"The _Albatros_ was helpless. Since the international agreement that only naval, military and police ships may fly armed, she had no possible means of defence. Flight, even, was impossible, and the loss of her wireless forbade her to summon help. Then the anonymous ship turned a machine gun on her rudder and shot it out of gear. There was nothing for it but to descend to the water and rest on her floats. Pring was forced to give the order, and she planed down. The other ship followed and took the water not two hundred yards away. "She then signalled in Morse code, with a Klaxon horn, that she was sending men aboard the _Albatros_, and that if the captain or crew offered the slightest resistance she'd blow her to pieces. They launched a Berthon collapsible boat from a door in the stern fusilage. There were four men in her, all armed with large-calibre automatic pistols, and wearing pilot's hoods and masks with talc eye-pieces, so that it was impossible to identify them. Pring could do nothing at all. He had the passengers to consider. These ruffians cleared out the safe and the women's jewel-cases--they left the mails alone--and in ten minutes they were back again with the loot. The ship lifted and went off in the dark at two hundred miles an hour, leaving the _Albatros_, helpless upon the water. "It was a business of several hours to rig up a makeshift rudder, but, fortunately, her searchlights were all right, and she kept on signalling with these until she was sighted by a big cargo steamer, a Baltimore to Cadiz boat, coming up from the south, the _Sant Iago_. She took off the passengers and is bringing them home; she's only a fifteen-knot boat, but I have already dispatched one of our smaller liners to pick her up and take the passengers aboard. They ought to be here some time to-morrow. "The _Sant Iago_ has wireless, and was able to communicate, not only with us, but also with the air-yacht _May Flower_, which she sighted on the four-thousand-foot level at dawn. The _May Flower_ belongs to Mr. Van Adams, the Philadelphia millionaire, who is crossing to England with a party of friends. She came down to the water and took up Commander Pring and the second officer, and should be here by tea-time this afternoon. Then we shall know more of this unprecedented, this deplorable business." "And the _Albatros_, Sir Joshua?" "A small crew was left on her, and an emergency tender and workmen started at dawn. She ought to be flying again to-night." I had all the available facts at last, and long before Sir Joshua had finished my mind was busy as a mill. There was going to be the very biggest sort of commotion over this. England and America would be in a blaze of fury within twenty-four hours, and every flying man, from the skippers of the lordly London-Brindisi-Bombay boats, or the Transatlantic Line, to the sporting commercial traveller in a secondhand 50 h.p. trussed-girder blow-fly, would be wagging the admonishing finger at ME.