“How about an aeroplane, sir?”
“Ha, an aeroplane!” With the exclamation the commandant’s face cleared, and for a moment he contemplated the idea as an inspiration of Providence. Then he shook his head.
“Impossible! Why, man, the Woodruff is two hundred miles on her way to Havana by now!”
“I could make that easily, sir; I’ve flown more than that before now.”
“And if you should miss her?”
“With a hydro, sir, I could come down alongside and be picked up.”
“Nonsense, boy!” the commandant snapped testily at his thoughtless enthusiasm. “I don’t mean that. Think, man, think. In any case, with a sea running like to-day’s, you’d be smashed to splinters long before you could ever be picked up. But what I mean is, suppose you should miss her entirely?
“From what I know of those things, your course is a matter of guesswork, anyway, and you have to keep checking up by landmarks all the time. Out at sea you’d lose yourself in ten minutes. And when you’ve missed her, how are you coming back? Two hundred out and two hundred back, to say nothing if another hundred or so lost in overhauling her and scouting around. Why, man, there’s not a machine in the service capable of making that. Certainly not without special preparation. No, sir; the chance is too desperate for me to order any man out on a thing like that.”
Rankin’s enthusiasm, fell with a cruel slump, and all the happy eagerness died out of his face. All these things he had overlooked in the first flush of his inspiration; and they were all true, too.
The older man, keen old veteran, with practised anticipation of all possible eventualities, had put his finger with unerring accuracy on each of the weak spots. Nor did he magnify their weakness at all. The thing was desperate, a forlorn hope.