“It can’t be a prairie fire, can it?” eagerly asked his brother, who, like most New Englanders, considered everything west of the Hudson River prairie.
“That’s Cleveland,” smiled the captain. “Take the glasses and perhaps you can make out the tall buildings.” But the smoky haze was too dense.
At sundown the ship’s pennant and the Stars and Stripes were hauled down, after which the big electric masthead lights were switched on, and then the red and green running lights, for starboard and port respectively.
With the setting of the sun a brisk breeze sprang up, whipping the water into cat’s paws, as white caps are called on the lakes, and the huge carrier began to pound, owing to its emptiness.
“I should think she’d break in two,” exclaimed Ted, the rising and resounding fall of the bow seeming, to his inexperience, a serious matter.
“Go aft and you’ll scarcely notice any motion,” explained the first mate.
The boys, however, preferred to stay in the pilot house, where the wheelsman allowed them to take turns in holding the vessel on her course, whenever the mate was absent.
“Where are we now?” asked Ted, as the boys came on deck early the next morning and discovered they were passing through a seeming water lane, flanked on both sides by planking which topped the water by some two feet.
“Going up the channel into the Maumee River,” answered a watchman, for the captain and his mate were on the bridge, occasionally calling sharp orders to the wheelsman in the pilot house below. “We’re in Toledo harbour, now.”
Too afraid they would miss something of interest, Phil and Ted barely touched their breakfast, despite its tempting fruit, flapjacks, and steak, and soon they were on deck again, watching the monster draws in the bridges swing open in answer to the carrier’s signals, and the ever-changing shore line of the city.