"The British Navy?" The fierce eyes of the soldier were startled. He ran his fingers through his stubbly hair. "Curse the British Navy." "Yes." The mild rejoinder seemed to irritate Von Salzinger. "Talk! Talk! Ach! Those are your orders, Johann. See to them, and communicate with me here. I must write." He moved over to a desk while Stryj deliberately adjusted his hat and lit another cigarette. Then he moved towards the door. "Is there anything else?" he enquired, with his hand upon the handle. Von Salzinger glanced round. "Yes, use every means at your command to get the information we need. Remember, Stryj, if the secrets of Borga have been discovered, if our country has been betrayed, then a harvest of vengeance is going to be reaped." He turned back to his desk and began a long communication addressed to Prince von Berger, while Johann Stryj passed silently out of the room. CHAPTER XV THE INERADICABLE STRAIN Von Salzinger was gross. He looked it. But he had not yet arrived at those years when the outward form loses its atmosphere of virile strength submerged beneath overwhelming adipose and a general bodily inertia. That would come as inevitably as reaction invariably follows upon the heels of excess when vitality passes its maximum. Von Salzinger was of original type, and beneath the shallow veneer of the civilizing process, in him was to be found of a certainty the hairy hands of the savage. It is the brand which can never be eradicated from the original Teuton, and particularly from those who are native of Prussia. The anxious insistence of the claims to Kultur, emanating more particularly from Prussian sources, can be taken as something in the nature of an unconscious admission of the depths from which they have only been partially lifted. Von Salzinger was pronouncedly of this type. He possessed all the physical and mental force which belongs to it; just as he possessed the full appetite for excess which is its invariable accompaniment. In him was developed to an unusual degree the desire for all the bodily enjoyment that life can offer to a creature in whose veins flows the full tide of the animal. Once having completed his arrangements with his erstwhile comrade Johann Stryj, he returned to the carefully considered course which he had marked out. With all the Prussian's scheming mind, from the moment he had been made aware of the drift of his fortunes he had cast about for the best outlets which might promise amelioration for the position which chance had placed him in. Nor had he been slow to discover what he sought. Possibilities had promptly opened up before the mental force which he applied to the problem before him.