"I calc'late," said the runaway captain, "that we just got wind of a submarine somewhere in these waters. The mate says she was spied from Nantucket lightship and that the news was relayed across to us. Maybe, however, she was just one of our own subs out on scout duty."
"Do you suppose she would attack us so near shore?" Belinda asked.
"Not knowin' the submarine's orders, I couldn't say, ma'am," declared Captain Dexter. "But whatever them undersea navigators are told to do, they do. To my mind they come nearer bein' marionettes with the strings pulled by their superiors at home than any human bein's since the world began. The blind obedience of Hannibal's hordes you read about, or that of the fanatic Mussulmen, never had nothing on these Germans. They've been trained for generations to let other folks think for 'em."
"Oh, no! Oh, no, Captain Dexter! We think for ourselves!" cried Belinda hurriedly.
"We, Miss?"
"Oh, I know I have a French name. But some of my people were German. I can sympathize—I do sympathize—with my mother's people."
"Yet you are going to nurse the French wounded?"
"But I sympathize with the poor poilus much more than with the Germans," she said, shaking her head. "I cannot feel bitterness for either side, Captain Dexter. But I hate the war itself."
"Then you are more nearly neutral than most of us," commented the old shipmaster shrewdly.
They paced the deck together while the throbbing ship drove on through the sea and the night, an unlighted bulk upon the face of the waters. The twinkling stars were all that lighted their way. Patches of the sea here and there were faintly phosphorescent; otherwise the heaving water was scarcely visible from the high deck.