The other man who had been drawing a cigar-shaped outline on the wet sand looked up.  “We must get those models,” he put in, adding, “both of them—­the one he has and that the government has.  Can it be done?”

“I can get them,” answered Wu sinisterly.

And so, while Kennedy was drawing together the net about Wu, that wily criminal had already planned an attack on him in an unexpected quarter.

Down in Washington the very morning that our pursuit of Wu came to a head, the officials of the navy department, both naval and civil, were having the final conference at which they were to accept officially Kennedy’s marvellous invention which, it was confidently believed, would ultimately make war impossible.

Seated about a long table in one of the board rooms were not only the officers but the officials of the department whose sanction was necessary for the final step.  By a window sat a stenographer who was transcribing, as they were taken, the notes of the momentous meeting.

They had just completed the examination of the torpedo and laid it on the end of the table scarcely an arm’s length from the stenographer.  As he finished a page of notes he glanced quickly at his watch.  It was exactly three o’clock.

Hastily he reached over for the torpedo and with one swift, silent movement tossed it out of the window.

Down below, in a clump of rhododendrons, for several moments had been crouching one of the men who had borne the orders to Wu Fang at the strange meeting on the promontory.

His eyes seemed riveted at the window above him.  Suddenly the supreme moment for which this dastardly plot had been timed came.  As the torpedo model dropped from the window, he darted forward, caught it, turned, and in an instant he was gone.

. . . . . . .

Wu Fang himself had returned after setting in motion the forces which he found necessary to call to aid the foreign agents in their plots against Kennedy’s torpedo.

As Wu approached the door of his den and was about to enter, his eye fell on our outpost, the blind beggar.  Instantly his suspicions were aroused.  He looked the beggar over with a frown, thought a moment, then turned and instead of entering went up the street.

He made the circuit of the block and now came to an alley on the next street that led back of the building in which he had his den.  Still frowning, he gazed about, saw that he was not followed, and entered a doorway.

Up the stairs he made his way until he came to an empty loft.  Quickly he went over to the blank wall and began feeling cautiously about as if for a secret spring hidden in the plaster.

“No one in the back room,” said Kennedy rejoining me in the den itself with the prisoner.  “He’s out, all right.”

Before Craig was a mirror.  As he looked into it, at an angle, he could see a part of the decorations of the wall behind him actually open out.  For an instant the evil face of Wu Fang appeared.