Floating alone in the ocean, a mere speck in the water, Jack turned toward land.  It was his only salvation now.

Tearing off his hat and with it the wet waste he had inserted as a cushion for his head, he struck out with long bold strokes.  The fresh air and the salt water invigorated him wonderfully after the long confinement in the stifling atmosphere of the Dewey.

As he swam he thought of the boys back there in Uncle Sam’s submersible and how they, too, would be negotiating this same swim very shortly—–­provided they escaped as safely as he had.

Before his mind flashed also the picture of what might happen to him when at last his feet would strike bottom and he would make his way through the surf to shore.  He knew full well that practically all of the Belgian seafront was held by the Germans.  It was not likely he could go very far without encountering a Hun coast patrol.  But he reserved to make the best of the situation and trust to luck.

After a hard swim he found himself in the surf and then his feet touched bottom and he made his way shoreward through the breakers.  Fatigued by the trip, he threw himself down on the sand, puffing and blowing from the effects of his fight in the water.

As he rested, he heard the murmur of a skyplane’s motors and turned to behold a giant Gotha machine heading up the coast.  Stretching himself out quickly, as though to simulate the posture of a drowned man cast up by the waves, he lay wide-eyed watching the German birdman.  Undoubtedly, it was one of the aerial coast patrol.

Five hundred feet above, it lazily floated along.  It came closer and closer, finally flying almost directly overhead.  With bated breath the boy on the sand waited for its passage and heaved a great sigh of relief as it purred onward in the direction of Blankenberghe without giving any indication as to whether its pilot had noted the body on the sand below.

Jack scrambled to his feet.

“Might as well find out what’s doing here,” he muttered to himself.  He peeled off his wet clothes.  One at a time he wrung out his garments and shook the water out of his long black hair.  Then he turned for a glance around him.  In front of him loomed the sand dunes, their weird shifting formations dotted here and there with scraggly underbrush.  Down the coast the picture was the same.

Turning, the lad gazed northward in the general direction where he knew lay Holland and her neutral shores.

“That’s where I go from here,” he said cheerfully.

He had jogged along not more than a quarter of a mile when the coast line veered sharply to right, leaving only the expanse of ocean looming up beyond the stretch of sandy beach.  Following along the curve in the coast line, Jack found himself presently on the shore of a small land-locked bay.  The mouth of the inlet was barely wide enough to permit the passage of a good-sized vessel.