The anchors were already coming up and the siren was blowing a warning as they gained the deck. Mart looked over the side for the boat in which they had made the trip from shore and which had been instructed to wait for them. But they had made the mistake of paying off their boatman for the outward trip, and, like many happy-go-lucky denizens of that port, he saw no cause for further labor while there was a shilling in his pocket. At all events, he was not there, and Mart cast a dubious gaze about the harbor. Tip, who had dashed off to obtain permission to remain aboard and had got it, came back and went into fits of laughter over Mart’s quandary. Nowhere was there a boat within signaling distance, and everyone was far too busy to give ear to Mart’s troubles. Nelson sought the officer of the deck and held a hurried consultation, and presently returned with word that, if they found a chance of sending Mart back, they would do so, but that it looked very much to the officer as if he would have to swim or stay aboard!
“Oh, well, that’s all right,” said Mart. “I’ll get Hail Columbia, of course, and be shot for desertion, but who cares? I say, Nep, when you get a chance see if you can persuade the radio shark to report me to the Q-4, will you?”
Nelson agreed and hurried off to his station, leaving Martin a bit worried and Tip chuckling. The Gyandotte turned and passed down the channel, signaling for the gate, and slid forth to the sea in the glory of a sunshiny November afternoon. Once past the mine fields she picked up her heels and went plunging southward in the teeth of a chill breeze dashing the foam from her bow and playing a tune on her aerial that sounded like the first efforts of a jew’s-harp performer. Although Mart watched and hoped until Kinsale Head was lost to sight, nothing offered in the way of transportation back to Queenstown, and, for that matter, and in spite of the officer’s promise, it is extremely doubtful if the Gyandotte would have slowed down to put him off. There was something very determined and objective in the cruiser’s manner this evening, and Nelson secretly believed that nothing short of a “moldie” was likely to stop her.
Mart accepted the situation at last and threw off dull care. Nelson had succeeded in getting a wireless back to the Q-4 explaining the cause of his desertion, and Mart declared that there was no more to be done. He was made welcome in Nelson’s mess and ate a good supper and was given a hammock and a place to swing it. Tip was not much in evidence that evening, but they learned the next morning that he had slept most comfortably on an improvised bunk in the ward room. The cruiser met a heavy sea shortly before midnight and performed quite a few fancy steps between then and morning, and Mart, who should have been inured to any sort of discomfort, confessed the next day that the motion had been so strange to him that he had not slept much!
What the Gyandotte’s original plan had been they never learned, for about nine that morning a messenger burst out of the wireless room and scurried to the bridge and the cruiser promptly showed signs of increased activity below decks and spouted blacker smoke and more of it and wheeled south-westward. And some three minutes later the whole ship’s company knew that somewhere a U-boat was “strafing” an American merchantman and that the little Gyandotte was off to see about it!
CHAPTER XXIII
THE CAPTAIN COMES ABOARD
Nelson and Tip and Martin leaned beside Number Four gun and explained to each other at great length and with much vehemence just why there wasn’t the ghost of a chance of the Gyandotte reaching the scene of action in time to take a hand. And then, having absolutely convinced themselves of that fact, they at once proceeded to prove just as conclusively that, being only sixty miles away when the message was caught, it would be the easiest thing in the world to arrive before it was too late. From which you will gather, and rightly, that all three wanted very much to have a finger in the pie and were too anxious and excited to be consistent.
The Gyandotte was shaking from stem to stern with the ardor of her engines and her two big stacks were spouting smoke. A good twenty-three miles an hour was what she was reeling off, and had the sea been a bit less unfriendly she might have bettered that by a fraction. What bothered the cruiser’s men more than anything else was the fear that another patrol boat or convoy, either nearer to the scene or faster, had picked up the wireless and would, in the words of Mart, “beat them to it.” There was one thing in their favor, however, which was that a low-lying mist shrouded the ocean, and they might be able to get within range of the U-boat before the latter took warning. They well knew how such jaunts usually ended. You pounded hard over sixty or eighty or a hundred miles and found either a lot of boats scattered over a ten mile radius or a merchantman just dipping her bows under for the final dive. Almost never did you glimpse the enemy. Of course it was a fine and satisfactory feat to rescue the steamer’s crew, but if only once in a blue moon you might get in a few shots at the Hun it would be a welcome variation!
In foretop cage the lookout strained aching eyes through the haze, and all about the rail glasses were leveled when, shortly after eleven, the Gyandotte drew near the indicated position. Half an hour before the final message had been caught from the attacked vessel: