“Oh, no offense! I was only joking, of course. I suppose you have specialists in that line as well as in others. From what I read in the papers that drift in to us here, I take it that everything is being specialized nowadays. What’s your particular line—navigating, engineering, submarining?”
Howard laughed again. “This is an age of specialization, all right, captain,” he returned, “but it hasn’t struck the navy yet. Quite the contrary! Only a year or two ago, Congress wiped out all special lines and insisted that all officers should know everything. Perhaps it was right, but——”
“But you don’t think so. Well, it’s a good thing to know all about your own job if you can. I suppose, however, you can’t help specializing more or less. For instance, you must have special men who manage your submarines.”
“Not exactly. Still, only a few men have had any experience in that line yet. The boats are too new and too few to give everybody a chance yet. Personally, I have been lucky enough to have had a good deal of experience with them, but comparatively few others have as yet.”
Forbes threw himself back in his chair with a look of intense satisfaction on his face. “That’s good,” he said heartily. “Humph! By the way, Howard, this party of yours is a curiously mixed one.”
“You think so?”
“Oh, it’s evident on the face of it!— Have a cigarette?— A navy officer, a New York policeman, and a girl; that’s odd enough, isn’t it? Not that sailors and girls are antipathetic—quite the contrary—but where does the policeman come in? I don’t quite place him in the picture.”
Howard lighted his cigarette with a steady hand. “I believe he had been to Porto Rico to bring a convict back to New York,” he returned.
“A convict. Humph! Too bad he didn’t bring him here. ‘There’s never a law of God or man runs in the Sargasso Sea.’ I’m up in the modern poets, you’ll observe, Howard. We have no extradition here. Well, as I was saying, Neptune makes some queer bed-fellows, especially here. Who is the lady, by the way?”
“Miss Dorothy Fairfax, daughter of Colonel John Fairfax, a millionaire railroad man who has been building lines in Porto Rico of late. His daughter was on her way home after visiting him on the island.”