RETREAT AND WOULD-BE REST--WINTRY WEATHER IN THE NORTH SEA--THE SECRET MESSAGE--RIVAL'S REMOVAL COMMANDED FORTHWITH--SEEMINGLY IMPOSSIBLE PROPOSITION--SEEKING ONE'S COLLEAGUES--SOLVING THE RIDDLE--PREPARING THE TRAP--THE LONELY SENTRY AND THE MYSTERIOUS BOATMAN CAPTURE, ARREST, SEARCH AND FIND--THE INCRIMINATING DOCUMENT--INSTANT DEPORTATION--EXULTATION--NEXT, PLEASE. After a coup of importance has been successfully accomplished, it is sometimes advisable for a Secret Service agent to betake himself to a quiet, secluded place where his identity and his activities are least likely to be known, or even suspected. Towards Christmas, in the first year of the war, I found myself in such a position; my work for some weeks past had been not only exceedingly strenuous, but, it was gratifying to remember, it had also been successful. Perhaps luck had unduly favoured me. Anyway, I knew quite enough of the enemy to be only too well assured that he would stop at nothing to get, or to attempt to get, even with me if he possibly could. I also thoroughly understood it was advisable for more reasons than one that I should take a well-earned rest, a few days breathing-space until further demands were made upon my individual efforts. Thus it was I turned my face towards a lonely, secluded little haven snugly concealed in an inner fjord of the Norwegian coast where I intended to sleep and dream and sink all traces of my existence on earth for a few brief days at least. December, 1914, in northern seas was a month of record storms and multitudinous wrecks. The daily life of those unfortunates whose duties took them there, or compelled them to navigate, was unenviable in the extreme. Ice, which accumulated and increased in its envelopment hourly, not only made decks doubly dangerous, but, unless removed from rails, ropes, deckhouses, and other parts of a ship at periodical intervals might possibly threaten worse disaster than the wrecks and sunken rocks around. Fogs, snowstorms, floating mines, mountainous seas, submerged hulks and treacherous shoals, coupled with the long, long winter nights, were enemies more to be feared than the cruel Hun. A few weeks of this work would try any man; it had been more than enough for me, a landsman whose soul never yearned for the life of a sailor. The relief at hearing the cranky, ought-to-have-been-long-ago-condemned old packet, rejoicing in the high-sounding name of some forgotten heathen god, bump and scrape and groan against the piling of the quay at my quiet sleepy little Scandinavian seaport, was a joy not to be expressed in words. To me who had roughed it, under strenuous conditions, the coarse fare and the still coarser bed-linen on even a flea-smothered couch seemed Valhalla adorned. It was rest. It was peace. It was contentment. It naturally followed that it was supreme happiness for the immediate moment.