"What is this? You are sick?"
Even while keeping his ears open and his eyes skinned, as he negotiated the Bird through a choppy cross-current, conning his course between the compass and the roller-chart-map, now illuminated by an electric bulb, his great shoulders shook with merriment as he saw the boy's head sink helplessly against the side of the fuselage, and his small body convulsed by throes of the sickness that is indistinguishable from the dismal malady of the sea. He had shut off the engine to shout to him. And in the sudden cessation of the tractor's racket, the deep organ note of the waters rolled in upon the hearing, mingled with the shrill piping of the wires and the ruffle of the freshening wind. As he switched on power once more, the broad white ray from the Bull Light leaped forth again and caught them as it ran eastwards over the tumbling white-crested billows, flinging a huge shadow of von Herrnung over the canvas-covered space of deck before him and showing him to the white-faced boy who had twisted round once more to look at him, as a featureless human torso shaped out of solid ebony with diamond specks for eyes and gleams of grinning ivory teeth.
"When are we going home? Why are we over the sea now?"
Von Herrnung shut off again for the luxury of hearing and answering:
"I have told you because we are going home. Our home is—Germany. You will not be an English boy but German, once I have got you there!"
The shrill cry of anger that came from the open mouth of the white face was lost to him in the necessity of switching on the engine. He nodded pleasantly to the white face and, in the darkness of his own shadowy visage, there was the glimmer of a laugh. Then he applied himself to other business, for the tide would turn in an hour, and then the wind might blow hellishly from the nor'-west. Flying lower, he knew his course the true one, for the white headlight and green starboard-lights of a big steamer pricked twinkling holes in the thick grey dusk to northward on his port beam. He told himself she was one of the Elbe Company's big bluff-bowed liners making from Newcastle for Hamburg Docks. The stern-lights of a sister-ship hailing from Grimsby, by her steerings, were also discernible in the mirk ahead, while the lights from her tiers of cabins made her look like a black water-beetle with golden legs, hurriedly scuttling over the sea. Following the course of the Hamburg-bound liners, even if one failed to make connection with one's accredited pilot, it would not be long before one picked up Borkum Riff Lightship and in due course, spiring silver grey against the pink-and-golden sunrise—the twin towers of Nordeich Wireless—marking the journey's end.
CHAPTER XXXIV
THE BROWN SATCHEL
The journey's end. A gust, tearing the mist that veiled the livid waters, showed the shadowy shapes of a procession of battleships, steaming southwards in single line.
You see the German assailed by the wind, now hard on the aëroplane's port beam, craning over, counting the speedlights passing diagonally underneath. Eight steel Leviathans, stabbing bright points of electric light through fog and funnel-smoke, with an effect of diamonds seen against a background of dull grey plush.