The two men of the naval reserve who were waiting for orders, watched him like schoolboys expecting a holiday; but he could not make up his mind. He left the window and studied the big chart on the wall, where the movements of a dozen submarines were marked in red ink from point to point as the daily reports came in, till the final red star announced their destruction. He chewed his lip as he pondered. There was a fleet of submarine destroyers in Westport Harbor at this moment, but they had only just come in from a long spell, and he was loath to turn them out on a wild-goose chase. "Confound the old idiot," he muttered again. "He can't even talk straight. Wanted to say that he had seen submarines, and starts jabbering about Germans in the light-house. Ring him up again, Dawkins, and find out whether he is drunk or talking in his sleep." Dawkins went to the telephone. For five minutes, he alternately growled into the mouth-piece and moved the hook up and down. "Don't get any answer at all, sir." "That's queer. He can't be asleep yet after that beautiful conversation." Commander Pickering went to the window again with his night-glasses. "Damned if there isn't a light in both his rooms, and it's getting on for two o'clock in the morning. There's something rum happening. We'll take a sporting chance on it, and make a regular sweep of the bay. I'll go out to the _Hatchets'_ myself on the _Silver King_. I think the old boy is dotty, and I suppose the Admiral will have my scalp for it to-morrow; but there's just one chance in a hundred thousand that Mr. Peter Ramsay did spot a squadron of U-boats. If so, we may as well strafe them properly." He went to the telephone himself this time, and began issuing orders all over the base. His final sentence was an after-thought, an echo and an elaboration of the queer warning he had received from the _Hatchets'_. "Don't go straight out. Make a sweep round by the south. There may be a trap; and you may as well let the dirigibles go ahead of you and do some scouting." * * * * * "It often happens with these chaps," said Commander Pickering to Dawkins, as they stood in Peter's bedroom an hour before dawn. "It's the lonely life that does it. They ought always to have a couple of men in these places; and, if it hadn't been for the war, of course, there would have been two men at the _Hatchets'_. Look here, at all this stuff. The poor chap had religious mania or something. See what he has written on these scraps of paper, twenty or thirty times over, every blessed text he could find about lanterns and lights, and it's all mixed up with bits from Herbert Spencer on the Unknowable." "It was well known all over Westport," said Dawkins, "that old Peter had a screw loose about religion, but he seemed such a reliable old boy. You don't think he could have seen anything to set him off like, sir? It seems funny that the door was left open like that."