Possibly with the idea of mitigating the impending punishment by a belated display of zeal, or else with a vindictive desire to get even with their captive for trouble in store for them, although through no fault of his, the Huns seized the young British officer by the wrists, wound a strip of coarse canvas so tightly round his head as to threaten him with suffocation, and bundled him forward to a gangway that led over the bows to a pontoon.
Presently the yielding planks of the pontoon gave place to hard metalled ground, and the sub knew that he was once more on dry land. Stumbling over ring-bolts and railway lines, to the gross amusement of his gaolers, the prisoner was led for a distance of nearly a mile. All around he could hear sounds of activity, the hum of machinery, the rasping of metal, and the thud of numerous pneumatic hammers predominating, while the air reeked with the fumes of petrol and a peculiar, nauseating odour that the sub failed entirely to identify.
Engines, evidently drawing small trucks, judging by the noisy clatter, were passing and repassing continually, so close that Farrar distinctly felt the windage from the rapidly moving train and the blast of hot-oil-laden air in his face, for his captors had condescended to readjust the bandage so that it no longer impeded his mouth and nostrils.
Groups of men, marching rather than walking, were frequently passing, and coarse greetings in which reference was made to the blindfolded prisoner were bandied between them and the Huns, but the language in which they spoke, although it bore a certain resemblance to German, was almost incomprehensible as far as the sub was concerned.
Then one of the German seamen gripped Farrar's shoulder and guided him across what felt like a swaying plank bridge. An iron gate was opened and closed with a sonorous clang, and a rifle-butt grounded on hard stone.
"Sentry," thought the sub. "Seems like a tough nut to crack, but if there's a ghost of a chance I'm on it. Wonder what's coming next?"
Up a flight of stone steps and through a wicket gate set in a larger door the prisoner was led; then along a corridor into a room. The bandage was removed from his eyes, and in the glare of a number of electric lamps he found himself face to face with Ober-Leutnant Otto von Loringhoven. With the latter were four naval and military officers in German uniform, and another in what the sub rightly guessed to be that of the Emperor Karl of Austria.
"This is your last chance, prisoner," began von Loringhoven without any preamble. "Do you agree to give us all the information you possess on any subject of which we wish to obtain intelligence?"
"I gave you my answer," replied the sub fearlessly.
"Did you?" sneered the Hun, his lips curling menacingly, and displaying a row of teeth resembling the fangs of a wolf. "What was it?"