“Hif Hi could honly ’ave got me ’ands hon ’im!” groaned Willum Johnson, shaking his shaggy head sorrowfully.
But Belding had something very serious to say to Whistler Morgan as the party started to climb out of the wood to the top of the hill overlooking the port and harbor.
“No use talking about it, Morgan,” he said, “but I never took my money out of my clothes. I had a couple of pounds besides silver.”
“Too bad.”
“And that is not the worst. I had papers and letters. Some things in the letters from my father I wouldn’t want many folks to see—and especially a Hun. Father is going to take a big sum in cash with him on the Redbird when he sails for Bahia. Gold, Morgan—thousands and thousands of dollars in gold coin.”
“Whew!”
“Some prize for a Hun U-boat! And think of my folks and your sisters aboard the Redbird! It’s going to worry me until I know this scoundrel is captured and I get back my papers.”
CHAPTER VI—WORK AHEAD
When the four Navy Boys and their friends came over the summit of the hill behind the English seaport which the Zeppelin had so recently raided and where it had come to grief, the bomb-set fires in the town had become controlled. Even the conflagration at the point where the Zeppelin had fallen was now entirely smothered.
Fortunately neither the marine hospital nor the port admiral’s headquarters had been hit by the Hun bombs. The first named was crowded with refugees from merchant ships sunk by the Hun submarines or blown up by floating mines. Almost daily the remnants of the unfortunate crews were brought in; for by this time the Germans had begun shelling the boats as they escaped from sinking ships, striving to carry out their master’s orders, “that no trace be left” of such breaking of the international law agreed to long since by all civilized nations.