“Mr. Boldig! It is a man afloat! Man overboard!”
Ruth thought she heard somebody run from her door.
She arose and tremblingly put on her dress. Then she hastened to pull aside the bed and open her door. She felt that she was safer out upon deck. Besides, she was curious to know what the cry had meant.
CHAPTER XXIV—COUNTERPLOT
To one who had been more than forty-eight hours drifting in a scuttle-butt in mid-Atlantic, the sight of almost any kind of craft would have been welcome. Tom Cameron hailed first the plume of drifting smoke, then the mast and stacks, and then the high, camouflaged bow of the Admiral Pekhard with a joy that increased deliriously as he became assured that the ship was steaming head-on to his poor raft.
The steamship was moving very slowly, and it was hours before, waving his coat frantically as he stood in his bobbing craft, he knew he had been sighted by the lookout. The latter had not expected to see anything like Tom and the remains of the wrecked Zeppelin in these waters. The lookout had been straining his eyes to catch sight of a periscope.
It was providential that the course of the Admiral Pekhard was bringing her almost directly toward the drifting bit of wreckage. She was almost on top of Tom before the lookout hailed and Boldig ran up to the bridge to get a better look at the object which had caused the excitement.
“That is no part of an underseas boat!” cried Boldig to the lookout. “What is it?”
“There is a man in it—see! He waves his coat. It looks like a boat—no! It is one mystery, Herr Boldig.”
But the latter now had his glasses fixed on the drifting raft. He saw the broken stays, the slipper-shaped bow of the Zeppelin, and he suddenly understood. It was not the first wreck of a Zeppelin’s frame work that he had seen floating in the sea; but it was the first in which he had seen a living man.