"If he refuses to help himself, Jacox, we must protect him ourselves," Ray declared. "I leave it to you and Vera to keep an open eye until I return from Selkirk next Monday. I'm bound to go down and see my sister. She seems very ill indeed."
And so a very important and delicate affair was thus placed in my hands.
Vera Vallance announced herself ready and eager to assist me, and that night I walked back to Bloomsbury much puzzled how next to act.
That the Germans would attempt to secure the secret of the new steel was absolutely certain. But to us, success meant the keeping of it to Britain, and the armouring of our new _Dreadnoughts_ with a resisting power eight times that of our enemies.
Next day I journeyed down to Sheffield and called upon the manager of Messrs. Joynson and Mackinder, the great steel-makers, who, as you know, hold the contracts for making the armour-plates of our improved _Dreadnoughts_. He told me how the firm had just constructed six of the new Emden electrical furnaces, and had also taken over the wonderful new process which the Professor had invented.
He then courteously took me across to that portion of the great grimy works, with its wonderful steel melting and refining furnaces, to where the Emden process was about to be carried out.
"I suppose you have no fear of the new method being learnt by any of your rivals--by any German firm, for instance?" I asked.
"Not in the least," laughed the manager, a bluff, grey-bearded man, speaking in his broad Hallamshire dialect; "we take good care of that. Each workman only does a part, the whole of the process being only known to myself. It wouldn't do for us to give Professor Emden forty thousand pounds for the secret and then allow it to fall into foreign hands. The Germans would, of course, give anything for it," he added. "Emden is a patriotic Englishman even though he is very eccentric, and if he liked he could have got almost anything he cared to ask from Krupp's."
"That's just the point," I said; and then, as we walked back to the office, I explained my fears. But, like the Professor himself, he only laughed them to scorn. So that evening I again returned to London filled with anxiety and disappointment.