with such graceful, steady wheelings that despite its constant speed, it seemed to be soaring in lazy spirals like a sleepy gull. Under the two fliers in the machine lay the eastern entrance of Long Island Sound—the watergate to New York, with half-open jaws whose fangs were the guns of Fisher’s Island on the north and Plum Island on the south. Utterly harmless and innocuous seemed those two jaws, for not even the keenest eye could make out from above anything more savage than grassy mounds and daintily graded slopes of earth. Not even the sharpest glass could see within those pretty models in relief the dragons of 12-inch mortars that squatted in hidden pits sixteen in a group, or the sleek, graceful rifled cannon whose secret machinery could swing their thirty-five tons upward in an instant and as instantly withdraw them after they had spat out their half ton of shot.
Between the guarding jaws there was deep water—deep and beautifully green. One of the airmen spoke to the other, who was looking out to sea through his glasses. “There they go,” he said, nodding to indicate the water below.
Both looked. They looked into fifty feet of ocean, but their height made it but as a thick pane of dim green glass.
They saw things moving, deep down. They were sleek and gray, like small whales. But they had snouts longer and sharper than any whale that ever swam. Three of them there were, moving out to sea through the entrance, steadily, at about ten knots an hour.
The Wait for the Enemy to Strike
An hour passed. The men in the hydro-aeroplane descended, and their reliefs went up. They circled for an hour. Sometimes they drifted out to sea till the land was lost behind them.
The forts and the army headquarters caught a wireless from the air. The enemy fleet was approaching Block Island, said the message. The hydro-aeroplane was rushing homeward while it spattered its news into the air, for it was a slow machine, and swifter ones were over the fleet. The enemy had formed in columns, ejaculated the fleeing machines, with destroyers and light cruisers in advance, and the transports, gripped on all sides by armored ships,
were coming on in echelon formation, eight cable lengths, or 4,800 feet, apart.