Jaimihr Khan held the tip to his master's cigarette.
"Nothing, General Sahib."
"Very good. Come, Woodhouse; sorry to have kept you waiting." The general started for the double doors. Woodhouse followed. He passed very close to the Indian, but the latter made no sign. His eyes were on the burning wisp of paper between his fingers.
CHAPTER XVI
THE PENDULUM OF FATE
The next day, Thursday, was one of hectic excitement for Gibraltar. Focus of the concentrated attention of town and Rock was the battle fleet, clogging all the inner harbor with its great gray hulks. Superdreadnaughts, like the standing walls of a submerged Atlantis, lay close to the quays, barges lashed alongside the folded booms of their torpedo nets. Behind them, battle cruisers and scouts formed a protecting cordon. Far out across the entrance to the harbor, the darting black shapes of destroyers on constant guard were shuttles trailing their threads of smoke through the blue web of sea and sky. Between fleet and shore snorting cockleshells of launches established lanes of communication; khaki of the Rock's defenders and blue of the fleet's officers met, passed, and repassed. In wardroom and club lounge glasses were touched in pledges to the united service. The high commander of the Mediterranean fleet paid his official visit to the governor of Gibraltar, and the governor, in, turn, was received with honors upon the quarterdeck of the flagship. But under the superficial courtesies of fanfare and present arms the stern business of coaling fleet progressed at high tension. It was necessary that all of the fighting machines have their bunkers filled by noon of the following day. Every minute that the Channel up under the murky North Sea fogs lay without full strength of her fleet protection was added danger for England.
That morning, Captain Woodhouse went on duty in the signal tower. Major Bishop, his superior, had summoned him to his office immediately after breakfast and assigned him to his tasks there. Sufficient proof, Woodhouse assured himself, with elation, that he had come through the fire in General Crandall's library, tested and found genuine. Through this pretext and that, he had been kept off duty the day before, denied access to the slender stone tower high up on the Rock's crest which was the motor center of Gibraltar's ganglia of defense.
The small office in which Woodhouse was installed was situated at the very top of the tower—a room glassed on four sides like the lantern room of a lighthouse, and provided with telescope, a telephone switchboard, range finders, and all the complicated machinery of gunfire control. On one side were trestle boards supporting charts of the ranges—figured areas representing every square yard of water from the nearer harbor below out to the farthest reaching distance of the monster disappearing guns. A second graphic sheet showed the harbor and anchorages and the entrance to the straits; this map was thickly spotted with little, red, numbered dots—the mines. Sown like a turnip field with these deadly capsules of destruction were all the waters thereabouts; their delicate tendrils led under water and through conduits in the Rock up to this slender spire called the signal tower. As he climbed the winding stairway to his newly assigned post, Woodhouse had seen painted on a small wooden door just below the room he was to occupy the single white letter "D."
Room D—where the switches were, where a single sweep of the hand could loose all the hidden death out there in the crowded harbor—it lay directly below his feet.
Captain Woodhouse's duties were not arduous. He had as single companion a sergeant of the signal service, whose post was at the window overlooking the harbor. The sergeant read the semaphore message from the slender signal arm on the flagship's bridge—directions for the coal barges' movements, businesslike orders to be transmitted to the quartermaster in charge of the naval stores ashore, and such humdrum of routine. These Woodhouse recorded and forwarded to their various destinations over the telephone.