The same enemies who had launched the torpedo must surely have jerked Matt from the deck of the submarine. But who were they? where were they?
With difficulty he lifted himself and got astride the rolling cylinder. From that elevated position he looked around him into the darkness. Silence reigned in every direction. There was no sign of the mysterious foes who had attempted to destroy the Grampus and to make a prisoner of her commanding officer.
Presently the young motorist became conscious that the coil was still about his throat, and that a long object was trailing downward and hanging with some weight from his neck.
It was a rope. He began pulling it in, coiling the wet length of it in his hand. The rope was all of seventy-five feet long, he judged, and that distance must have marked the position of his foes when the noose was cast. To see even half that distance into the thick darkness was impossible, but why had Matt not been able to hear the men who had attempted such dastardly work?
Speculations were useless. Matt, however, had secured a makeshift raft which would keep him afloat until such time as the Grampus, or some other boat, could pick him up.
Hoping that the submarine would come to no harm, and determined to make the best of his desperate situation, the king of the motor boys set about making an examination of the steel tube that supported him.
[CHAPTER III.]
SAVED BY A TORPEDO.
Matt's first move was to take the noose from about his throat and pass the rope around and around the torpedo, tying it fast. The loops of the rope gave him a handhold which he could not possibly have secured otherwise on the hard, smooth shell, rendered slippery by the water with which it was drenched.