to her own devices, I went out of the wheel-room by the starboard door, in order that I should not be observed by the people on board the other vessel, and so entered the old-fashioned chart-room. I quite expected to find the chart there with the run marked out upon it, and I was not disappointed. The navigator, whoever he was, must have been both a careful and conscientious man, for I found that he had pricked off his run up to mid-day. I found it very easy, therefore, to settle our position. It proved to be as I expected. We were not in the North Sea at all, and, so far as that chart was concerned, had never been there. Our true position was three degrees, or thereabouts, west of Achil Head, on the west coast of Ireland. I had just convinced myself on this point, when I chanced to look out of the window on the port side. Almost before I had time to think, I was back in the wheel-room once more. "The boats are returning," I shouted down the tube, in a voice that might have been heard a couple of hundred yards away, and then added illogically--"can you do nothing?" I looked again, and sure enough two of the boats were heading directly for us. It was plain that they had noticed something suspicious, either from the smoke escaping from the funnel, or the splashing of the screw astern, otherwise they would not have deemed it necessary to send a second boat. They must have guessed that we had escaped from our cabins, and that we had taken charge of the ship.