The cutter was run in to the side of the towering hull of the superdreadnaught. The port ladder was down. A number of the watch on deck were strung along the rail, and the officers did not forbid their cheering the members of the wrecked tender's crew.
"Welcome home again, Mr. MacMasters!" was the greeting of the officer of the watch as the ensign led his party up the ladder.
"And mighty glad we are to get here," declared Ensign MacMasters.
The boys and men scrambled aboard and bade good-bye cheerfully though gratefully to the cutter's crew. The latter craft turned on her heel and shot away toward the distant coast.
Already the huge battleship was under way again. She was running with few lights. And where she was running was a question that even the members of the crew the boys put the question to could not answer.
It was generally known that Captain Trevor had received orders by wireless that had changed the plan of the cruise entirely. Instead of running back up the Atlantic coast, they had put to sea.
It was the next day before the Kennebunk's company in general knew that she was bound first for the Azores. That meant a European cruise, without a doubt. All the "old timers" were agreed upon that.
It was finally rumored about the ship that the report of the Kennebunk's cruise to the southward, and the score of her gun crews at target practice, together with her good luck in sinking a German submarine with the first shot ever fired from her guns, had so impressed the Department that she was to join the European squadron under Admiral Sims at once.
"There's a chance for you boys to see some real action," declared one of the masters-at-arms. "If the Hun comes out of Kiel, we'll be there to say 'How-do!' to him."
The boys who had been absent from the battleship for so long found, however, that the spiritual atmosphere of the crew was not much changed. There were still a lot of "croakers" as Torry called them.