'It strikes me that in a war a lot might depend on these, both in de-
fence and attack, for there's plenty of water in them at the right tide for
patrol-boats and small torpedo craft, though I an see they take a lot of
knowing. Now, say we were at war with Germany— both sides could
use them as lines between the three estuaries Cheap LV Belt ; and to take our own case, a
small torpedo-boat (not a destroyer, mind you) could on a dark night cut
clean through from the Jade to the Elbe and play the deuce with the ship-
ping there. But the trouble is that I doubt if there's a soul in our fleet who
knows those channels. We haven't coasters there; and, as to yachts, it's a
most unlikely game for an English yacht to play at; but it does so happen
that I have a fancy for that sort of thing and would have explored those
channels in the ordinary course.'I began to see his drift.
'Now for the islands. I was rather stumped there at first, I grant, be-
cause, though there are lashings of sand behind them, and the same sort
of intersecting channels, yet there seems nothing important to guard or
attack.
'Why shouldn't a stranger ramble as he pleases through them? Still
Dollmann had his headquarters there, and I was sure that had some
meaning. Then it struck me that the same point held good, for that strip
of Frisian coast adjoins the estuaries, and would also form a splendid
base for raiding midgets, which could travel unseen right through from
the Ems to the Jade, and so to the Elbe, as by a covered way between a
line of forts.
'Now here again it's an unknown land to us. Plenty of local galliots
travel it, but strangers never, I should say. Perhaps at he most an occa-
sional foreign yacht gropes in at one of the gaps between the islands for
shelter from bad weather, and is precious lucky to get in safe. Once
again, it was my fad to like such places, and Dollmann cleared me out.
He's not a German, but he's in with Germans, and naval Germans too.
He's established on that coast, and knows it by heart. And he tried to
drown me. Now what do you think?'He gazed at me long and
anxiously.
IT was not an easy question to answer, for the affair was utterly outside
all my experience; its background the sea, and its actual scene a region of
the sea of which I was blankly ignorant. There were other difficulties that
I could see perhaps better than Davies, an enthusiast with hobbies, who
had been brooding in solitude over his dangerous adventure. Yet both
narrative and theory (which have lost, I fear, in interpretation to the
reader) had strongly affected me; his forcible roughnesses, tricks of man-
ner, sudden bursts of ardour, sudden retreats into shyness, making up a
charm I cannot render. I found myself continually trying to see the man
through the boy, to distinguish sober judgement from the hot-headed
vagaries of youth. Not that I dreamed for a moment of dismissing the
story of his wreck as an hallucination. His clear blue eyes and sane sim-
plicity threw ridicule on such treatment.
Evidently, too, he wanted my help, a matter that might well have in-
fluenced my opinion on the facts, had he been other than he was. But it
would have taken a'finished and finite clod'to resist the attraction of the
man and the enterprise; and I take no credit whatever for deciding to fol-
low him, right or wrong. So, when I stated my difficulties, I knew very
well that we should go.
'There are two main points that I don't understand,'I said.'First,
you've never explained why an Englishman should be watching those
waters and ejecting intruders; secondly, your theory doesn't supply suf-
ficient motive. There may be much in what you say about the navigation
of those channels, but it's not enough. You say he wanted to drown
you— a big charge, requiring a big motive to support it. But I don't deny
that you've got a strong case.'Davies lighted up.'I'm willing to take a
good deal for granted— until we find out more.'
He jumped up, and did a thing I never saw him do before or since—
bumped his head against the cabin roof.
