Everything was in order to commence work; in fact, Doctor Lamson had just decided that he would try his engines together for the first time, when Clifford Vandel's telegram reached him from Southampton. His agent in Winnipeg had kept him well informed of the principal events going on in the world during his long isolation, and the sailing of the French and Russian Polar expeditions _via_ Davis Straits had not escaped him. For a few minutes after he had read the dispatch he walked up and down the telegraph room, into which no one but himself and Austin Vandel, Clifford's nephew and his own general manager, could under any circumstances gain admission, since none but they knew the combinations of the lock which opened the steel door. Austin was sitting at the table where he had received the message, and he broke the silence by saying: "I guess, doctor, that looks a bit ugly. I suppose it's that Alsatian Frenchman and that pretty Frenchwoman you were telling me about that's fixed this up." "There's not the slightest doubt about that," said Lamson, whose enthusiasm for the great scheme had quite overcome his earlier scruples. "If we had only known of that other set of specifications, and managed to get hold of them somehow--still that wouldn't have done much good, because even then the Frenchwoman, this beautiful daughter of the Bourbons as they call her, would have given it away as soon as she guessed what we were doing; and if she hadn't done so--well, Fargeau would have done so; so I suppose after all it's inevitable." "Then you think we'll have to fight for it?" said Austin. "If those expeditions are really armed forces, and their object is to take these works by hook or by crook, of course we must," replied Lamson. "Poor devils! I wonder what they'll feel like when we turn the disintegrators on them?" "Don't talk about those," said Austin. "Time enough for that when we have to use them to save ourselves--which the Lord forbid. I sha'n't forget that experiment of yours on poor Hudson's body; but to see it turned on to a living man! Great Scott!"