ptain.

"Taking in sail--and spars, too!" cried Commander Bilton-Brooks.

It was true. Not only had the strange cutter let all her thin sails run
down, but she seemed to have folded up her mast, boom, gaff, and
bowsprit in some strange way and stowed them out of sight.

"Has she shown any flag yet?" asked the Captain.

"None that I have seen," answered the Executive Officer.

"Then I'll wager a month's pay that she's some Yankee invention,"
declared Captain Dudley Fawkes.

"What in the world are they doing now?" said the Executive Officer.

A strange misshapen mass was rising above the bulwarks of the cutter
with surprising swiftness.

"It's a balloon!" exclaimed the Captain.

"Hadn't we better open fire on her?" asked the Executive Officer.

"Not yet. I think we'd better get close enough to hail her first,"
answered the Captain. "She may not be anything more than a pleasure
craft, you know."

The balloon was inflated by this time, and was tugging at the heavy
steel hawsers by which it was attached to the cutter's hull. A cry of
surprise broke from the crew of the British cruiser.

"Look! look! She's going up!"

The great balloon, inflated with the newly discovered gas, mercurite,
the lightest and most powerful of all known gases, was lifting the
cutter bodily into the air. Her curiously shaped hull, modelled after a
shark's body, and equipped with a fin-keel for sailing on the wind, was
now fully revealed. At the same instant a United States ensign was waved
over her stern by a young man.

"Mr. Cortis," called the Captain, who had not thought it necessary yet
to enter the conning-tower, "give him a taste of your metal."

"Ay, ay, sir," answered the Lieutenant in command of the forward 8-inch
guns.

The next instant there was a terrific concussion, and one of the big
shells went screaming toward the cutter: but she was rising so fast that
the projectile passed under her, and plunged foaming into the sea a mile
away.

"More elevation, sir," cried the Executive Officer.

"Impossible!" answered Lieutenant Cortis: "we're too close to her, and
the angle is too high."

"Look at her now!" exclaimed the Captain. "She's rushing toward us!"

"Sailing against the wind with a balloon!" cried Commander
Bilton-Brooks.

The shark-bodied cutter, with her fin-keel below and her balloon above,
was indeed now moving toward a position above the cruiser.

"Call away the riflemen!" cried the Captain.

The red-co