There is much speculation as to our destination. Is it the Mersey; the Clyde; Queenstown? Or France direct? Where are we now, anyway? Each noon, when the ship’s officers appear upon the bridge in a body, and perform mysterious sun-worshipping rites with sextants, the amateur experts look knowing, and refer darkly to probable latitudes and longitudes. One, diagnosing the present commotion of billows as a “ground-swell,” announces positively that we are just off the Bay of Biscay. Another, basing his conclusions upon the lengthening hours of daylight and the presence in our wake of certain sea-birds (herring-gulls, really) which he describes as “penguins,” announces confidently that we are now well within the Arctic Circle and will ultimately fetch a compass to Aberdeen, via Iceland. The battle rages between these two extremes: probably a carefully worked-out average of opinion would bring us somewhere near the truth. Gunners are quite familiar with the process: they call it “bracketing.” But it does not matter. The real fun will begin when we sight land, and the authorities upon the subject start in to identify it.
Another night has passed, and the question is settled. We have sighted land, and are informed that we may expect to make our port to-night. It is a breathless summer morning, and our great ships, which looked forlorn and insignificant amid the ocean wastes, appear to have swelled a good deal during the night. Certainly we form a stately pageant, for our escorting forces have been augmented. Destroyers are beating the bounds, nosey little patrol-boats thread their way in and out of the flotilla; silver-grey monsters float above our heads in the blue, occasionally descending to dip a suspicious nose towards the glittering wavelets. One of them dives down gracefully to within hailing distance of our own ship. It is a sublime moment. A thousand Stetsons are waved in welcome, and an earnest query—the spontaneous greeting of Young America to Old England—is roared from one of our portholes:
“Say, you got any beer up there?”
At the forward end of the boat-deck Boone Cruttenden and Miss Lane were leaning over the rail, in that confidential conjunction invariable in all young couples, whether in war or peace, on the last day of a voyage. Boone’s blue eyes surveyed the scene around him, and glowed.
“It makes you think a bit!” he exclaimed. “Here we are, thousands of us Americans, on board British ships, being convoyed into a British port by the British Navy. I wish the old Kaiser was here! And I wish some of our folks at home who are asking what the British Navy is doing in this war could be here too! They might learn then what is meant by the freedom of the seas!”
“Still,” complained the youthful seeker after sensation, Miss Lane, “I did hope that we might have seen just one little submarine.”
It is hard to refuse some people anything—especially American girls of twenty-three. Miss Lane’s wish was promptly gratified. A few hundred yards away, right in the middle of the convoy, there was suddenly protruded from the unruffled surface of the ocean a few feet of something grey, slender, and perpendicular—something which, after a hurried and perfunctory survey of the situation, retired unobtrusively whence it came. But not before it had been seen, and welcomed. For a brief minute shells burst around it, machine guns pattered imprecations over it, bombs descended upon it from the heavens above, and depth-charges detonated in the waters beneath. The convoy altered its formation, as prudence dictated. But nothing further happened. Calm reigned once more upon the face of the waters.
“Some little surprise for him, I guess,” said Cruttenden. “Lying on the bottom, and just came up for a look around! He did not expect to poke his periscope into this hornet’s nest, I should say. I wonder if anything hit him. I guess not: he was too slick. But you had your thrill right enough, Miss Lane!”
Miss Lane sighed rapturously.