In fact, every man who could get on deck was watching the tumbling seas for any sign of wreck or castaway. After all, as the minutes passed and nothing at all was descried where they had expected to find survivors of the Zeppelin, even the roughest members of the crew stopped growling about “the Heinies.”
It was one thing to give vent to the bitterness they felt against the Germans in speech, it was another thing to think of those fourteen or sixteen men struggling for so many hours in the icy water, and finally being drowned so miserably.
The hammock stowers had just stopped down the hammock cloths and the boys had got their mess gear preparatory for breakfast at 7:30 A. M. when there came a hail from the mast. One of the lookouts had descried something in the east. He pointed, and excitedly yelled his directions to the watch officer.
The Colodia’s engines began to speed up. When she went her full thirty-odd knots her hull shook as though she would rattle to pieces. The life of a destroyer in such work as the Colodia had been doing since she was launched, can be only a few months. Commander Lang was already talking to his officers of the time when she would have to be scrapped.
Meanwhile her record would amply repay the Navigation Bureau for building her. There was no doubt of that.
Now she pounded away at top speed for the point where the lookout had seen something afloat on the tumbling seas. All through this trip, not only the destroyer’s commander, but many of the more thoughtful members of the crew, had half suspected a German trick.
It would not be outside of possibility, or probability, for the crew of the Zeppelin brought down ashore to send a rescue ship to sea into a trap arranged with the usual German ruthlessness. It was possible that there had been no second Zeppelin at all, but that the Colodia was steaming at her best pace to a rendezvous with a U-boat prepared to torpedo her.
Tricks quite as vile had been played before by the Hun. Commander Lang, with his binoculars to his eyes, got the spot on the sea that the lookout had observed and kept his glasses trained there. It certainly was not a periscope they saw, yet it might be some wreckage held together for the special purpose of masking a periscope.
The gun crews were at their stations and the men handling the depth bombs were ready on either side, and fore and aft, to drop the deadly explosives if it was found that the Colodia had run into a trap.