CHAPTER XI—ACTION
If action was what George Belding craved, he was getting it. Everybody aboard the United States destroyer Colodia was on the alert as the craft leaped ahead to full speed for the spot where the rusty-sided tramp steamship was popping away with her deck guns at some object as yet not in view from the destroyer.
The merchant ship was being conned on a zig-zag course, evidently in an attempt to dodge an expected torpedo. Her hull hid whatever she was shooting at from the crew of the Colodia; but the latter did not doubt the nature of the big ship’s erratic course.
At top speed the Colodia rushed to the fray, and on suddenly rounding the stern of the tramp, a great shout rose from the boys ranged along the destroyer’s rail:
“There she is!”
The cry was drowned by the salvo of guns discharged at the conning tower of the German submersible not more than a thousand yards from the tramp ship. The position of the German craft had been excellent at first for a shot at the merchant vessel; but her first torpedo had evidently missed its objective. Now with the destroyer in view, the Hun let drive a second missile and then began to submerge.
The torpedo’s wake could be seen by the lookouts on the Colodia the instant it left its tube. The tramp vessel evaded the explosive; but the destroyer was directly in the torpedo’s path.
There was real danger at this moment. Quickly swerved as she might be, it was not at all sure that the Colodia could escape the torpedo. Every man and boy aboard was at his station; among them Al Torrance was placed at the starboard rail. He was armed, like many of his mates, with a rifle.
As the destroyer shot across the path of the torpedo Torry fitted the butt of his rifle into the hollow of his shoulder, huddled his cheek against the stock, and brought the cross-sights of the rifle full upon the sharklike projectile.
The rifle report was almost instantaneous with the roar of the torpedo. The latter blew up not twenty yards from the destroyer’s rail!
“Hi! Hi! Hi!” yelled the mates of the keen-sighted Torrance.
“Well done!” called the officer of the watch through his megaphone. “Well done, Torrance!”
The whole crew cheered again, and Al’s flaming face acknowledged their appreciation. Mr. MacMasters came quickly to wring the lad’s hand in appreciation.
“Good for you, Torrance,” he said. “Your name goes down on the log for that.”
“Aw, she wouldn’t have hit us anyway,” said Al, quite overcome by so much praise.
“Never mind. It showed accurate marksmanship and good work, too. Those autoprojectiles are dangerous to leave drifting about the seas. You get a good mark, my boy.”
Meanwhile the Colodia, swerving not a hair from her course, reached and overran the spot where the submersible had sunk. The order rang out and the depth bomb was dropped. Then the destroyer scurried out of the way to escape the effect of the deep-down explosion.
Up from the depths rose a mound of muddy water. It rose twenty feet above the surface, and the spray shot twice as high. The thundering explosion shook the running destroyer in every part. The effect of the discharge upon what was under the sea must have been terrible.
Half a mile away the Colodia swerved and circled, to pass again over the spot where the bomb had been dropped. The boys leaned over the rails to watch for anything in the water that might prove that the submarine had been wrecked. There was not a bit of wreckage; but suddenly Ikey Rosenmeyer shrieked:
“Oil! Oil! Oh, bully! Oil!”
A roar of other voices took up the cry. Great bubbles of oil rose to the surface. The Colodia passed over a regular “slick” of fluid that could mean nothing but that the tanks of the submersible had been ripped open by the explosion of the depth bomb.
Morgan found George Belding standing beside him and looking back at the oil-streaked waves with a very serious visage.
“What’s on your mind?” asked the Seacove lad.
“It seems terrible, doesn’t it, Phil?” said Belding. “All those fellows! Gone like that!” and he snapped his fingers.
“Well,” returned Whistler, “you wanted action, didn’t you? Now I guess you’ve had enough for a while.”
“I believe you,” agreed his friend solemnly.
But the work and life of the boys on the destroyer was not altogether made up of such scenes and incidents as these that have been related. Just at this time the troop ships were coming across from America in great convoys and the Colodia sometimes had less than half a day in port between trips. Four or five hours ashore in the English port, or at Brest where the greater number of ships from America landed their freight and human cargoes, was the utmost freedom that the Navy Boys and their mates secured.
There were extra calls, now and then, like these which have been related herein. When an S O S call is picked up by shore or ship radio, every Naval vessel within reach is sure to make for the point of peril.
The life was not altogether exciting, however, for there were many days of tedious watching and waiting in which it seemed that the Hun boats had all scurried back to their bases and the patrols scarcely raised a porpoise, much less one of the “steel sharks of the sea.”
At Brest, well along in the month following the introduction of George Belding to the Colodia, the young fellow from New York got a cablegram from his father mentioning the date of the Redbird’s sailing for Bahia with his own family and Philip Morgan’s sisters aboard.
Whether the treasure of gold coin was to be part of the ship’s burthen or not, the cablegram did not state. George had written his father about his lost letters and papers and of the probability that the knowledge of the treasure would reach those Germans who would consider the ship bound for South America, and all she carried, their legitimate prey.
If information of the treasure of gold coin had been sent by the spy from the Zeppelin to his associates in the United States, there might be already afoot a plot to get possession of Mr. Belding’s gold. The boys of the Colodia had not heard of the capture of the spy who had disappeared in George Belding’s uniform. Much as they had inquired in England, they had been able to learn absolutely nothing.
Phil Morgan had even been to see Franz Eberhardt at the port hospital where the young German was confined while his arm was being skilfully treated by the English surgeons. Later the German youth had been taken to an internment camp in one of the back shires. Before he had gone Whistler had tried to get him to talk again about “Cousin Emil.” But Franz had become wary.
He was no longer acting “the schmardie,” as Hans Hertig had called him. He had begun to see something of England and had learned something of the character of the English. To be a prisoner, and well treated as he was, was a much more serious situation than had at first appeared.
But he refused to say anything at all of Cousin Emil. Whether it really was Franz Eberhardt’s cousin with whom the Navy Boys and “Willum” Johnson had had their adventure, the fact remained that as far as the boys knew, a German spy was at large in England, And he had information in his possession that might possibly injure Mr. Belding and his affairs.
The Seacove boys were all now interested in the sailing of the Redbird. If Whistler’s two sisters alone had been sailing for Bahia the others would have felt a personal anxiety in the matter.
“Wish the old Colodia was going to convoy that Redbird,” Al Torrance said. “Eh, fellows?”
“By St. Patrick’s piper that played the last snake out of Ireland!” declared Frenchy Donahue, “’twould be the foinest of luck if she was.”
“Oi! oi! Ain’t it so?” murmured Ikey. “And that Alice Morgan such a pretty girl! I hope that Redbird gets to Bahia safe.”
“As far as we can hear,” said Whistler cheerfully, “there are neither submarines nor raiders now in the Western Atlantic. They seem to have been chased out, boys.”
This supposition, however, did not prove to be founded on fact; for on the very next occasion that the Colodia was in the French port, Brest, there was much excitement regarding a new German raider reported to have got out of Zeebrugge and run to the southward, doing damage on small craft along the French coast. This was before the British Captain Carpenter with the Vindictive bottled up that outlet of German ships.
Some denied that it was a raider at all, but a big, new submarine that was built with upperworks to look like a steam carrier when she was on the surface. However, she had a name, it being the Sea Pigeon, instead of a letter and number. The whole fleet of destroyers was soon on the lookout for this strange vessel, and the American commanders offered liberal rewards to the owners of the sharp eyes who first spotted the new Hun terror of the seas.
The Colodia went to sea to meet a new convoy from America, “all set” as the boys said, to make a killing if they ran across the Sea Pigeon.
“Well, we got the Graf von Posen,” Ikey Rosenmeyer said, with cheerful optimism, “so why not this here Pigeon ship? We’re the boys that bring home the bacon, aren’t we?”
“Aw, Ikey!” groaned Frenchy Donahue. “Can’t you ever forget you were brought up in a delicatessen shop? ‘Bring home the bacon,’ indade!”