"Only small steam-boats and junks," the prisoner said. "I’ve nothing more to ask him," said Cummins, so the man was marched away and given a cigar to smoke as a reward. "We shall not starve them out, sir," was Cummins’s only comment. Helston shrugged his shoulders. The second man was brought in, a cunning-looking rascal with unshaven head, his repulsive face made still more hideous by several scars. More scars were visible on his sunken-in chest, and altogether he was a most disagreeable-looking specimen of the human race. He talked more freely than the other man, and told his story very volubly. He had been a "boss" workman in the engine works at the Foochow Arsenal, and had been recruited with many others by the German Schmidt, and shipped to Hong Lu without any knowledge of the character of the employment. "Does he complain?" "Oh no, rather not!" He was paid well, spent nothing except a little on tobacco, and had not much work to do. After working for some months on board the merchant steamers, he was put in charge of the engines of the ill-fated torpedo-boat, and that was why he was aboard her that night. "What did he do aboard the merchant ships?" He seemed to have been a leading hand of shipwrights, and had had many men under his orders. He quite warmed to the subject, and told of all the jobs he had done for the last six months. He had lengthened the funnel of one steamer, added a fo’c’stle to another, altered the bows of a third, and the masts of a fourth. "My aunt!" chuckled Cummins, as A Tsi interpreted this, "I see now how these people make their fortune. They capture a steamer, bring her in here, alter her so that her own builders would not recognize her, and then take her down to some quiet port on the mainland and sell her. Ask him, A Tsi, if that is so." Yes, that was so; and the Chinaman looked surprised at their ignorance. The syndicate, it appeared from what he said, had constructed a ship-repairing yard, and kept it most of the time working at high pressure. Sometimes they kept a ship as long as six months, but whenever a ship did leave, no one could possibly recognize her as the one which had been brought in. On all other points this prisoner corroborated the first, and dotted down on another rough plan of the island the positions of the forts, ships, &c., very much as he had done it. As to food and coal, they had enough to last "many moons". "Mountains of coal" was his description. Asked by Cummins why the other torpedo-boats had not come out, he promptly replied that their engines were unfit for any speed, and that their crews were probably frightened. Directly Ping Sang heard the man’s statement about reconstructing steamers captured and altering their appearance, he went away to his cabin, and returned carrying some papers. At the first opportunity he asked the prisoner, speaking in Chinese, and with very unusual excitement, if ever he remembered the capture of a ship named the _Fi Ting_.