y with me. You swore it!"

"I have sworn allegiance to my Emperor, and that comes first,"
retorted Von Kettler. "Oblige me by retiring."

"I shall do nothing of the sort," cried the girl hysterically. "When
you used me as a tool in your enterprises in Washington, you played
upon my patriotism for my conquered country. I thought I was
undertaking a heroic act. I didn't dream of the villainy, the
cold-blooded murder that was to be wrought.

"You've kept me here virtually a prisoner," she went on, with rising
violence, "an attendant upon that old madman, your Emperor, and his
sham court, while more murder is being planned. Where is Captain
Rennell, I say?" She stamped her foot. "I demand that he and this old
man be set at liberty at once. Hugo," she pleaded, "come away with me.
Don't you see what the end must be? This is no heroic enterprise, it
is wholesale murder that will arouse the conscience of civilized
mankind against you! Order that the vortex-ray be turned off," she
went on, looking through the opening in the partition toward the
dynamo. "That gas--you cannot be so vile as to send it forth again, to
destroy the American ships?"

"My dear Freda," retorted the young man coolly, "the vortex-ray is
already charged with the gas, and at a height of twenty thousand feet
it is now creating a vacuum that will send the gas upon the wings of a
hurricane straight up the Atlantic seaboard. It will obliterate every
living thing on board the battleships, from men to rats, and this time
we mean to reach New York.

"As for that swine Rennell," he went on, "you heard His Majesty
announce his intention of sending him back to Washington with the
information of our irresistible power. Of course I know you are in
love with him, and that these qualms of conscience are due to that
circumstance."

* * * * *

But Dick hardly heard the latter part of Von Kettler's remarks.
Suddenly the significance of the dynamo and the superheated room above
had come home to him. He had read of such a project years before, in
some newspaper, and had forgotten about it until that moment.

By sending a high-tension current almost to the limits of the earth's
atmosphere, the article had said, a vortex or vacuum could be set up
which would create a hurricane.

The tremendous pressure of the in-rushing air would make a veritable
cyclone, which, taking the course of the prevailing winds, would rush
forth on a mission of