Chard shook his head impatiently. He absolutely refused to credit the strange stories which, during the last few days, had been rife in the west. Patrol skippers had solemnly assured him that they had seen the _Gelderland_ off the Cornish coast. One declared that, not knowing what she was, he had boarded her and seen her captain, a young man who could not speak a word of English; but, as her papers were in order, he had let her proceed without troubling to search her cargo. As day after day passed these stories were added to, or varied, until the _Gelderland_ began to be regarded as a phantom ship, and was spoken of, not without awe, as the _Flying Dutchman_. The skipper of the _O47_ alone maintained a sceptical attitude, and reiterated his belief that she had been either torpedoed or mined. At last the Admiralty, awaking to the fact that a captured ship had disappeared, sent wireless instructions to the officers in command of the patrols to make a systematic search for the vessel. And so, from Start Point to the Lizard, cruiser, destroyer, and patrol-boat swept the seas. On the afternoon of the very day that these instructions were sent out, Skipper Chard stood in the wheelhouse of the _O47_ and swept the horizon with his glasses. Suddenly he uttered a cry, for just visible against the skyline was the _Gelderland_. "Whack her up all you can!" he yelled through the voice-pipe. "We've sighted her!" The engineer did his best, and the deck-plates of the _O47_ vibrated with the ponderous thumping of the machinery below. Chard leaned out of the wheelhouse with his binoculars glued to the missing prize, calling down maledictions upon himself and all his kin if he failed to lay her by the heels. But the _Gelderland_ was making off as fast as her engines would carry her, and there ensued a long and stern chase which lasted until the _O47_ was near enough to send a shot crashing through the _Gelderland's_ chart-room. Then, and not till then, the _Gelderland_ hove to. "You'll be hanged for this, you ravin' lunatic!" shouted Chard as he boarded the recaptured prize; and then, as the Lieutenant, descending from the bridge, smiled in a sickly sort of fashion, he added: "You've been guilty of barratry, piracy, mutiny, and heaven knows what!" Lawless was told to regard himself as a prisoner, and then the skipper, pursuing his investigations, was amazed to find some score of Germans in the hold, all of them belonging to the submarine service. "Why--why, what the deuce does this mean?" he demanded. "I had to sling some of the cargo overboard," answered the other apologetically, "or there wouldn't have been room for these chaps." "But how the blazes did they get here?"