“No, I was only thinking,” he replied.
Arriving in his room he tried to dismiss the incident from his mind. He still held the locket in his hand.
“One of the men dropped it during drill,” he assured himself. But instinctively his eyes traveled back to the locket as if it were a talisman. A feeling took possession of him that if he opened the locket the clew would be inside. But he controlled this feeling. It would not be honorable to open it.
He regretted that Lazar was away—on board the “Minnesota,” umpiring her target practice. If he were here he would tell him of his fears; then he could do as he thought best.
“I believe Syd is right,” he said half aloud; “this close application to work has gotten on my nerves. I take things too seriously. I hear a noise in the turret, and the ship being a regular sounding-board, it may have come from anywhere. Then why should I take for granted it came from the handling room? And then I find a small gold locket which I at once take as a sure sign that I am right in my conjecture.” Then his thoughts became more serious. “But if it was in the handling room, it shows that some one was there who had no business there, because when I called he did not answer. Could any one wish to injure the turret gear? Had Lazar an enemy?”
For hours that night he lay awake revolving in his mind all the possible phases of the incident and at last dropped into a troubled sleep.
Awakening the next morning he was in a state of mental depression. An overpowering desire to open the locket came to him which he could not refuse. He took it out of his bureau drawer and forced the tiny thing open. A girl’s face looked out at him. He studied it carefully, then closed the locket and threw it back into the drawer with a gesture of disappointment.
“I wonder what I expected to find there,” he said with a sarcastic smile. “My nerves are in about the same condition as those of a man before his first battle. I shall certainly be happy when it’s over.”
“Mr. Lazar is in the turret, sir,” announced O’Neil, putting his head in the midshipman’s mess room, while Phil was eating his breakfast, “and he’d like to see you.”
“We are to fire as soon as the umpires arrive, Mr. Perry,” Lazar informed him as the midshipman crawled down through the scuttle and stood by his side between the two big guns.