The Narcissus had been out of Pernambuco harbor four days before Mr. Reardon, upon comparing the sun—which all are agreed rises in the east—with the direction in which the ship was headed, and then extracting the cube root of the resultant product, and subtracting it from the longtitude and latitude of the Cape of Good Hope, decided that there must be something wrong with Mr. Schultz's navigation. So he spoke to Mr. Schultz about it, and was laughingly informed that they were traveling on a great circle. Thereupon Mr. Reardon remembered that at sea a ship traveling on the arc of a great circle, for some mysterious reason repudiates the old geometrical theorem that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. He recalled that vessels plying between San Francisco and Yokohama describe a great circle which brings them well up toward the Aleutian Islands, So he was satisfied with the explanation, this being his first voyage into the South Atlantic anyhow; but he continued to observe the sun each morning, and still the vessel's head held far to the south. A suspicion that all was not as it should be slowly settled in Mr. Reardon's head, and though he said nothing, he used his ejes and ears. A dozen times a day, as the ship rolled steadily south, he was tempted to take down the speaking tube and confide his suspicions to the master, confined in his state-room by reason of deep—but not serious-knife wounds. Each time he was on the point of yielding, however, he remembered that Mike Murphy had called him a renegade—so he refrained.
The installation of the wireless plant and the presence aboard the ship of Herr von Staden had failed to arouse his suspicions the first day out. True, the wireless could not have been connected with the electric light plant below without Mr. Reardon's knowledge and consent, but when he asked Mr. Schultz about it the latter replied that Cappy Ricks must have changed his mind about installing wireless on the Narcissus, for he had cabled to the agents of the charterers in Pernambuco to have a wireless plant and a competent operator waiting for the vessel upon arrival. It was Mr. Schultz's opinion that the owners had evidently arrived at the conclusion that it was wise to have a wireless aboard during war times. Personally, Mr. Schultz approved of the innovation.
So did Terence Reardon, for that matter. He found the new wireless operator a charming fellow, possessed of talents far superior to those of the young men who ordinarily pound the brass at sea. Indeed, after the second day out, Mr. Reardon would have been heartbroken had anything happened to that wireless. For Herr August Carl von Staden sat at the key almost continuously, eavesdropping on the war news, and Mr. Reardon never came to the wireless room that the operator did not have some news of an overwhelming British defeat!
As the voyage proceeded, however, and Mr. Reardon's mind grew a trifle uneasy, reluctantly he began to view Herr von Staden and the wireless with apprehension. He asked the affable operator how much the Marconi company charged the Narcissus for his services and the rental of the wireless plant, and von Staden, momentarily stumped, replied that the tariff was two hundred dollars a month; whereupon Reardon knew he lied, for the charge is one hundred and forty. The German, realizing instantly that he was not on the target, added: “That is, for a first-grade operator and a plant like this. Of course we furnish cheaper operators and less powerful plants, Mr. Reardon.”
“Oh! So that's the way av it?” the chief replied, and immediately went to his state-room for the purpose of thinking it over. Eventually he came to the conclusion that all was not as it should be, but that, nevertheless, it was no affair of his. He was paid to obey signals given him from the bridge.
“'Tis no business av mine, afther all,” he soliloquized. “For why should I be puttin' dogs in windows? He's paid to navigate the ship, an' didn't Cappy Ricks tell me to mind me own business? And yet, there's something wrong in this ship. I feel it in me bones.”
He felt it with a force that was almost violent when Mr. Schultz called down through the speaking-tube late one afternoon and told him to put her under a dead-slow bell. That meant they were practically heaving to, and steamers only heave to at sea in fine weather when they have reached a certain longitude and latitude and plan to keep an appointment. On the instant there was a strong odor of rat in Terence Reardon's engine room, but his “Very well, sir,” contained no hint of his surprise and suspicion. He gave his orders to the firemen to bank the fires, and when this had been done he informed his engine-room crew that they might all go on deck for five minutes and get a breath of fresh air. Nothing loath, they scrambled up the steel stairway—and the instant the last man was out of earshot Terence Reardon sprang to the speaking-tube to whistle up the skipper in his room.
Now, undoubtedly the cool and calculating Herr August Carl von Staden had been carefully trained to take into consideration, when planning his strategy, every conceivable contingency that might possibly arise. It is probable that the German secret service never turned out a more finished graduate than Herr von Staden; but the fact remains, nevertheless, that there are certain contingencies over which no human being has control. One of these is Newton's law of gravitation; another, an equally immutable law to the effect that water will seek its own level; a third, the vindictiveness of an outraged Irishman; and a fourth, the very natural tendency of any man, not excepting Mr. Terence Reardon, to be profoundly surprised and intensely curious when certain phenomena, which we shall now proceed to explain, take place in the engine room where he is chief.
Michael J. Murphy, having only the day before again essayed the task of whistling up the engine room, and having, by reason of the ball of cotton waste with which the tube had been plugged by the first assistant engineer, again failed to receive the courtesy of a reply from any one, had, to put it mildly, been annoyed.
“Very well, my bullies,” he soliloquized as he hung up the tube, “you wouldn't speak to me when I wanted to speak to you; so now the first time one of you wants to speak to me I'll hand you a surprise, and I'll hand it to you right in the mouth.” And forthwith Michael J. had carefully poured down the speaking tube the contents of the basin in which he had just made his morning ablutions! He longed to do something nasty, and he succeeded admirably.