Facing the roar of the wind and the rain, we made our way to his cabin, where he brought forth from gigantic drawer certain mysterious looking bundles, which he proceeded to unwrap. But first he took another look at me, repeated his question, received a fairly assuring reply, and again fell to untying the many pieces of red tape with which these several parcels of documents were reinforced, and Inid out o: his_table blueprints and originals, etfors from several modern. governments, memoranda and so forth. He did not at once disclose what this all_meant, however. Laying his dirge nautical hand on. the papers to prevent them from being whirled into the Pacific and probably setting into the hands of the enemy, he said to me, slowly and with deliberation.
"Do you know that I believe th T could win the war in a—month?" (I believe it was a month that he said), 'As I gave no sign, but sat on in indecipherable amazement, he asked me whether I was interested, Interegted?—why, I was all ears. But he kept watching me pretty closely, At last he unwound himself, with considerable enthusiasm, and' showed mo what was mind, Personally I have never bee able to do much with my hand: and could not, therefore, appreciate the multifarious wonders that these plans embodied. But I remember they related to some marvellous type of pilotless planes, which could be manufactured for next to nothing, which needed no human factor to take them over to Berlin, und that you would be able to get them together by the hundred Salisbury Plain (or wherever it is that they would do this sort of thing), merely time them, let them Rose from the leash like a pack hungry foxhounds, and then retire to rest in certain knowledge that at the appointed hour they: would be dropping their deadly bombs all over the ill-fated cities of your enemy. Whether they were to return and tell the tale I cannot quite remember, but I do remember the refreshing enthusiasm of that China Const skipper as he told mo his tale and almost made me, who Knew nothing of these things, believe that it was possible to do what he had in his ideation as an already accomplished fact.
The Lethargic Authorities going to win the war in a month. But the skipper was not quite so sanguine. He probably thought that I was not quite such a fool as T looked, and he kept asking me if T could keep the secret. Why, all T could do was to sit back on his settee, feeling slightly mellowed, with my glass in my hand, and gaze in wonder at that master inventor who wag profarod to run ships up and down the China Coast even in typhoons, and yet could win the war in @ month, T fancy, however, that this idea had been "shown to. the British authorities, and also to the American, but at that time nobody was prepared to entertain it to the point of undertaking the necessary experimentation to prove that the war could be won in a month. But in the War Offices of the world men in charge of things are notoriously' unimaginative, and many of them are like I was—didn't know any: thing about it, and their intellect unlike mine, I'hope, gots befogged in dull routine.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.