"There was no time to lose. And you have a wonderful record for long-distance flying. And luck it was!—if you had been of my mind. Tell me, did not _they_ give you plain instructions?" "Do ’they’ ever speak plainly?" von Herrnung scoffed; and Luttha answered calmly: "Yes, to an ordinary man, who does not understand obscure language, they would have said: ’Lieutenant Commander Luttha, here is a brown leather satchel, with something inside it belonging to the Emperor. You will convey the satchel to Nordeich and deliver it to His Majesty’s hands. And from the moment I entrust it to yours, it shall be close as your very skin to you. If you meet Death upon your errand, die with it next your heart!’" The speaker added with a wounding accent of irony: "Perhaps that marks the difference between a plebeian and a nobleman! I would have lashed it to my body, under my clothing. You strapped it about the boy! By the way, what is the boy?" "The boy! ... Nothing! ... A piece of ballast, merely!" Von Herrnung, warmed by dry clothes and exhibitions of schnapps, was fast recovering his characteristic arrogance. He added, with a shrug and a wave of the hand: "As for the lost satchel, it may well be that duplicates of the dispatches contained in it have been sent to the Emperor by another messenger. That is the usual method, perhaps you are not aware?" "Duplicates exist, but in only one place on earth will you find them, and that place is the London War Office!" The Commander pitched his cigar-butt into the cuspidor, snapped the three stud-clips that secured his yellow oilskin storm-coat, and dug his piercing little eyes into von Herrnung’s as he asked: "Have you never heard of the War-engine of Robert Foulis, the Scottish sea-captain who first suggested to the British the use of steam as applied to battle-ships, and invented the screw-propeller and the big devil knows how many other things besides the mysterious, secret weapon that Great Britain has kept hidden up her sleeve a hundred and twenty-six years! It was offered by Foulis, then Earl of Clanronald, in 1812, to the British Government, and it frightened people like the drunken Regent and the Duke of York and Lord Mulgrave into refusing it. It was offered again to their War Office at the time of their Crimean War,—taken into consideration by the Duke of Newcastle and again ejected,—because—_Grosse Gott!_—it was too inhuman! As though a weapon that could end a War in a twinkling by sheer deadly effectiveness could be anything but a boon to mankind. _Pfui_! Such hypocrisy makes me vomit worse than thirty hours of submergence. Not because of its inhumanity has Britain stored up the old man’s war-engine. Out of diplomacy, to brutalise the great Germanic nation into subservience under the rod of Fear!"