"They intended to investigate the secrets of the box," Teddy remarked. "No doubt that's what they were after." "Well--they didn't see very much!" I laughed, for already I had been up to the locked attic to which we had carried it on the previous night, and found it there with the door still secure. Then, having satisfied ourselves that no damage had been done, we all retired to rest. But sleep did not come to my eyes. Hour after hour I lay awake until the grey dawn, pondering over the events of that night. That a desperate plot of the enemy was afoot against us could not be doubted, and I realised that it would take all our ingenuity and foresight to combat the plans of an unscrupulous enemy well provided with money, and desperate upon a resolve. To go boldly to the authorities and denounce Lionel Eastwell as a spy would avail me nothing. Indeed, there was no actual evidence of it. No more popular man at Hendon, at Brooklands, or at the Royal Automobile Club was there than Eastwell. Yet, was not that popularity, purchased by the ample means at his disposal, and the constant dinners and luncheons which he gave regardless of their cost, proof in itself that he was acting secretly against the interests of Great Britain? Long ago I had suspected that his was the Invisible Hand that sent every secret of our progress in aviation to Germany by way of the United States. He had several American friends to whom I had been introduced, apparently business men who had come over for various reasons, and it was, no doubt, those men who conveyed back to New York secret information which, later on, returned across the Atlantic and was duly docketed in the Intelligence Bureau of the German General Staff at Berlin. Truly the wily Teuton leaves nothing to chance, and has his secret agents in the most unsuspected places. Yet, reflecting as I did in those long wakeful hours, I saw that it was not surprising, and that the enemy would, naturally, have kept a very watchful eye upon anyone who had devised a means of fighting Zeppelins, and, if possible, defeat him in his attempt. This thought decided me. I meant, at all hazards, to try my device against an enemy airship, even though I might fail. I had foreseen all the risks of machine-guns mounted upon the top of the latest airship, of the dangers of night-flying, of landing difficulties even if successful, and the hundred and one mishaps which might occur in the excitement and darkness.