Matthew Hudson's face was a curious study at this moment. It suggested a leopard endowed with a sense of humor. His mouth twitched at the corners and his amazingly clear eyes were lit with an almost boyish jubilation. It was a somewhat fierce jubilation; but it undoubtedly twinkled with the humor of the New World. Then he asked the skipper a mysterious question: "Is it impossible?" "Impossible! We're in the wrong position; and if we try to get right they'll blow us to bits. Besides, they'll be aboard in half a minute. We're drifting a little in the right direction; but it will be too late. They'll search the ship." "How long will it take us to drift into the right position?" "If we go on like this, about four minutes. But it will be all over by then." "Look here, Davis; I'll try and detain them on deck. You know Americans have a reputation for oratory. You'd better go through my room. And--look here--I'll be the skipper for the time being. I'm afraid they'll want to take Matthew Hudson prisoner; so I'll be the kind of American they'll recognize--Commander Jefferson B. Thrash, out of the best British fiction. You don't happen to have a lasso in your pocket, do you? I lent mine to ex-President Eliot of Harvard, and he hasn't returned it. Tell the men there. That's right! I don't want to be playing the fool in Ruhleben for the next three years." A few moments later, a step at a time, Davis disappeared into Hudson's cabin, which lay in the fore part of the ship. Two other men prepared to slip after him by lounging casually in the companionway, while the men in front moved a little closer to screen them. They seized their chance as the German boat stopped, twenty yards away from the _Morning Glory_, and the officer in command announced through a megaphone, in very good English, that he was in a great hurry. They were friends, he said; and there was no need for alarm, so long as the _Morning Glory_ carried out all instructions. All they wanted was the confidential chart of the British mine fields, which the _Morning Glory_, of course, possessed, and all other confidential papers of a similar kind. If the _Morning Glory_ did not carry out his instructions in every detail the guns of the cruiser would sink her. He was now coming aboard to secure the papers. "I guess that's all right, captain!" bawled Matthew Hudson in an entirely new voice and the accent that Europe accepts as American, with about as much reason as America would have for accepting the Lancashire, Yorkshire and Glasgow dialects, all rolled into one, as English. The quiet member of the Century Club had disappeared, and the golden, remote Wild Westerner, almost unknown in America itself, had risen. In half a minute more the German officer and half a dozen armed sailors were standing on the deck of the _Morning Glory_.