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THE LAST OF THE “PENGUIN”
South of Chiloe Island, on the Chile coast, there lies a little harbour which shall be nameless.
Here, six days later, the Penguin was hurriedly coaling—on the Spreewald’s dollars.
It was at eight o’clock on a glorious and summerlike morning that she put out of this place with her bunkers only half full, her stores just rushed aboard cumbering the deck, and a man swung over the stern on a board, painting her name out above the thunder and pow-wow of the screw.
Blood would never have wasted paint and time in the attempt to alter the name of his ship had it been the English he dreaded now. As a matter of fact, word had come to the chief official at the little nameless port above indicated that the Germans were out looking for a fifteen-hundred-ton cable boat named the Penguin, grey-painted and captained by a master mariner named Michael Blood.
The bleating of the infernal Spreewald had been heard all over the Pacific. Sprengel’s bad language was following it. The Minerva had communicated by wireless with the German gunboat Blitz, lying at the German island of Savaii, in the Navigators. The Blitz had spoken to the cruiser Homburg, lying at Tongatabu; from Tongatabu it had been flashed to Fiji, and from there to Sydney. From Sydney it went to San Francisco, reaching the City of the Golden Gate in time for the morning newspapers; from there it passed in dots and dashes down the west American seaboard to Valparaiso and Valdivia.
Added to all the turmoil, the cable company whose cable had been broken smelled the truth and were howling for the Penguin’s blood.
Marconi waves from Valparaiso had found the German cruiser squadron far at sea, and they had started on the hunt.