“The patient has roused,” said the nurse, “and the doctor would like to have you come.”
Silently we passed through the bare corridors and up the wide stairs. As we entered, the doctor sat beside the man on the narrow iron bed. I looked with eager inquiry at the face. It shone with normal intelligence. We had conquered again.
“I have just been telling Mr. Joslinn of your finding him, and of his being here,” said Forrester. “Now he is ready to talk.”
Dorothy greeted him and began the talk, while I wrote feverishly as Joslinn spoke in a low steady tone. Yes, he had gone out fishing. He had left a little shooting box, whither he had run down alone on Monday, and taken the knockabout out. The reason no one had known of his disappearance was that there was no one to care. He had no family and had retired from business, made little trips now and then, so his landlady and friends simply thought of him as away. I chafed at the time that he took in coming to the point. If he only reached it, his long description of his acts was all a part of the story. Then came the crisis:
“I was out ten or twelve miles from shore, just about sunset,” said Joslinn, “when I saw a battleship coming up the coast. She was the only ship in sight, and she passed within a short distance of me, so near that I felt the last of her wake. I never saw a finer spectacle than that boat as she swept on.” He paused.
“Go on, go on,” I said anxiously.
“I knew it was the Alaska,” he resumed, “because I had seen her lying for weeks below my apartment house in Riverside Drive. I watched her as she went on triumphant. It was the time of evening colors. Out across the water came the bugle call, which I had heard so often as I hung over the parapet of the Drive at nightfall. The marine guard and the crew stood mustered and facing aft. The flag fell a fluttering inch, and at the moment of its fall the band crashed into the full strain of the Star Spangled Banner. I stood with bared head, and my eyes filled as the great ship bore proudly on. Just as the last note of ‘Oh long may it wave’ came to me, like a bursting soap bubble, like a light cloud scattered by the wind, she disappeared without a sound! Not so much as the splash of a pebble in the water could I hear.”
“Do you mean to say,” cried Tom, in utter amazement, “that all those thousands of tons of armored steel, those great guns in their huge turrets, that terrific mass of metal, disappeared without a sound?”
“Absolutely without a sound,” answered Joslinn gravely. “The Alaska disappeared with less commotion than a ring of tobacco smoke in the air. It utterly destroyed one’s belief in the reality of anything in this world!”