He dragged him on and on to the edge of the woods that bordered the lake. There he stopped, he could go no farther. As Grant slipped from his grasp to the snow covered ground, a wild roar echoed across the lake and back again, and seemed to split the very heavens. Stewart saw a cloud of smoke and flame shoot up from the lighthouse. The ground about him shook with the blast and great cracks ran crazily out into the ice of the lake. Where all had been solid ice a moment before a broad expanse of black water appeared, and gliding swiftly toward it with a speed that could not be diminished, and a direction that could not be veered, Stewart saw the iceboat with its helpless occupant, Stewart saw his men in the automobile a short distance behind the iceboat. He saw the driver jam on his brakes and saw the machine skid swiftly about in a flurry of ice and snow, just as the iceboat disappeared over the brink of ice into the cold blackness of the waters of the lake. He passed a hand over his face and turned back to Grant, who was staring up at him in bewilderment. "What are you doing here?" Grant's voice was scarcely a murmur. Stewart smiled and bent over him. "A girl gave me the tip--Dixie Mason. The girl with Von Lertz, you know." Grant sat upright and stared at him. "Dixie Mason!" He rubbed his aching head. A wild conglomeration of ideas made his head whirl. Why had Dixie Mason done this? Had she too been working with the Germans for a purpose? Or had she simply allowed kindness to intervene in a plot which otherwise would have meant his death? His aching brain refused to solve the puzzle. Grasping Stewart's hand he rose. "We'd better go back," he said simply, brushing the snow from his clothes, "Fay must be about ready to make a full confession." They walked to the bank of the lake and waited for the return of the operatives in the automobile. At the club they found Fay ready to make his confession. He had signalled his willingness to do so. "I was given 20,000 marks to come to America," he said, "I was told to get in communication with German officials here--but they would not have anything to do with me. That is all I can tell you regarding them----" He stopped. The memory of another day had come to him--a room in an office building in lower New York, in Wall Street. The clamor of traffic and shouts of drivers echoing into a still room. Two men before him, hard, cunning, calculating. And the voice of one suavely suggesting: "Our positions demand that we must not be known as the directors of any movement of espionage against the United States--if your plan should fail and you should be arrested, we would of course be compelled to repudiate you. Like-wise it would be your duty to say that you had tried to see us but that we had denied you an interview."