“Feel wholly comfortable?” mockingly inquired the foreign agent, when he saw the boy’s eyes open.

“Not especially, thank you,” mumbled the boy, dryly.

Jack had discovered, by this time, that he was lying on a wooden floor, very likely in the basement of the house.  The room contained no furniture, beyond an old table.  Daylight was excluded by wooden shutters fastened into place over the windows.  On the table a single candle burned in a candlestick.

“Why didn’t you bring along with you, Benson,” sneered the long fellow, “the property of mine that you stole from me?”

It was plain, then, that the foreign agent remembered the submarine boy well.

“Why are you playing this fool trick on me?” counter-questioned Captain Jack.  “You knew I didn’t have the—­the things with me.  You could see that.”

“I put you to this inconvenience,” replied the foreign agent, “because I wanted to know a few things.  In the first place, why are you bothering with me, or with my plans?”

Jack remained silent.

“Won’t talk, eh?  Oh, well, then, perhaps we can find out a few things without any very especial help from you.”

Millard bent over, thrusting his hand into one after another of young Benson’s pockets.  In so doing he brought to light the envelope in the lad’s inner coat pocket.  Just an instant later, the wretch snatched the folded sheet from the envelope, spread the paper open and held it up to the light.

“Ho-ho!” sneered the rascal, “an order authorizing you to cause my arrest?  This disposes of your case, then, young Mr. Benson!”

CHAPTER VII

A LESSON IN SECURITY AND INFORMATION

Despite the savageness of his utterance Millard continued to gaze thoughtfully, for a few moments, at the submarine boy’s face.

As the rascal gazed, however, a grayness came into his cheeks that, somehow, smote Captain Jack with secret terror.

“I—­I don’t see how it can be helped,” gasped Millard, at last, in an altered tone that came as another dash of ice water over the submarine boy.  “Benson, I hate to do it.  I’d hate to use a dog in such a way, but—­but there’s no help for it!”

A long-drawn-out sigh, a still queerer look in his face, then the scoundrel broke forth again: 

“It’s your own fault, after all, boy, and there’s no help for it.”

“By and by I suppose you’ll enlighten me as to what ‘it’ means?” hinted Jack, trying hard to bolster up a courage that, none the less, would ooze and drop.

Millard’s only answer was to bend over the boy and roll him somewhat in examining the prisoner’s bonds.  It was through this that Jack discovered what he had not known before—­namely, that his wrists, besides being bound behind his back, were also lashed fast to something in the flooring.

There was a queer little choke in Millard’s breathing as he went out of the room and returned with a bushel basket of shavings.  These he dumped on the floor, close to a wall.  Then, again, he went out.  When he returned he was carrying a can of coal-oil.  The contents he poured over the shavings, then against the wall.  Next, over the shavings, he heaped three or four newspapers.