“Who are you?” the officer demanded.

Jack shook his head in reply.

“How did you get here?” came the command more sharply.

Still Jack kept silence.

“Search him!” ordered the officer, and after a search that revealed nothing, he added in German: 

“Take him away—–­we’ll go into his record later.  He’s only a boy anyhow, and boy spies are not worth bothering about in this man’s war.”

Jack was marched off to the canal bank and, following the towpath for a time, the party reached a small fishing village of not more than thirty or forty huts built upon the banks of a stream that Jack realized immediately was the same waterway up which he had made his way to the wireless station.  Now he was a mile or more inland from the lagoon and the seacoast.

In the water, moored alongside a wharf, was a huge submarine—–­one of the latest type of U-boat.  This, no doubt, was its hiding place and the rendezvous of other U-boats.  Like a flash it occurred to the American boy that he had penetrated, or rather had been escorted, into the heart of one of the submarine bases.

“If I ever get out of this mess,” he resolved to himself, “I’ll put Uncle Sam wise to this rat hole.”

Down into the village he was led and directly to the headquarters of the base officer.  The party paused before a cottage that once had been the happy home of a Belgian fisherman.  The German lieutenant tapped him on the shoulder and motioned for him to follow.  In a moment Jack was ushered into the presence of a corpulent German naval captain with sleepy eyes, who looked without interest at the youthful prisoner and yawned as he heard the story of the capture.

“Shoot the wireless man who fell asleep,” he drawled.  “Lock up the boy for the present.  I’m not in the mood to cross examine a young spy.”  And yawning again he waved dismissal.

Jack was conducted to an old boat house that in the days before the war had been used by the Belgian fishermen as a repair shop for their fishing craft.  He was glad of a chance to rest.  The ropes had bound his legs and arms painfully, and his muscles ached from the battering he had received in the sea while making his escape from the Dewey.  The Dewey!  Jack thought now of his good old ship and wondered what “Little Mack” and the rest of the boys were doing.

Completely tired out, he climbed into a dilapidated old fishing dory and stretched himself out in the bottom of the boat.  Using a tarpaulin for a cover, he made himself as comfortable as possible and dozed off.

So fatigued was he that he slept soundly, unconscious of the activity without, where the moored U-boat was being fitted for another voyage into the North Sea.

It was several hours past noon when he was awakened by the roar of guns, hoarse cries of men, and the stamp of feet outside his prison.  As he jumped to his feet and clambered out of the boat a shell burst just over the fish-house, scattering a hail of metal over the flimsy roof and tearing a jagged hole in the wall above the doorway.  Running to a window that looked out over the canal wharf, Jack saw Germans scrambling up out of the hold of the U-boat, some of them carrying rifles, others lugging a machine gun.  The village was in wild confusion.