“So she will; she’d ride a deluge! A regular Noah’s Ark she is--that old self-bailer! But she ain’t a hummer for speed; they can’t get more than eight or nine miles an hour out of her, even at a pinch.”
“Ha! She wouldn’t be much good for chasing spy-boats then, if there are any around here, giving out information to enemy ‘subs.’” Sesooā’s eyelashes, brilliantly brine-gemmed, like the dog-seal’s mustache, shot a sidelong, scintillating glance at the massive old master mariner whose six feet two of broad stature leaned awry, like a crooked pillar, he having been lamed for life in a battle with the seas when the main-boom of his vessel fell on him and crushed his right leg.
“Well, now, I don’t suppose she would! No doubt there are busy spies among us. Bonfires have been seen blazing on some lonely spot of this very shore before transports passed, far out to sea! But it doesn’t seem as if they could do much signaling from boats and get away with it. The Coast Guard patrols keep a pretty sharp lookout.”
“Yes, we’ve seen them, starting out at sunset from the watch-tower--that old crow’s-nest over there on the rock.” Olive nodded her small, flower-like head, around which the red silk handkerchief was wound like an Arab’s turban, towards a human aërie perched upon a cliff of the neighboring island. “They patrol the shore in different directions till midnight, when other ‘surf-men’ go ‘on beat.’ They showed us their long, portable electric torches with which they signal the tower--and the tower signals the station--if they sight anything unusual.”
“Unusual! Good life! There ain’t anything atop o’ the ocean now, seems to me, that isn’t as unusual as wings on a whale or--or an iceberg at the equator!” Captain Andy’s big laugh exploded like a fog-gun. “Fancy seeing a gray-and-black submarine roll itself out o’ the water an’ go for you like a fork-tailed fish with a pulpit on its back, as I did last March, when I was taking that old coaster, the Susie Jane, back to Kennebunkport. Luckily, she was goin’ home light--meanin’ empty--an’ she could run like a ghost, that old girl, so she showed the sub her heels. We mightn’t have got off, though, for all that, only that a big destroyer, camouflaged till you couldn’t tell her from a flock of mermaids taking a sunbath on the surface, hove in sight, an’ the U-boat dove--crash dive, I reckon, if ever there was one!
“Gee! I couldn’t help speculatin’ as to what the finny creatures thought of her--she had some shiny fins, too, herself--as she lay on the bottom; whether it was a case of:
“‘The fishes all came around she,
And seemed to think as they scanned her log,
That she made uncom-mon-ly free!’”
The girls’ laughter echoed the old sea-dog’s briny chuckle.