When breakfast was eaten, forward and aft, all hands were piped on deck, and in less than ten
minutes M.L. —— was under way and threading the winding channels of a cliff-begirt Firth to the mist-masked waters of the North Sea.
As I picked my way forward to the little glassed-in cabin, which served the double purpose of navigating-bridge and wheel-house, I told myself that I was sure of two things—first, that the skipper, by birth, breeding, residence, and probably citizenship, was an American of Americans, and, second, that the chances were he would not admit that fact unless I “surprised him with the goods.” An Englishman will often mistake a Canadian for an American but a Yankee himself will rarely make that error. I was sure of my man on a dozen counts, and resolved to lay in figurative ambush for him.
I all but had him within the hour. We were clear of the Heads, and the skipper, having turned over to Mac, was trying to forget that imperious call o’ the sea he had chaffed ’Arry about by showing me round. He had explained the way a depth-charge was released, and was just beginning to elaborate on the functions of an old-fashioned lance-bomb.
“Now this fellow,” he said, balancing the ungainly contrivance and giving it a gingerly twirl about his head, “is a good deal like the sixteen-pound hammer which I used to throw at college.”
Knowing that the hammer-throw was not a Canadian event, I promptly cut in with “What college?”
“Minnesota,” he answered readily enough; adding, as I began to grin: “A good many Canadians go across there for the agricultural courses.” I resolved to await a more favourable opportunity before bringing my “charge” point-blank. It came that afternoon, when I stood beside him on the bridge as he bucked her through ten miles of slashing head-sea, which had to be traversed to gain the shelter of a land-locked bay beyond a jutting point, where we were to lie up for the night. He was telling me U-boat-chasing yarns in the patchy intervals between the demands of mal de mer and navigation, and one of them ended something like this: “Old Fritz—just as we intended he should—caught the reflection of the flame through his upturned periscope and, thinking his shells had set us afire, rose gleefully to gloat over his Hunnish handiwork. Bing! I let him have it just like that.”
The motion with which he flung the lemon he had been sucking as an antidote for sea-sickness could not have been in the least suggestive of what really happened; but that straight-from-the-shoulder, elbow-flirting, right-off-the-ends-of-the-fingers action was so like another motion with which I had long been familiar, that, with a meaning side-squint, I observed promptly:
“So you add baseball to your other accomplishments, do you? Did a bit of pitching, if I don’t miss my guess? How long have you played?”