“The gaff holds the top of the mainsail,” he was saying to himself, “and the jib-boom—”
Here he was obliged to interrupt the repetition of his lesson by laughing aloud at the memory of his last view of Captain Saulsby. Harvey Jarreth had been waiting at the cottage, true to his word, so that Billy’s final sight of the two had shown him the little eager man still pouring out a flood of argument, while the Captain sat unconcernedly darning his blue sock once more, and whistling as gaily as though Jarreth and his real-estate project were a thousand miles away.
However, just before Billy passed out through the gap in the wall, he saw something that drove both lesson and laughter completely from his mind. He had stopped to take one more look at the little house, the sloping garden, the steep rocks running out into the foaming surf and at Johann Happs’ trim little boat riding at anchor just inside the harbour. One glance showed him clearly that the vessel was in distress, but how or why he could not tell. She seemed to be settling slowly in the water, indeed had already sunk so deep that the waves were breaking over her. And, strangest of all, Johann Happs was standing, with folded arms, upon the beach, staring at her but quite unmoving, never lifting a hand to rescue his beloved boat.
CHAPTER III
THE CRUISE OF THE JOSEPHINE
The North Atlantic fleet of the United States Navy was playing its war game off the coast of New England, with a large part of the manœuvres apparently arranged for the especial benefit of the visitors on Appledore Island. For three days ships had been plying steadily back and forth in the offing; huge dreadnaughts whose like Billy had never seen before, smaller cruisers and swift slender destroyers that ran in and out amongst the rest of the fleet like greyhounds. Even the knitting brigade on the hotel verandah deserted its usual task of rocking and gossiping and plying swift needles for the relief of the Belgians, and instead came down to the wharf to stare out to sea, to wonder what this boat was, or what that ship could be doing, and what it was all about anyway. The one or two men in the company were able to tell much of just what the whole plan was, and just what each division of the fleet was trying to do to the other. Unfortunately none of these learned dissertations on naval strategy ever seemed to agree, and the eager questioners went back to their watching rather more puzzled than before.
Two young naval officers were actually quartered at the Appledore Hotel, but they spent all their time observing the ships’ movements from the highest point of the island, or signalling from one of the headlands. When they could be stopped and questioned they seemed to display such pitiful ignorance alongside of the fluent knowledge of the lecturers on the wharf that it hardly seemed worth while to ask them anything.
The first three days had been dull and foggy, making the manœuvres even more confusing than usual to the uninstructed mind; so Billy, who had done his best to have no interest in the matter, finally proclaimed loudly that the whole business was a great bore and that he would waste no more time in watching it. But on the fourth day, a clear cloudless one, with brisk winds and a sea so bright that it fairly hurt your eyes to look at it, he went down to see his friend Captain Saulsby and found that he, too, was caught by the fascination of this same war game.
“I wish I could see the way I used to,” the old man sighed as he put down his battered telescope—Billy felt better about him when he found that he actually had one—and leaned back in his chair by the door. “That ship that’s going by now is either the Kentucky or the Alabama and for the life of me I can’t tell which. I’ve watched them off this point for a lot of years now, and never could see so little before. I do believe,”—he spoke as though the suspicion had only just occurred to him—“that I’m getting old!”
A week ago Billy might have felt inclined to laugh at any one who was so bowed down with years but who seemed so surprised on discovering the fact. Now, however, he had become too fast a friend of the Captain’s for that. A man who could endure pain as unfalteringly as Captain Saulsby did, who, although nearly a cripple, could still work for his scanty living and never complain of the toil and hardship, such a person was not to be laughed at.