Chapter III: Part I: The Buccaneers (3)

“Yes,” said Blood, “and don’t you know that the first thing she’d do if we shifted our helm without a reason would be to come smelling round us? Don’t you know that a man-o’-war has no business to do at all but to look after other folk’s businesses? She’s not due to time anywhere; she’s got no cargo to deliver, no owners to grumble at her if she’s a day late. No, her business is to keep her eye out on the watch for shady people like you and me, and of course for the enemy if it’s war time. No, I reckon we’ll keep straight on, but there’s one thing we’ll do, and that is dismantle the spar gun. I reckon a dummy gun would be a difficult thing to explain away, and that, backed by the faces of our chaps and the fact that we haven’t a yard of cable in our tanks and no log except the one I faked up and forgot to keep to date more’n a week ago. Might get us into very serious trouble.”

“Is she a Britisher, do you think?” asked Harman, still ogling the approaching vessel through the glass.

“We’ll soon see,” replied the Captain.

He came down from the bridge, and hustled the fellows round, making them remove the dummy gun and place it down below on the cable deck.

Then he came back on to the bridge.

The stranger had ceased firing up, and had cleared herself of smoke. She was a cruiser right enough, one of the modern, swift, small-tonnage cruisers that can yet sink you with a broadside or cripple you most effectually with a bow chaser and from the distance of four miles.

Blood laughed as he looked at her.

“I expect she can do her twenty-five knots,” said he. “Piracy! Who could do anything with piracy these days between wireless and things like that. Harman, I guess I’m sick of this business and the uncertainty of it. I guess if this chap passes us and leaves us alone I’ll make tracks for home--which means Frisco. We can get rid of the _Penguin_ somehow or ’nother and crawl up home through Central America. Crawl up home, those are my sentiments now, for I’ve got a feeling down my spine that this chap is going to stop and speak to us.”

“Why should she do that?” said Harman. “Wish you wouldn’t be _drawin’_ bad luck by prophesying it. Why in the nation should she stop a harmless cable ship?”

“Well, if she’s a German she’d stop us to see if we are English, and then sink us, and if she’s a Britisher she’d stop us to see if we were German. I wouldn’t mind in either case only for the _Spreewald_ and Christobal Island _and_ Wolff and Shiner. If the Germans were to take us, and Wolff and Shiner were to get news of our capture they’d make things pretty warm for us.”

“Let’s hope she’s a Britisher,” said Harman.

A mile off the stranger, who had obviously slackened speed, ported her helm slightly to give the _Penguin_ a view of what she was saying.

She was saying, in the language of coloured flags:

“Lay to till I board you----”

“She doesn’t ask to be invited,” said Blood. “Run up the Stars and Stripes--thank God she’s English!--but then we’re German; at least we’re owned by Wolff and Shiner, and _they’re_ German as sausages. Of course, they may have become naturalised Americans, but a British ship is not likely to go into the family history of Shiner or Wolff. Down with you, Harman, anyway, and get the ship’s papers together and have a box of cigars on the table for the chap that is sure to come aboard. And mind, you know nothing; pretend to be a bit silly, though that doesn’t need much pretence. Keep your mouth closed and refer everything to me. I guess this situation will require some fancy work in the way of lying.”

“I’ll be mum,” said Harman.

He slid down the bridge steps, and scuttered along the deck to the saloon companionway, while Blood, alone in his glory on the bridge, and trying to assume the dignity that he did not feel, gave his orders to the crew.

He rang the engines to half speed, and then to dead slow; then he rang them off, and the _Penguin_, whose heart had stopped beating, one might have fancied through fright, lay moving slightly to the swell and waiting for the attentions of the _Minerva_, for that was the stranger’s name.

She formed a pretty picture across the blue water despite her ugly colouring and her singular lines. One knows it to be bad taste to praise enthusiastically the new engines of warfare on land or sea. All the same, a twenty-five-knot cruiser, with her teeth showing, gives one a picture of power and speed combined hard to beat in the present, and perfectly unbeaten by the past.

Blood was not thinking things like this. He was taking the measure of the six-inch guns that seemed straining their long necks to get at him; also of the little guns that showed their fangs at all sorts of loopholes and unexpected places. He had never been so close up to the business side of a warship in all his sea experience, and he noticed everything with the freshness and the vividness and the deep, deep interest that objects assume for us when they suddenly become bound up with our most vital interests and our lives.

I can fancy Charles the First quite disregarding Bishop Juxon, the crowd, and all the great considerations that must have crowded about the scaffold erected in Whitehall; disregarding all these while he fixed his eyes on the axe with its handle of good English beachwood and its blade of British iron. That axe spoke to him if anything ever spoke to him, and it said, in words as well as deed: I am the symbol of the British people.

To Blood the _Minerva_ was saying the same thing.

Blood was a Nationalist--when he had any politics at all--and maintained a sentimental dislike for Britannia. He really did not dislike her, but he fancied he did. In reality, he admired her. He admired her as a lady whom, to use his own language, you may belt about the head as much as you like, but who is sure to give you the knock-out blow in the long, long end.

The _Minerva_ was one of the things she hit people with, and the weapon impressed him. The incongruity of the fact that he had been robbing Germans in the name of England did not strike him at all.

There are all sorts of subtleties in the Irish character that no foreigner, be he Englishman or German or Frenchman or Scot or Welshman, can understand.

Blood, then, though he had been out of Ireland long enough to lose his brogue almost entirely, though England had “betrayed his country in the past,” and had never done much for him in the present would, had he seen an English and a German ship in action, have joined in on the side of England. He had often abused England, yet at a pinch he would have fought for her.

That is the Irish attitude, and it is unalterable. Ireland is, as a matter of fact, bound to England in wedlock. John Bull married her forcibly a great many years ago, and treated her cruelly bad after the marriage. She is always flinging the fact at his head, and she will go on doing so till doomsday, but she is his wife, and no matter what she says she is always ready, at a pinch, to go for any stranger that interferes with him.

When Blood declared war against the Germans he did so in all good faith as an ally of England. Cold reflection, however, told him that England would certainly not recognise that alliance, nor would she recognise the _Penguin_ as one of her fighting ships, official or unofficial, that with her peculiar ideas as to the rights of belligerents and nonbelligerents she might be as bad a party to be captured by as Germany.

He knew quite well now that between the _Spreewald_ affair and the Sprengel business, to say nothing of the original cable-cutting adventure, he would have an exceedingly bad time were this cruiser to clap the shackles on him.

He watched her now as she dropped a boat; then he leaned over and shouted to Harman, who had come on deck again, to have the companionway lowered.

Then, as the boat came alongside, he came down from the bridge to meet his fate.

A young, fresh-looking individual came up the steps--a full lieutenant by his stripes--saluted the quarter-deck in a perfunctory manner, recognised Blood at once as the skipper, and addressed him without ceremony.

“What’s the name of your ship?” asked the lieutenant.

“The _Penguin_,” replied Blood.

“The deuce it is! Are you sure it’s not the _Sea Horse_?”

“The which horse?” inquired Blood, whose temper was beginning to rise.

It was his first experience of British navy ways with merchantmen, ways which are usually decided and heralded by language which is usually abrupt.

“_Sea Horse_--_Sea Horse_--ah!” His eye had fallen on a life buoy stamped with the word “Penguin.” “You _are_ the _Penguin_. You will excuse me, but we were looking after something like you--a fifteen-hundred-ton grey-painted boat. The _Sea Horse_. Tramp steamer gone off her head and turned pirate, looted a German vessel under pretence that war had broken out between England and Germany.”

“Well, it wasn’t us,” laughed the Captain. “Couldn’t you see we were a cable ship by the gear on deck?”

“Yes, but the message came to us by wireless with bare details. What was your last port?”

“Christobal Island, quite close here--we have only left it a few hours, and by the same token there was news there that war had broken out between Germany and England.”

“How did they get it?”

“Well, the fellow there--Sprengel is his name--has a wireless installation, and he picked up a message some days ago.”

“He picked up a lie. It has been all over the Pacific, seems to me. There’s been a sort of dust-up over a place called Agadir, but there’s no small chance of war, worse luck. The business has been settled. We had the news only yesterday.”

No news could have been more dumfounding to the unfortunate Blood than this. The cable message that had so upset Shiner and Wolff had been some lying news-agency rumour. On the strength of it he had done all he had done. More than that was the mystery of the _Sea Horse_. What on earth did it mean? Had another ship gone pirating on the same rumour?

He managed, however, to keep a cheerful countenance and even to speak.

“Well,” said he, “I’m right glad to hear that. War may be all right for you, but it’s no good to our business.”

“No, I don’t suppose it is,” said the lieutenant. “Well, I suppose you are all right, but just as a matter of form I’ll have a glance at your log.”

“Of course,” said Blood, with death in his heart. “If you’ll come down to the saloon I’ll have the greatest pleasure in showing it to you.”

The lieutenant followed him below.

Harman had put out the log and the cigar box on the saloon table. The lieutenant refused a cigar, but showed interest at the sight of the log. He sat down and opened it.

“Why, good heavens,” said he, “you haven’t been writing it up for days and weeks! Where’s your first officer’s log?”

“Harman doesn’t keep one,” said Blood, whose anger was beginning to rise against the situation and his visitor.

“Who’s Harman?” inquired the other, his eyes running over the entries.

“My first officer.”

“Oh, doesn’t he? H’m--h’m! Most extraordinary--what’s this? ‘Reached the Spot.’ What spot?”

“The spot on the cable we were due to work on.”

“What cable?”

“You must ask the owners that. It’s private business.”

“Who are the owners?”

“Shiner & Wolff.”

“Where are they?”

Blood did not know where the precious pair might be at that moment, but he answered:

“Frisco.”

“Are they a cable company or simple cable repairers?”

“Repairers, I think.”

“Where are the rest of the ship’s papers?”

Blood tramped off to his cabin, and returned with a bundle of all sorts of documents.

“Well,” said the lieutenant, “I can’t go through them now. I must get back and report. I’ll take these with me for reference.” He bundled log and papers together and put them under his arm.

“Look here!” said Blood. “Are you taking those off the ship?”

“Only for reference,” replied the other. “They will be quite safe, and you can have them back when I have reported.”

“Very well,” said Blood.

“And now I’d just like to have a look round. Follow me, please.”

This was a new departure. A command. Blood followed, sick at heart, but cigar still in mouth.

The lieutenant evidently knew all about cable ships.

He stopped at the after-cable tank.

“Cable tank--how much have you on board?”

“Not an inch,” replied Blood.

“H’m! But you want some spare cable for mending purposes.”

“We used it all.”

The officer passed on through the square where the forward cable tank was situated, then down to the cable deck.

Here the first thing he spotted was the infernal spar gun.

He smelled round it, and inquired its use.

“I don’t know,” said Blood. “It was on the ship when I joined--some truck left over from the last voyage, I believe.”

This suddenly recalled the inquisitor to something he had forgotten--Blood’s Board of Trade certificates.

Blood produced them, having to go back to his own cabin for them. They told their tale of long unemployment.

The lieutenant was a gentleman, and having glanced them over returned them without comment. Then he left the ship with the log and the papers under his arm, and was rowed back to the _Minerva_.

“What’s up?” asked Harman.

“We are,” said Blood. “There’s no war; the whole thing was a lying rumour those two guys sucked in over the cable. There was a good chance of war, but it was patched up, and it’s now peace, perfect peace, with us perched on top of it like a pair of blame fools.” He told the whole tale that we know. Then suddenly light broke upon him.

“The _Sea Horse_,” said he. “I see the whole thing now--when we fired those two blighters off the ship and shoved them on the _Spreewald_ it was their interest not to give the show away. We were nose on to the _Spreewald_, so she couldn’t see our name. Shiner and Wolff would be the last men to give their own names, considering what they’d been doing and the latitude they were found in. They’d be sure to pose as innocents taken off some other ship by us. They’d fake up a yarn, and they’d fake up a new name for the old _Penguin_.”

They had gone on to the bridge again and they were talking like this with an eye always upon the _Minerva_, that arbiter of their destinies.

“That’s easy enough to understand,” said Harman. “What gets me is how to understand our position. What the deuce did that scuffy want, cartin’ off the log and the ship’s papers for? Ain’t there no law to protect an innocent vessel bein’ manhandled by a durned British cruiser in times of peace? What’s to become of peaceful tradin’ if such things is allowed? Where’s the rights of neutrals if a monkey on a stick like that blue-an’-gold outrage on the name of a sailor can walk on board you an’ walk off with the log book in his pocket? That’s what I want to know. I’m not a man that wants much in this here world. I only wants justice.”

“Faith, and I think you are going to get it,” said the Captain. “Bare justice, as the little boy’s mother said when she let down his pants. I’m not saying I didn’t do most of the inciting to the piracy and plundering, but whether or no we are all in the soup, and the chap with the ladle is fishing for us, and there’s no use in bothering or laying blame--we’d have shared equally in the profits.”

“Oh, I’m makin’ no remarks,” said Harman. “I’m not the man to fling back at a pal, and I guess I can take the kicks just the same as the ha’pence, but you’ve a better headpiece than me, and what I say is, be on the lookout to get the weather gauge of these jokers so be it’s possible. You can do it if any man can--get out of the soup and be a pineapple.”

“Give us a chance,” said the Captain. “I’m not going to haul my colours down without a fight for it.”

They stood watching the _Minerva_. Men were cleaning brasswork on board of her, a squad of sailors were doing Swedish exercises; the ship’s work was going on as unconcernedly as though she were lying in harbour, and this vision of cold method and absolute indifference to all things but duty and routine did not uplift the hearts of the gazers.

“They’re stuffed with pride, those chaps,” said the single-minded Harman. “They potter about and potter about the seas with their noses in the air, lookin’ down at the likes of us who do all the work’s to be done in the world. And what do they do? Nothin’! They never carry an ounce of grain or a hoof or hide, or mend a cable or fetch a letter, and they looks down on us that do as dirt. _You_ saw that josser in the brass-bound coat and the way he come aboard--they’re all alike.”

“She’s moving up to us,” said the Captain, suddenly changing his position. “She’s going to speak us.”

The _Minerva_, with a few languid flaps of her propeller, was indeed moving up to them. When she came ranging alongside, within megaphone distance, a thing--a midshipman, Blood said--speaking through a megaphone nearly as big as itself addressed the _Penguin_.

“Ship ahoy! You are to follow us down to Christobal Island.”

“Good Lord!” said Harman. The Captain said nothing, merely raising his hand to signify that he had understood.

“What’s your speed?” came again the voice through the megaphone.

The Captain seized the bridge megaphone.

“Ten knots,” he answered.

“Right!” came the reply. “Follow us at full speed.”

The blue water creamed at the _Minerva’s_ forefoot as her speed developed. She drew away rapidly, and the _Penguin_ slowly and sulkily began to move, making a huge circle to starboard.

When she got into line the _Minerva_ was a good two miles ahead.

Said Harman, for the Captain was speechless:

“I call this playing it pretty low down. _Jumping_ Jeehoshophat, but we’ll be had before Sprengel! He won’t rub his hands--oh, no! I guess he won’t rub his hands! And the old _Penguin_ is going as if she liked it. Ain’t there no gunpowder aboard to blow a hole in her skin an’ sink her? And that durned British cruiser as tight fixed to us as though she was towing us with a forty-foot hawser. I reckon if I had some poison I’d pour it out and drink it. I would that! I feel that way low down I’d pour it out and drink it.”

“Oh, _shut_ your head!” said the Captain. “You carry on like an old woman with the stomach ache. We’re caught and we’re being lugged along by the police officer, and there’s no use in clutching at the railings or making a disturbance. The one good thing is that we haven’t any of those chaps on board us, sitting with fixed bayonets on the saloon hatch and we in the saloon. The first thing to be done is to steal as much distance out of her as we can without her kicking.”

He went to the engine-room speaking tube:

“Below there, heave any muck you think likely to make smoke in the furnaces; there’s a lot of old rubber and canvas waste on the cable deck. I’ll tell Mr. Harman to have it sent down to you. I want to ’pear as if we were doin’ more than our best--yes, we’re caught and bein’ led to port, and we mean to have a try to get loose; keep a good head of steam, and keep your eye on the engine-room telegraph. I’ll be altering the speed now and then.”

He sent Harman to do what he said; then he stood watching the distant _Minerva_. She was now about two and a quarter miles ahead. The two vessels were going at about equal speed, with the balance perhaps in favour of the _Minerva_. He ordered the engines to half speed, and kept them so for a couple of minutes, then put them on to full speed again. The result of this proceeding was an almost imperceptible gain on the part of the cruiser.

In the next two hours, by the skilful use of this device, the distance between the two ships was increased to at least three and a half miles. Blood was content with that; so gradually had the increase been made that the _Minerva_, suspecting nothing, stood it, but Blood instinctively felt that she would not stand any more. The man had a keen psychological sense.

He was reckoning on a change of weather.

The wind had fallen absolutely dead, and the heat was terrific, simply because the air was charged with moisture. The captain knew these latitudes.

“I don’t see what you’re after,” said Harman, coming up on the bridge. “What’s the good of stealin’ a few cable len’ths out of her? We can’t get rid of her by day, for her guns can hit us at six miles, and if we made a show to bolt she’d turn and be on us like a cat pouncin’. She can do twenty-five knots to our twelve. Then at sundown she’s sure to close with us and keep us tied tight to her tail.”

“Maybe,” said the Captain.

He said nothing more.

An hour later he had his reward.

The horizon to westward and beyond the _Minerva_ had become slightly indistinct; the horizon to eastward and behind them was still brilliant and hard.

He knew what was happening. A slight change of temperature was stealing from the west, precipitating the moisture as it came in the form of haze.

He put his hand on the lever of the telegraph and rang the engines off.

Harman said nothing. He went to the side and spat into the sea. Then he came back and stood watching.

“There’s nothing like haze to knock gun firing on the head,” said the Captain.

Harman said nothing, but moistened his lips. A minute passed, and then the _Minerva_, all at once, like a person showing the faintest sign of indecision, showed the faintest change in definition. The faint haze had touched her.

At the same moment the Captain rang up the engines, and ordered the helm to be put hard astarboard. The _Penguin_ forged ahead, and began to turn.

“They’re so busy cleaning brasswork and saluting each other that they haven’t noticed Mr. Haze,” said the Captain. “They’re new to this station and don’t know that Mr. Fog is sure coming on her heels. Ah, she’s seen us, and she’s turning.”

The _Minerva_, in fact, had also put her helm hard astarboard.

She was making a half circle, and as small a half circle as she possibly could, but the _Penguin_ had got a quarter circle start on her, and while the _Minerva_ was still going about the _Penguin_ was off.

If hares ever chased ducks this business might be compared to a lame duck being chased by a hare. The _Minerva_ could steam ten miles to the _Penguin’s_ five and over; her guns even now could have sunk the _Penguin_ with ease, though they might not have made very good shooting, owing to the haze; that elusive, delusive haze.

“Below there,” cried the Captain through the engine-room speaking tube. “Shake yourself up, MacBean! Whack the engines up--give us fifteen or burst! What’s the matter? We’re being chased by that British cruiser, and it’s the penitentiary for the lot of us if we’re caught--that’s all.”

He turned, and at that moment the _Minerva_ spoke.

A plume of smoke showed at her bow, there came a shrill, long-drawn “whoo-oooo” like a hysterical woman “going off” somewhere in the sky, then a jet of spume and a lather of foam in the sea two cable lengths to port.

It was a practice shell, and it left the water and made another plume a mile and a half ahead and yet another a mile beyond that.

It was her first and last useful word, for now the haze had her, destroying her for war purposes as efficiently as a bursting shell in her magazine.

The haze had also taken the _Penguin_; everything seemed clear all around, but all distant things had nearly vanished.

Another shell came whooing and whining from the spectred _Minerva_ before the white Pacific fog blotted her out.

A faint wind was bringing it, less a wind than a travelling chillness, a fall of temperature, moving from east to west.

The Captain, having given his instructions to the helmsman, left the bridge, and went down below.

X THE LAST OF THE “PENGUIN”

South of Chiloe Island, on the Chile coast, there lies a little harbour which shall be nameless.

Here, six days later, the _Penguin_ was hurriedly coaling--on the _Spreewald’s_ dollars.

It was at eight o’clock on a glorious and summerlike morning that she put out of this place with her bunkers only half full, her stores just rushed aboard cumbering the deck, and a man swung over the stern on a board, painting her name out above the thunder and pow-wow of the screw.

Blood would never have wasted paint and time in the attempt to alter the name of his ship had it been the English he dreaded now. As a matter of fact, word had come to the chief official at the little nameless port above indicated that the Germans were out looking for a fifteen-hundred-ton cable boat named the _Penguin_, grey-painted and captained by a master mariner named Michael Blood.

The bleating of the infernal _Spreewald_ had been heard all over the Pacific. Sprengel’s bad language was following it. The _Minerva_ had communicated by wireless with the German gunboat _Blitz_, lying at the German island of Savaii, in the Navigators. The _Blitz_ had spoken to the cruiser _Homburg_, lying at Tongatabu; from Tongatabu it had been flashed to Fiji, and from there to Sydney. From Sydney it went to San Francisco, reaching the City of the Golden Gate in time for the morning newspapers; from there it passed in dots and dashes down the west American seaboard to Valparaiso and Valdivia.

Added to all the turmoil, the cable company whose cable had been broken smelled the truth and were howling for the _Penguin’s_ blood.

Marconi waves from Valparaiso had found the German cruiser squadron far at sea, and they had started on the hunt.

This was the news that had come to the chief official at the little Chilean port, and which, being friendly toward Blood and unfriendly toward Germany, he communicated to the former. There was also the matter of a tip, which left the coffers of the _Penguin_ completely empty after the account for coal, provisions, and harbour dues had also been settled.

“What’s the course?” asked Harman as the coast line faded behind them.

“Straight out to sea,” replied Blood. “Due west till we cut the track from Taliti to the Horn; then southeast for the Straits of Magellan. Ramirez is going to fake them with the news that we have gone north.”

“Why not go straight for the Straits down the coast instead of puttin’ out like this?”

“They’ll be hunting the coast; sure to send a ship south. They’ll never think of us going west; the last thing they’d think of.”

“Are you sure Ramirez is safe?”

“Oh, he’s safe enough. He hates the Germans, and he has taken my money. He’ll stick to his bargain. I wish we were as safe. Good Lord, every cent gone and nothing to show for it but this old hooker which we can’t sell, and the sure and certain prospect of the penitentiary if we don’t work a miracle--and even then we are lost dogs. Frisco is closed to us. We never can show our noses in Frisco again.”

“I wouldn’t have come on this cruise if I’d known things was goin’ to pan out like this,” said the ingenuous Harman. “No, indeedy! I’d have stuck to somethin’ more honest. What I want to know is this: What’s the use of war, anyway? When it has a chance of doin’ a man a good turn the blighted thing holds off, whereas if you and me had been runnin’ a peace concern it’s chances that it’d have come on. No, blamed if I don’t turn a Methodis’ passon if I ever get out o’ this benighted job. It’s crool hard to be choused like this by a cus’t underhand trick served on one just as a chance turns up to make a bit. Why couldn’t they have fought and been done with it? What’s the good of all them guns and cannons, and all them ships? What in the nation’s the good of them ships? Seems to me the only good of them is to go snuffin’ and smellin’ round the seas, pokin’ their guns into other folk’s affairs and spoilin’ their jobs. Well, there’s an end of it. I’m a peace party man now and forever more. Blest if it ain’t enough to make a man turn a Bible Christian!”

“You’d better go and see to the stowing of the stores,” said the Captain. “There’s no use in carrying on like that. I didn’t make war, or else I guess I’d have made it more limber on its legs. Come! Hurry up!”

They stood two days to the west, and then they turned to the south coast and made their dash for the Straits.

The weather had changed. It was steadily blowing up from the westward. The sea, under a dull sky, had turned to the colour of lead, and the heavy swell told of what was coming.

They had not sighted a ship since leaving the Chilean coast, but three days after altering their course the smoke of a steamer appeared, blown high by the wind and far to westward. The wind had scarcely increased in force, but the sea was tremendous and spoke of what was coming.

The Captain, on the bridge, stood with a glass to his eye, trying to make out the stranger. He succeeded, and then, without comment, handed the glass to Harman.

Harman, steadying himself against the rolling and pitching of the ship, looked.

A waste of tempestuous water leaped at him through the glass, and then, bursting a wave top to foam with her bows, grey as the seas she rode came a ship of war.

A cruiser, with guns nosing at the sky as if sniffing after the traces of the _Penguin_. She was coming bow on, and now, falling a point or two, her fore funnel seemed to broaden out and break up. It was the three funnels showing, now _en masse_ and now individually. Then, as she came to again, the three funnels became one.

“She’s a three-funnel German,” said Harman, “and she has spotted us.”

Even as he spoke the wind suddenly increased in violence.

“I’m not bothering about her much,” said the Captain. “I’m bothering about what’s in front of us.”

“Whacher mean?”

“Mean! Look at the sea and the stuff that’s coming. Could we put the ship about in this sea? No, we couldn’t. You know very well the old rolling log would turn turtle. Well, what’s before us? A lee shore. If we don’t reach the opening of the Straits of Magellan before sundown we’re dead men all. Germans! I wish I were safe in the hold of a good German ship.”

The truth of his words burst upon Harman. There are no lights at the entrance of the Magellan Straits; the entrance is not broad; to hit it in the darkness would be next door to impossible, and not to hit it would be certain death.

It was impossible to put the ship about. Harman’s extraordinary mind did not seem much upset at the discovery.

“D’ye think we’ll do it?” asked he.

“I don’t know,” said the Captain. “We may and we mayn’t. You see, we haven’t a patent log. I haven’t had a sight of the sun for two days. I can’t figure things to a nicety. But if I had ten patent logs I wouldn’t use them now. I’d be afraid to--what would be the good? Mac is whacking up the engines for all they’re worth.”

“Well, maybe we’ll do it,” said Harman, applying his eye again to the glass. Then: “She’s going about.”

The Captain took the glass.

The cruiser was turning from her prey before it was too late. It was a terrific spectacle, and once the Captain thought she was gone. The foam was bursting as high as her fighting tops and the grey water pouring in tons over her decks.

Yet she did it, and the last Blood saw of her was the kick of her propellers through sheets of foam.

At four o’clock that day they knew that they could not do it. There was no grog on board, so they were having a cup of tea in the saloon. The Captain sat at the head of the table, before the tin teapot and a plate of fancy biscuits.

The Captain and Harman were the only two men on board with a knowledge of what was coming.

“Another lump of sugar in mine,” said Harman. “I don’t hold with tea; I never did hold with tea. The only thing that can be said for it is it’s a drink. And how some of them blighters ashore lives suckin’ it day and night gets me.”

He was drinking out of his saucer.

“Oh, tea’s all right. I reckon tea’s all right,” said the Captain in an absent-minded manner.

“Maybe it is, but give me a hot whisky and you may take your tea to them that like it,” replied Harman.

He lit his pipe and went on deck. The Captain followed. They could not keep away from the fascination up above.

The bos’n was on the bridge, and they relieved him.

Not a sign of land was in sight, and the sea was running higher than ever.

“You see,” said the Captain, “we can’t make it. It’ll be sundown in an hour. We’ll strike the coast some time after dark, and God have mercy on our souls.”

“You ain’t tellin’ the hands?” said Harman.

“No use tellin’ them. I told Mac, so that he might get the best out of the engines.”

“And there’s no bit of use gettin’ out life belts,” said Harman. “I know this coast; rocks as big as churches an’ cliffs that nuthin’ but flies could crawl up; and b’sides which if a chap found himself ashore he’d either starve or be et by niggers. They’re the curiosest chaps, those blighters down here. I guess the A’mighty spoiled them in the bakin’ and shoved them down here by the Horn to hide them from sight. Wonder what Wolff and Shiner is doin’ by this?”

“God knows!” said the Captain.

The darkness fell without a sight of the land, and, leaving the bos’n on the bridge, they came down for a while to the engineroom for a warm. Mac just inquired if there was any sight of land, and said nothing more.

The engines were no longer being pressed, and they smoked and watched the projection and retraction of the piston rods, the revolution of the cranks, and all the labours of this mighty organism so soon to be pounded and ground to death on the hard rocks ahead.

It was toward midnight that the coast spoke, so that all men could hear on board the _Penguin_.

Its voice came through the yelling blackness of the night like the roar of a railway train in the distance.

The crew were gathered aft and in the alleyways, for all forward of the bridge the decks were swept. Harman and the Captain were on the bridge.

Mac had the word to give her every ounce of steam he could get out of the boilers, in the desperate idea that the harder she was pressed the higher she might be driven on the rocks, and the tighter she might stick.

The roaring of the breakers seemed now all around them, and the Captain and Harman were clinging to the bridge rails, bracing themselves for the coming shock, when--just as a curtain is drawn aside in a theatre--the rushing clouds drew away from the moon.

The white, placid full moon whose light showed the foam-dashed coast to either side of them, and right ahead clear water.

They had struck the Magellan Straits by some miracle, just as the bullet strikes the bull’s-eye of a target, and right to port they saw a great white ghost rising in the moonlight and falling again to the sea.

It was the foam breaking on the Westminster Hall.

It was breaking three hundred feet high, and Harman, as he was hurled along to the safety of the Straits, caught a glimpse of the great rock itself after a wave had fallen from it, glistening in the moonlight desolately, as slated roofs glisten after rain.

That was a sight which no man, having once seen, could ever forget.

* * * * *

I met Blood last year. He was exceedingly prosperous, or seemed so. He told me this story, and I have so mixed names and places that he himself would scarcely recognise the chief actor, much less his enemies. As to the fate of the _Penguin_, I could only get him to say that she “went down” somewhere south of Rio, but that all hands were saved. Harman, he said, had turned religious.

* * * * *