Where it was going, or the reason therefore, did not much interest Ralph Stillinger and Tom Cameron. The fact that the great airship was beneath their airplane was sufficiently startling to fill the excited minds of the two young Americans.
Were they observed by the Huns? Could they wreak some serious damage upon the Zeppelin before their own presence—and their own peril—was apprehended by the crew of the great airship?
CHAPTER VIII—AFLOAT
The Admiral Pekhard nosed her way out of the port just as dusk fell. She dropped her pilot off the masked light at the end of the last great American dock—a dock big enough to hold the Leviathan—and thereafter followed the stern lights of a destroyer. Thus she got into the roadstead, and thence into the open sea.
The work of the Allied and American navies at this time was such that not all ships returning to America could be convoyed through the submarine zone. This ship on which Ruth Fielding had taken passage for home was accompanied by the destroyer only for a few miles off Brest Harbor.
The passengers, however, did not know this. They were kept off the open decks during the night, and before morning the Admiral Pekhard was entirely out of sight of land, and out of sight of every other vessel as well. Therefore neither Ruth nor any other of the passengers was additionally worried by the fact that the craft was quite unguarded.
The Admiral Pekhard mounted a gun fore and aft, and the crews of these guns were under strict naval discipline. They were on watch, turn and turn about, all through the day and night for the submarines which, of course, were somewhere in these waters.
The Admiral Pekhard was not a fast ship; but she was very comfortably furnished, well manned, and was said to be an even sailing vessel in stormy weather. She had been bearing wounded men back to England for months, but was now being sent to America to bring troops over to take the place of the wounded English fighters.
Ruth learned these few facts and some others at dinner that night. There were some wounded American and Canadian officers going home; but for the most part the passengers in the first cabin were Red Cross workers, returning commissioners both military and civil, a group of Congressmen who had been getting first-hand information of war conditions.
Then there were a few people whom the girl could not exactly place. For instance, there was the woman who sat next to her at the dinner table.