Out of Old England's inmost heart they sail,
A fleet of memories that can never fail.
At this moment the Morning Glory ran into a bank of white mist, which left him nothing to see from the bridge. The engines were slowed down and he decided that it was time for breakfast.
The cabin where he breakfasted with the skipper was very little changed, except that it seemed by contrast a little more palatial than in peace time. There had been many changes on the exterior of the ship. Her white and gold had been washed over with service gray, and many beautiful fittings had been removed to make way for grimmer work. But within there were still some corners of the yacht that shone like gems in a setting of lead.
The Morning Glory had been a very beautiful boat. She had been built for summer cruising among the pine-clad islands off the coast of Maine, or to carry her master down to the palms of his own little island off the coast of Florida, where he basked for a month or so among the ripening oranges, the semitropical blossoms and the cardinal birds, while Buffalo cleared the worst of the snow from her streets. For Matthew Hudson was a man of many millions, which he had made in almost the only country where millions can be made honestly and directly out of its enormous natural resources.
His own method had been a very simple one, though it required great organizing ability and a keen eye and brain at the outset. All he had done was to harness a river at the right place and make it drive a light-and-power plant. But he had done it on a scale that enabled him, from this one central station, to drive all the electric trolleys and light all the lamps in more than a hundred cities. He could supply all the light and all the power they wanted to cities a hundred miles away from his plant, and he talked of sending it three hundred miles farther.
Now that the system was established, it worked as easily as the river flowed; and his power house was a compact little miracle of efficiency. All that the casual visitor could see was a long, quiet room, in which it seemed that a dozen clocks were slumbrously ticking. These were the indicators, from the dials of which the amount of power distributed over a district as big as England could be read by the two leisurely men on duty. In the meantime, night and day, the river poured power of another kind into the treasury of Matthew Hudson.
But his life was as unlike that of the millionaires of fiction as could be imagined. It reminded one of the room with the slumbrous clocks.
He was, indeed, as his own men described it, preeminently the "man behind the gun." When the Morning Glory had been accepted by the naval authorities he had obtained permission to equip her for her own work in European waters at his own cost, and to make certain experiments in the equipment.
The Admiralty had not looked with favor on some of his ideas, which were by no means suitable for general use in the patrol fleet. But Matthew Hudson had too many weapons at work against Germany for them to deny him a sentimental pleasure in his own yacht. He seemed to have some particular purpose of his own in carrying out his ideas; and so it came about that the Morning Glory was regarded among her companions as a mystery-ship.
The two men breakfasted in silence. They were both drowsy, for there had been a U-boat alarm during the night, which had kept them very much awake; but Hudson was roused from his reverie over the second rasher by a loud report, followed by a confused shouting above and the stoppage of the engines.