Nelson missed Martin horribly at first, and was a bit mopey as long as the old Gyandotte stayed at the base. Fortunately for his spirits, that wasn’t long. She followed the submarines through the booms just two days later, picking her way between anchored mines as daintily as any fine lady avoiding mud puddles, and, wigwagging a last signal to the forts, headed south. Nelson saw the hills of Queenstown fade into the brown and purple shadows of evening and finally disappear. Later the cruiser altered her course and in the first full darkness the light of Fastnet flashed at them from starboard. Nelson slept finely that night, for the Gyandotte rolled comfortably and creaked and rubbed her seams and was quite home-like again.
In the morning they were out of sight of land, lounging over a calm gray-blue sea in company with three destroyers. At daylight the four ships scuttled into line and held a deal of conversation by means of gay signal flags. The lookouts had hourly spasms, for that summer the waters around Great Britain and France for three hundred miles away from the coasts were thick with floating débris, and, with sufficient imagination on the part of the lookout, an empty lard pail makes an excellent periscope a mile away, while an abandoned mattress at two miles is as fine a conning tower for practice purposes as soul could desire. Those destroyers were new at the game and filled with enthusiasm, and half a dozen times that day the sharp bark of three-inch or four-inch guns added to the joy of life. When it wasn’t inanimate wreckage that made a lookout gasp and shout incoherently it was a porpoise. A porpoise appearing suddenly near the bow suggests just one thing in the world, and it isn’t “Porpoise!” It’s “Torpedo!” The Gyandotte was theoretically blown to bits at least five times that day by playful porpoises! What distressed the Gyandotte’s secondary battery crews was that while the destroyers were forever letting fly at something, or, at least, preparing to, the Gyandotte’s place at number three in the formation presupposed her to be safely guarded and gave no excuse for potting mythical periscopes.
That was a wonderful day, though. Aside from imitation U-boats, there was other excitement. Once they sighted and bore down on a big four-masted schooner from which trailed a long veil of black smoke. One of the destroyers slipped out of column and had speech with the schooner and later reported to the cruiser: “American ship Annie B. Wells, Baltimore, in cargo. Struck a mine yesterday evening and started a fire in some turpentine casks. Says she has fire under control and will be able to make Havre without assistance.”
Later two mine sweepers wallowed along under convoy of a diminutive chaser painted with more colors than she had tonnage. Again it was a big Italian freighter, high-sided, rusty-red in spots and squares, ambling along for Bordeaux. But by night the highway was empty and the four ships slid westward into a gentle sea while a soft breeze blew from the south and whispered of Spanish orange groves. Nelson was always glad he experienced the North Atlantic under the conditions he found that day and night, for never again, for as long as he roamed it, was it so kindly and bland.
In the morning, five hundred miles west of Land’s End, they awoke to green seas that buffeted the bow under the steady push of a southeast wind and to a sky that alternated sun and squall. The destroyers rolled merrily and the spindrift flew aft as far as their second stacks. There was more signaling about noon and at two o’clock smoke was sighted ahead and the four ships picked up their pace and plowed on into an anxious group of transports and convoys. The transports were big passenger liners and their decks were solid brown streaks where boys in khaki waved and cheered, three and four deep behind the rails, as the newcomers sped amongst them.
That was a fine sight to Nelson. Leaning from the Gyandotte’s Number Four gun port, he waved back, and cheered a little, too, but was rather too chokey to make much noise. Lewis, first shellman, who leaned at Nelson’s elbow, didn’t try to shout. He just grinned all the time, and blinked his eyes, and kept muttering, over and over: “They’re the boys to do it! Good old kids from the U. S. A.!” Nelson wondered at the tier on tier of faces, blurred by distance, that looked down from the many decks of the big liners. He couldn’t see the expression of any individual countenance, for the Gyandotte didn’t get close enough for that, but it seemed to him that a sort of composite and kindly grin beamed over the water from every one of the troopships. Now and then, when the wind allowed, he could hear the cheering, steady, continuous, and always broad-brimmed campaign hats fluttered like brown leaves in a breeze.
“They’re the boys! Good old kids from the U. S. A.!” He found himself repeating Lewis’ slogan in time to the song of the ship’s engines. He felt very warm about his heart and a trifle damp of eye, and was proud and haughty and wouldn’t have given a plugged nickel for the whole German Empire just then.