The machine plunged down the embankment of the shore and out on the ice in a spray of snow.
Inside the lighthouse Grant groped in returning consciousness. About him swirled clouds of smoke. The fuse, along which the slowly creeping red fire advanced, had ignited a bunch of chemical-soaked excelsior. Choking and fighting for breath Grant essayed to rise. In fitful moments of consciousness he realized his peril and the need for help.
Was this to be the end of his endeavors to help his country free herself from the treacherous clutch that was fast choking the breath of freedom from her? Were all his efforts to be in vain, and was he too, to fall a victim to that iron hand? In a moment more the flames would reach their objective. With a final struggle he relapsed once more into oblivion, as the flames crackled and the smoke rose smotheringly about him.
Suddenly the door banged back on its hinges and in the draft clouds of smoke eddied and whirled.
"Grant!" It was Stewart's voice. The anxious shout startled Grant into consciousness. He reached out a hand and caught at Stewart's coat. Slipping an arm under him, Stewart staggered out into the cool, fresh air with Grant a dead weight, impeding every moment of their precious progress, the progress that must take them away from that creeping tongue of flame and the dynamite.
He dragged him on and on to the edge of the woods that bordered the lake. There he stopped, he could go no farther. As Grant slipped from his grasp to the snow covered ground, a wild roar echoed across the lake and back again, and seemed to split the very heavens. Stewart saw a cloud of smoke and flame shoot up from the lighthouse. The ground about him shook with the blast and great cracks ran crazily out into the ice of the lake. Where all had been solid ice a moment before a broad expanse of black water appeared, and gliding swiftly toward it with a speed that could not be diminished, and a direction that could not be veered, Stewart saw the iceboat with its helpless occupant, Stewart saw his men in the automobile a short distance behind the iceboat. He saw the driver jam on his brakes and saw the machine skid swiftly about in a flurry of ice and snow, just as the iceboat disappeared over the brink of ice into the cold blackness of the waters of the lake.
He passed a hand over his face and turned back to Grant, who was staring up at him in bewilderment.
"What are you doing here?" Grant's voice was scarcely a murmur.
Stewart smiled and bent over him. "A girl gave me the tip—Dixie Mason. The girl with Von Lertz, you know."
Grant sat upright and stared at him. "Dixie Mason!" He rubbed his aching head. A wild conglomeration of ideas made his head whirl. Why had Dixie Mason done this? Had she too been working with the Germans for a purpose? Or had she simply allowed kindness to intervene in a plot which otherwise would have meant his death? His aching brain refused to solve the puzzle.