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The dockyard was patrolled by twenty members of the crew and four petty officers from H. M. C. S. Niobe and by a squad of men from the Dominion police, who were instructed to keep out all without passes countersigned by the commandant, and who were particularly vigilant in the watch for men with cameras.
Just as the death ship reached her pier, and in the midst of the eager movement forward to learn what news she brought from the scene of the Titanic’s wreck, a little tug was spotted near by, and Commander Martin, in charge of the dockyard, scented a moving picture man.
In a very few moments he was putting out for the tug in the little patrol launch. Again a few moments and he was standing on the pier with a complacent smile on his face.
“I have the films,” he said in explanation, so the privacy was guarded.
The friends and relatives of those who were lost when the great liner went down were urged not to assume the ordeal of meeting the Mackay-Bennett. Almost without exception they followed this advice, and only a scattering few could be seen among those waiting on the pier.
In all the crowd of men, officials, undertakers, and newspaper men, there was just one woman, solitary, spare, clasping her heavy black shawl tightly around her.
This was Eliza Lurette, for more than thirty years in the service of Mrs. William August Spencer, who was waiting at her home on East Eighty-sixth Street, New York, while Miss Lurette had journeyed to Halifax to seek the body of Mr. Spencer, who went down with the Titanic.
So the crowd that waited on the pier was made up almost entirely of men who had impersonal business there, and the air was full of the chatter of conjecture and preparation.
Then, warned by the tolling of the bells up in the town, a hush fell upon the waiting people. The gray clouds that had overcast the sky parted, and the sun shone brilliantly on the rippling water of the harbor as the Mackay-Bennett drew alongside her pier.