erfectly efficient for harbour work. Among the officers
of the ship is a R.N.R. lieutenant with a German name. I jumped to
him, but the captain laughed. The man's father and grandfather were in
the English merchant service, and though his people originally came
from Saxony, he is no more German than we are ourselves. Besides, my
experience is that an Englishman with an inherited German name is the
very last man to have any truck with the enemy. He is too much ashamed
of his forbears for one thing; and for another he is too dead set on
living down his beastly name. So we will rule out the Lieutenant
R.N.R. My own man, who is a petty officer R.N.V.R., and has worked on
a lot of ships which have come in for repairs, says that the temper
among the workmen in the yards is good now. It was ugly when dilution
of labour first came in, but the wages are so high that all that
trouble has settled down. I have had what you call sabotage in the
shell and gun shops, but never yet in the King's ships. We have had
every possible cutter of the wires on the mat before the Captain and
me. We have looked into all their records, had their homes visited and
their people questioned, inquired of their habits--Mr. Copplestone,
here, knows what comes of drink--and found out how they spend their
wages. Yet we have discovered nothing. It is the worst puzzle that
I've struck. When and how the gun cable was cut I can't tell you, but
whoever did it is much too clever to be about. He must have been
exactly informed of the lie and use of the cables, had with him the
proper tools, and used them in some fraction of a minute when he
wasn't under the eye of my own man whose business it was to watch
everybody and suspect everybody. I thought that I had schemed out a
pretty thorough system; up to now it has worked fine. Whenever we have
had the slightest reason to suspect any man, we have had him kept off
the ship and watched. We have run down a lot of footling spies, too
stupid to give us a minute's anxiety, but this man who cut the
_Antinous_'s wires is of a different calibre altogether. He is AI, and
when I catch him, as I certainly shall, I will take off my hat to
him."

"You say that the _Antinous_ is all right now?" I observed.

"Yes. I saw her towed out of the repair basin an hour ago, and she
must be away down the river by this time. It is not of her that I'm
thinking, but of the other ships which are constantly in and out for
repairs. There are al