"I cannot let you go!" she cried. "Stay with me and I am yours!"
"I must go!"
He tore himself from her and ran down the passage into the street. She thought she would have fainted at that instant, but something—suspense, the faint possibility of success, doubt—nerved her to action. After a few moments of awful uncertainty she followed Sempland along the hallway, out through the door, and into the night. He was not to be seen. She knew where he had gone, however, and she bent her steps toward the government wharf. She went slowly at first, but finally ran at her greatest speed.
CHAPTER VI
AN ENGINE OF DESTRUCTION
The David, so named because although she was small it was hoped she would strike terror to the huge Goliaths of the Union fleet, was built of boiler iron. She was thirty feet long and of a cigar shape, her greatest diameter being a little less than six feet. She was propelled by a hand engine worked by members of her crew, and could be submerged at pleasure, but experience had shown that once down she usually stayed down with all on board. A résumé of her history has been given. She was a floating, or sinking, death-trap.
Originally she was intended to drag after her a floating torpedo in the hope that she could pass under a vessel's keel and explode the torpedo when she reached the proper position. General Beauregard, however, had positively forbidden that she should be used as a submarine any longer on account of her disastrous behavior, and on this occasion she was provided with a long spar sticking out from her nose, on the end of which was one hundred pounds of powder in a copper cylinder provided with four extremely sensitive tubes of lead containing a highly explosive mixture, which would ignite upon contact with a ship's side or bottom and explode the torpedo.
She was painted a slate-gray, and her ballast was so adjusted that with the seven men who manned her on board, one to steer, one to look after the torpedo, and five to turn the propeller crank, her low hatch scarcely rose above the water. In that condition, and especially at night, she looked like a plank floating on the surface. By hard and conscientious labor her five man-power engine could shove her along at about a speed of four knots. Although the order of General Beauregard that she should not be submerged again had materially diminished the risk which experience had shown was overwhelming, yet the proposed expedition was nevertheless hazardous in the extreme.