like a bullet. And she was just about the color of the water, so it was next to impossible to see her after she was several hundred feet away, even in that bright moonlight.”

[29]

[29]

“I can understand that.”

“I wish you could have seen her.”

“So do I. But suppose you describe her to us, without reference to turtle-backs. Describe her just as you would if you had never seen a turtle-back.”

“All right. She was, I should say, seventy-five or eighty feet, over all, and from sixteen to twenty feet beam. I am guessing at it, of course.”

“Certainly.”

“She was long and narrow, and floated as if she was rather deep in the water. She carried two masts, but I saw no sign of a sail upon her. There was no funnel, and when she shot away from the bow of the yacht, her motive power, whatever it was, made no noise whatever, so I presume she was propelled by electricity.”

“Storage-battery power, eh?”

“Yes. Her deck was convex from end to end, and guarded, as I have already said, by a nickel rail which ran her entire length. Away forward there was a low turret, shaped like an old-fashioned poke bonnet, if the wearer of the bonnet were looking aft. This was, no doubt, the wheel-house. Amidships there was a second turret, shaped like an iron kettle, and about six or eight feet in diameter. Aft there was another one, exactly like it; and that is all.”

“Do you think she might have been a submarine?”

“No, I do not. I have thought of that, and studied over it. She did not seem to me to be the proper model for a submarine; at least, she was not at all the shape[30] of the generally accepted pattern for that sort of a craft.”

[30]

“Well, what did she suggest to you?”

“Something more in the line of a small torpedo-boat destroyer—long, narrow, low in the water, swift, almost invisible by reason of her color, and with her upper housings so arranged that if 

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