His own method had been a very simple one, though it required great organizing ability and a keen eye and brain at the outset. All he had done was to harness a river at the right place and make it drive a light-and-power plant. But he had done it on a scale that enabled him, from this one central station, to drive all the electric trolleys and light all the lamps in more than a hundred cities. He could supply all the light and all the power they wanted to cities a hundred miles away from his plant, and he talked of sending it three hundred miles farther. Now that the system was established, it worked as easily as the river flowed; and his power house was a compact little miracle of efficiency. All that the casual visitor could see was a long, quiet room, in which it seemed that a dozen clocks were slumbrously ticking. These were the indicators, from the dials of which the amount of power distributed over a district as big as England could be read by the two leisurely men on duty. In the meantime, night and day, the river poured power of another kind into the treasury of Matthew Hudson. But his life was as unlike that of the millionaires of fiction as could be imagined. It reminded one of the room with the slumbrous clocks. He was, indeed, as his own men described it, preeminently the "man behind the gun." When the _Morning Glory_ had been accepted by the naval authorities he had obtained permission to equip her for her own work in European waters at his own cost, and to make certain experiments in the equipment. The Admiralty had not looked with favor on some of his ideas, which were by no means suitable for general use in the patrol fleet. But Matthew Hudson had too many weapons at work against Germany for them to deny him a sentimental pleasure in his own yacht. He seemed to have some particular purpose of his own in carrying out his ideas; and so it came about that the _Morning Glory_ was regarded among her companions as a mystery-ship. The two men breakfasted in silence. They were both drowsy, for there had been a U-boat alarm during the night, which had kept them very much awake; but Hudson was roused from his reverie over the second rasher by a loud report, followed by a confused shouting above and the stoppage of the engines. "That's not a submarine!" said the skipper. "What the devil is it?" And the two men rushed on deck. The mist had lifted a little; and, looming out of it, a few hundred yards away, there was something that looked, at first glance, like a great gray reef. For a fraction of a moment Hudson thought they had run into Heligoland in the mist. At the second glance he knew that the gray, mist-wreathed monster before him was an armored ship, and the skipper enlightened him further by saying, in a matter-of-fact voice: "That settles it--enemy cruiser! We're stopped, broadside on. They've got a couple of guns trained on us and they're sending a boat. What's the next move?"