CHAPTER XVI—STATIONS
Since sailing out of Brest and before receiving her special orders by wireless telegraph, the Colodia had made no base port where the crew could receive either mail or cablegrams. Two weeks and more had passed. Philip Morgan and George Belding had no idea where the Redbird was, or whether or not their relatives were safe.
“The fate of a ship at sea is an uncertain thing at best,” Phil Morgan said seriously to his friend, “in spite of the old salt’s oft-repeated prayer: ‘Heaven help the folks ashore on this stormy night, Bill!’”
“Don’t joke about such serious matters,” Belding replied. “Wonder how far the folks have got toward Bahia?”
“Well, you know where we stuck the pins in the chart to-day, boy?”
“To be sure. But we don’t really know a thing about it.”
“Courage!” urged Whistler. “We are just as likely to be right in doping out the Redbird’s course as not.”
“It’s the confounded uncertainty of it that gets me,” said Belding bitterly, and then changed the subject.
Interest in the Colodia’s search for German raiders and submarines did not flag even in the minds of these two members of her crew. For several days, however, the destroyer plowed through the sea, hither and yon, without picking out of the air a word regarding either the Sea Pigeon or the huge submarine which some of the boys believed they had surely seen in the mirage reflected against the morning sky.
The detail work of a naval vessel at sea even in wartime, unless something “breaks,” is really very monotonous. Drills, studies, watch duties, clothes washing, deck scrubbing, brass polishing. All these things go on with maddening regularity.
Every time the wireless chattered the watch on deck started to keen attention. But hour after hour passed and no word either of the German raider or the big submarine was caught by Sparks or his assistants.
Yet there was a certain expectation of possible action all of the time that kept up the spirits of the men and boys of the destroyer. At any moment an S O S might come, or an order from the far distant naval base for immediate and exciting work.
The Colodia and her crew were supposed to be ready for anything—and she was and they were!
The daylight hours were so fully occupied with routine detail that the boys made little complaint; but during the mid-watch and the first half of the morning watch when the time drags so slowly, the crew sometimes suffered from that nervous feeling which suggests to the acute mind that “something is about to happen.”
On this particular night—it was mid-watch—things were going very easily indeed on the Colodia. It was a beautiful tropical night, with a sky of purple velvet in which sparkled more diamond-stars than Whistler Morgan or George Belding seemed ever to have seen before.
They were lying on the deck, these two, and gazing lazily skyward, it not being their trick on lookout. The Colodia was running as usual with few lights showing; but not because it was supposed that there was any other craft, either friendly or of the enemy, within miles and miles of her course.
They lay within full hearing of the radio room. Suddenly the wireless began to chatter.
“Hold on!” exclaimed Whistler, seizing his friend’s sleeve. “That isn’t a call for you, George.”
“I’ve got so I jump everytime I hear it,” admitted Belding, sinking back to the deck.
The messenger soon darted for the commander’s cabin. It was no immediate order or signal for help, or he would have first hailed the bridge. But soon Mr. Lang’s orderly appeared with a message for the officer of the watch.
There were a few whispered words at the break of the bridge. Then the officer conning the ship gave swift directions for her course to be changed and signaled the engine room as well. Almost immediately the pace of the destroyer was increased.
“I wonder what’s in the wind?” murmured Whistler.
“I’m going to see if I can find out,” said Belding, rising again.
He went around to the door of the radio room. Sparks himself was on duty. He sat on the bench with the helix strap and “eartabs” adjusted. He had just taken another message, but it was nothing meant for the commander of the Colodia.
“That’s the second time to-night, George,” he said, removing his head-harness. “I don’t know what to make of it.”
“What’s the matter, sir?” asked the young fellow.
“Why, I guess it’s static. Nothing more, I suppose. Yet it is a regular ‘ghost talk.’ I can almost make out words.”
“Goodness! What do you mean?” asked the young fellow, mightily interested. “I never heard of ‘ghost talk’, though I know ‘static’ means atmospheric pressure.”
“Pah! It means electricity in the air that we can’t wholly account for,” said Sparks. “But this——”
“What?”
“Why, I tell you, George; twice to-night I have almost caught something that seemed to be a message in one of our codes and tuned to this length of spark. But I can’t really make head nor tail of it.”
“That wasn’t what you just sent aft to the Old Man?”
“Shucks! No! I’ll give you a tip on that, young fellow,” and the radio man smiled. “We’ve been zigzagging across the steamship routes, but now you will notice that we have an objective. That message was from Teneriffe in the Canaries. That big sub has been seen down that way.”
“Bully!” exclaimed Whistler, who had come to look into the room over his friend’s shoulder.
“Oh, that you, Whistler? Well, there is nothing secret about it. But this confounded ‘ghost talk’——”
“Sounds interesting,” Whistler said.
“I’m puzzled. I hope I’ll catch it again. It is just as though somebody—a slow operator, regular ham—was trying to put something over and couldn’t quite do it. Funny things we hear in the air, anyway, at times.”
He went back to his machine, grumbling, and the boys came away after a bit. The news that the super-submersible had been heard of again was something to talk about, at least, and served to keep them awake through the rest of the watch.
In the morning the news that the German submarine was again active in a certain part of the ocean to the southward became generally known. It was likely that the strange and threatening craft, which plainly could make longer cruises than most submarines, had been sent forth to prey upon food ships from South America.
She expected to lurk along steamship lanes, like a wolf crouched in the underbrush beside a forest path; and like that wolf, too, she was relentless. Yet, her treatment of captured ships thus far had been more humane than most, as shown by her use of the Que Vida’s crew and passengers.
“Still, she’s a regular pirate,” Whistler Morgan said in speaking of this. “See how her men robbed those poor sailors, and even the women.”
“Ah, you said something then, boy!” Al Torrance agreed.
“I wonder,” George Belding said reflectively, “if the war should end suddenly, and some of these U-boats are out in the various seas, if their commanders won’t become veritable pirates?”
“How’s that?” cried Frenchy Donahue. “It’s pirates they are already!”
“But to go it on their own hook,” put in Ikey. “I see what Belding means. Just think of a new race of buccaneers! Wow!”
“Begorra!” murmured the Irish lad, his eyes shining, “they might infest certain seas like the old pirates of the Spanish Main.”
“I hope you see what you’ve started, George,” growled Whistler with mock anger. “Those kids are off again.”
The friends from Seacove were not alone excited by the renewed chase of the super-submersible. That day, too, there were two messages about the German craft. She had sunk a small freight boat and a fishing sloop. It was evident that she had run somewhere for supplies, and had now come back to the island waters.
How many Canary fishermen’s sloops and turtle catchers she sank during the next few days will never be known. Mark of such vessels could not be taken until their crews rowed ashore—if they were fortunate enough to get to shore. The tales the Colodia got by wireless, however, showed that the Germans were robbing all crews, as they had the people from the Argentine ship.
From these shore reports, it seemed that the huge submarine was circling about the steamship lane again, boldly attacking everything that came in her way; but it was not until next day that the destroyer got out of the air a bona fide call for help. This was from the radio of the British steamship Western Star bound up the Cape of Good Hope.
She had merely time to repeat her S O S signal when her spark was cut off. Doubtless the radio plant of the freighter was destroyed by shellfire.
She had, however, given the Colodia clearly her situation, and the United States destroyer started upon another of those remarkable dashes for which she and her sister ships were originally built.
There was a chance that they might reach the spot where the Western Star was being held up before the submarine could get away; and the Colodia’s crew was at stations, ready for what was coming.