"Lord knows what he may have been playing at before he did this. We'd better go upstairs, and have a look at the light." The two men plodded up the steep winding stair, poking into every corner on their way up, till they emerged on the little railed platform under the great crystal moons of the lantern. The glare blinded them. "Turn those lights off," said Commander Pickering. Dawkins ducked into the tower and obeyed. Half a dozen patrol boats, each with its tiny black gun, at bow and stern, were cruising to and fro over rough seas, that looked from that height very much like the wrinkles on poor old Peter's gray face. Another sailor hauled himself to the platform, breathing hard from the ascent, and saluted. "A telephone message for you, sir," he said. "There's been a lot of mines discovered off the point. We should have run straight into them, if we had neglected your warning and steered a straight course out." Commander Pickering looked at Dawkins in silence. Far away to eastward, the dawn was breaking, red as blood, through a low fringe of ragged gray clouds. In a few moments the crystal moons of the _Hatchets' Light_ were afire with it, and breaking it up into the colors of the rainbow round the black figures of the three men. "We'll have to apologize to Peter," said Dawkins at last. "It was a very lucky coincidence," said Commander Pickering; and he led the way downstairs at a smart pace to Peter's room again. "There's no doubt that he shot himself," he said. "Look at all this. The man was stark mad. See what he has written on the title-page, under his own name: '_Thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my Church_.'" II UNCLE HYACINTH On a bright morning, early in the year 1917, Herr Sigismund Krauss, secret agent for the German Government, stopped at the entrance of Harrods' Stores, looked at himself in one of the big mirrors, thought that he really did look a little like Bismarck, and adjusted his tie. To relieve the tension, let it be added that this scene was not enacted in London, but in the big branch of Harrods' that had recently been opened in Buenos Aires. Nevertheless, it was because it looked so very much like the London branch that it had rasped the nerves of Herr Krauss. He was in a very nervous condition, owing to the state of his digestive system, and he was easily irritated. He had been annoyed in the first place because the German houses in Buenos Aires were unable to sell him several things which he thought necessary for the voyage he was about to take across the Atlantic. He had been almost angry when the bald-headed Englishman who had waited on him in Harrods' advised him to buy a safety waistcoat. All that he needed for his safety was the fraudulent Swedish passport, made out in the name of Erik Neilsen, which he carried in his breast pocket.