"Then stand aside and watch!" he cried, withdrawing from the room on to the landing. "See, look here!" and he opened his bag. This caused both men to withdraw from the room to peer inside his bag.
With a quiet movement, however, Ray flung a small dark object into the centre of the room, and in an instant there was a bright blood-red flash, and the whole place was one mass of roaring flames, which, belching from the door, caused us all to beat a hasty retreat. In a moment the place was a furnace.
The spies shouted, cursed, and fired their revolvers at us through the thick smoke, but we were quickly downstairs and out in the road.
"That will soon drive out the rats," laughed Ray, as we watched the flames burst through the roof and saw the two men escape half dressed through the window we had opened.
And as, with the red glare behind us, we hurried back to the spot where we had left our car, Ray remarked, with a laugh of triumph:
"Stolberg bought that place two years ago with money, no doubt, supplied from Berlin, so he's scarcely likely to come upon us for incendiarism, I think. It was the only way—to make one big bonfire of the whole thing!"
CHAPTER IV
HOW THE GERMANS ARE PREPARING FOR INVASION
"We're going down to Maldon, in Essex," Ray Raymond explained as we drove along in a taxi-cab to Liverpool Street Station late one grey snowy afternoon soon after our return from Norfolk.