“Right where it came from,” I put it straight back to him.
If it hadn’t been for my game arm I guess Bill and I would have settled the mooted question as to where my chunk of mud came from by referring it to the court of last resort, by which I mean the manly art of hit-’em-again, gob.
“Put up your dukes,” commanded Bill at the same time striking an attitude of a gas-house slugger.
Now to get my right hand up I had to lift it with my left and when Bill saw this he yelled, “time, you win!”
Then his eyes softened, his voice lost its harshness and he became sympathetic. He wanted to know how it happened and all about it. And then we got the matter of the chunk of mud straightened out to Bill’s satisfaction. From that time on Bill and I were pals and we used to swap stories. He had been in every corner on the face of the earth except South America and his stock of experiences was a large one. To keep even with him I had to manufacture tales out of raw material as I went along and I often thought he did the same thing. Say, he certainly put over some regular crawlers. He never got tired of talking about the prospects of mining diamonds in Brazil and all I had to do to get him going was to flash my sparkler on him and he was transported as if by magic to equatorial South America.
Like dozens of other fellows I have met, Bill was a strange contradiction of brains in that he was a natural born hard boiled egg and yet when a fellow needed a friend he was as compassionate as a Salvation Army lass in a trench under fire; again he was ignorant, yet wanted to learn. For instance he wanted me to teach him wireless; it was all vague and intangible to him. He had to have something he could see in three dimensions instead of having to visualize it in his mind; his one big talent lay in his being able to hit a target with a projectile of small or large size and accordingly he was able to serve his Uncle Sam nobly and with telling effect.
You may or may not know it but a fellow can join the navy and live aboard ship a long time and still know but very little about any part of her, except his own particular branch, unless he keeps his eyes and ears open and talks with fellows who know and can and will answer his questions intelligently. Bill was ignorant when it came to book-learning but he knew all about submarines and submarine chasers from their bottoms up.
I had asked him why it was that a torpedo from a U-boat couldn’t hit a submarine chaser and also to tell me something about the fighting qualities of U-boats.
“You see, matey,” explained Bill wisely, “the torpedoes made for the Kaiser’s U-boats are adjusted so that after they are shot from their tubes they run through the water at an even depth of between 8 and 9 feet below the surface. Now a boat of any size draws far more water than this and, of course, if the torpedo hits her at all it will be below the water line and she goes down. But this chaser of ours draws only 4 feet of water and so a torpedo, if it behaves itself, would pass clean under her and never touch her.
“The trouble is,” he went on, “that there never was a torpedo made that stuck to its course and it is liable to shift to the port or starboard or to come to the surface and for this reason we never take a chance but dodge them. You can always tell when a torpedo is coming by the thin white wake she makes on top of the water and while a ship can’t get out of its way, a speedy little boat like ours can make a quick turn and give it a wide berth.”