CHAPTER III.
AT SEA ON A DESTROYER.
The Beale, like the other vessels of her class, of which the Navy Department has built such numbers in recent years, was a long, low, waspish-looking craft. She was painted dark “war color,” with four squat funnels. On the foremost were three bands of yellow. A superstructure raised itself forward. Aft and amidships were business-like looking machine guns and torpedo-launching tubes. Altogether she was as wicked a looking instrument of war as one could imagine—well worthy of the sinister appellation—destroyer.
On the morning of the day on which she was to sail, Lieutenant Timmons, former gunnery officer of the Manhattan, did not step on board his speedy command till half an hour or so before sailing time. He found a scene of intense bustle and activity awaiting him. Last stores were being rushed on board, and the excitement that attends the last moments before the casting off of any vessel, from a mud scow to a battleship, was in the air.
From the Beale’s four stacks columns of black smoke were pouring, and white spurts of steam gushed from her escape pipes. She reminded one of an impatient horse champing his bit,—the bit in this case being the taut lines which held her to the navy yard wharf.
“Say, Herc, this is something like it,” observed Ned, as the two young men stood on the forward deck and watched the eager preparations going forward.
“Um, kind of like going to sea in a machine shop,” was Herc’s comment as he gazed about him at the wilderness of steel and mechanical contrivances. As Herc had said, the deck of a destroyer does not bear a material difference from the metal wilderness of a machine shop.
“Wait till we get outside,” grinned Ned; “if there are any whitecaps she’ll dance around like an empty bottle.”
“Woof!” grunted Herc, who still had a lively recollection of his first day at sea on the Manhattan. If that mighty Dreadnought was tumbled about like a plaything of the waves, what would happen to the little Beale? Herc dared not think about it.