This capture of one of the largest cargoes of contraband rubber was due to an impression he got from two innocent cablegrams which had been intercepted and brought to him at the Admiralty,—one of them apparently concerning an operation for appendicitis, and the other announcing the death of the patient. His intuitions, indeed, resembled those of the artist; and, though he was one of the smartest sailors in the Navy, he looked more like a pre-Raphaelite painter's conception of Galahad than any one I had ever seen in the flesh. He looked exceedingly youthful, and the dead whiteness of his face, which his Philistine brethren described as lantern-jawed, was lighted by the alert eyes of the new age. They had that peculiar glitter which one sees in the eyes of aviators, and sometimes in those of the business men accustomed to the electric cities of the new world. His hands were like those of a musician, long and quick and nervous. But I could easily imagine them throttling an enemy.
We turned in early that night, and I dozed fitfully, revolving fragments of our somewhat disconnected conversation. The beautiful sea-cry "All's well" came to me from the watch in the bow, as the bell tolled the passage of the hours; and it was not till daybreak that I slept, only to dream of that table in Berlin, waiting for its guests, with a peach in every champagne glass.
II
As we waited in the cold brilliance of New York harbor, a few mornings later, and looked with considerable satisfaction at the German steamers that were huddled like gigantic red and black cattle in the docks of the Hamburg-Amerika and North German-Lloyd, a telegram was brought aboard which settled our plans.
Duncan was to go down to Washington that night, while I was to go up to Rockport, a little fishing village on the coast of Maine. At this place I was to take a motor-car and drive some fifteen miles to a certain lonely strip of pine-clad coast. There we were to camp out in a tiny cottage, which we could rent from an old sea-captain whom I knew before the war. Two artists, in quest of a quiet place for work, could hardly find a happier hunting-ground. I was particularly glad to find that we could hire a trim little motor-launch, in which we could go exploring among the islands that dotted the blue sea for scores of miles. It was a beautiful coast, and their dark peaks of pine were printed like tiny black feathers against a sky of unimaginable sapphire. Nothing could seem more remote from the devilries of modern war.
Duncan joined me, a week later, in Captain Humphrey's cottage—it was a small white-painted wooden house among the pine trees on the main land, built on the rocks which overhung a deep blue inlet of the Atlantic. We discussed our plans on the little veranda, from which we could see half a dozen of those pine-crowned islands, which were the objects of suspicion. There were scores of others we could not see, to north and south of us, and we checked them off on the map as we sat there under the dried sunfish and the other queer marine trophies, which the old skipper had brought back with him from the South Seas.
The nights were quite cold enough for a fire, though it was only mid-July; and we finished all our plans that evening round the big stove, the kind of thing you see in the foc'sle of a steam trawler, which stood in the center of Captain Humphrey's parlor. We were more than a little glad indeed to let our pipes and the good-smelling pine logs waft their incense abroad; for—like all the dwellers in those parts—the old skipper subsisted through the winter on the codfish which he had salted and stored during the summer in his attic; and though his abode was clean and neat as himself, it had the healthy reek of a trawler, as well as its heating apparatus. A large oil lamp, which hung from the ceiling, was none the worse, moreover, for the moderating influence of a little wood-smoke.
"To-morrow, then," said Duncan, "we take the motor-launch and have a look at all the islands between this place and Rockport. They've been awfully decent down in Washington about it. The only trouble is that they don't and can't believe it. Exactly the state of mind we were in, before the war. Everybody laughing at exactly the same things, from spy-stories to signals on the coast. I met a man in the Government who had been taken to a window at midnight to see a light doing the Morse code, off this very coast, and he laughed at it. Didn't believe it. Thought it was the evening-star. We were like that ourselves. No decent man can believe certain things, till they are beyond question.
"It's our own fault. We told them all was well before the war; and I don't see how we can blame them for thinking their own intervention unnecessary now. We keep on telling America that it's all over except the shouting. We paint the rosiest kind of picture to-day about the prospects of the allies; and then we grumble amongst ourselves because Americans don't turn the whole of their continent upside down to come and help us. We deliberately lulled America to sleep, and then we kicked because we heard that she had only one eye open.
"Well,—they've given us a blessing on our wild-goose chase. We may do all the investigating we like, as I understand the position, so long as we leave any resultant action to the United States. This means, I suppose,—in old Captain Humphrey's language—that we may be 'rubber-necks,' but we mustn't shoot. All the same, I brought the guns with me." He laid two automatic pistols on the table. "It's more than likely, from what I've been able to gather, that we may have to defend our own skins; and I suppose that's permissible. Oh, damn that mosquito!" He slapped his ankle, and complained bitterly that the old sea-captain's faith in his own tough exterior had prevented him from providing his doors and windows with mosquito netting.