The gong clanged, and the Guard Boat slid away into the mist again. The figure in the bows was relieved by a comrade, and together with the remaining two vanished down the foremost hatch. The faint reek of Navy tobacco drifted aft to the stern-sheets, where the Lieutenant of the Night Guard had resumed his position, leaning against an angle of the cabin with his hands deep in the pockets of his overcoat. He was reflecting on the strangeness of a profession that dragged a man from his bed at one o'clock in the morning, to steam round a foggy harbour in the company of armed men, these times of piping peace.
Once a night throughout the year, in every Dockyard Port in the kingdom, a launch slid away from the Depot jetty, slipped in and out among the anchored ships, and returned to her moorings when the patrol was completed. Why? Some grim significance surely lay in the duty, in the abrupt hails that stabbed the stillness, greeting the throb of her engines: in the figure of the armed man in the bows with the megaphone, ready to fling back the reassuring answer....
He shifted his position and glanced forward. The bowman was chewing tobacco, and every now and again turned his head to spit overside. Each time he did so the port bow-light lit his features with a ruddy glare. It was a stolid countenance, slightly bored.
The Lieutenant smiled gravely. Did the figure wonder why he wore a cutlass in peace time? Did he realise the warning it embodied—the message they conveyed night by night to the anchored ships? His thoughts took a more sombre turn. Would the night ever come—just such a night as this—and under the fog a Menace glide in among the blindfold Fleet? To the first hail of alarm answer with a lever released, a silvery shadow that left a trail of bubbles on the surface.... And then—the fog and silence riven to the dark vault of heaven.
He raised his head. "All right, Coxswain, enough for to-night. Carry on back." Over went the helm: the boat swung round on a new course, heading whence she had come an hour before.
Carry on back! It was so easy to say.
His thoughts reverted to the grim picture his imagination had created. How would that shadowy Terror, her mission fulfilled, "carry on back"? Wheel wrenched over, funnels spouting flame, desperate men clinging to the rail as she reeled under the concussion, racing blindly through the outraged night for safety.
Thus had a warring Nation written a lesson across the map of Manchuria for all the world to read—and, if they might, remember.
Where did he come in, then—this figure leaning thoughtfully against the angle of the steamboat's cabin? What was his mission, and that of the steamboat with its armed crew, night after night, in fog and by starlight, winter and summer...?
A chord of memory vibrated faintly in his mind. There was a phrase that summed it up, learned long ago.... He was a cadet again on the seamanship-deck of the old Britannia, at instruction in a now obsolete method of sounding with the Deep-Sea Lead and Line. They were shown how, in order to obtain a sounding, a number of men were stationed along the ship's side, each holding a coil of the long line. As the heavy lead sank and the line tautened from hand to hand, each man flung his coil overboard. As he did so he called to warn the next—