Navy boys to the rescue : Answering the wireless call for help

By Halsey Davidson

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Title: Navy boys to the rescue
        Answering the wireless call for help


Author: Halsey Davidson

Release date: January 15, 2024 [eBook #72723]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: George Sully and Company, 1919

Credits: Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images made available by the Library of Congress)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NAVY BOYS TO THE RESCUE ***




NAVY BOYS TO THE RESCUE




[Illustration: With her smoke trailing behind her and the guns
barking in rapid succession, the Colodia raced toward the scene.]




NAVY BOYS TO THE RESCUE

OR

ANSWERING THE WIRELESS CALL FOR HELP

BY

HALSEY DAVIDSON

Author of “Navy Boys After a Submarine,” “Navy
Boys Chasing a Sea Raider,” etc.

NEW YORK

GEORGE SULLY AND COMPANY




BOOKS FOR BOYS.

NAVY BOYS SERIES

By Halsey Davidson

12mo. Cloth. Illustrated.

NAVY BOYS AFTER A SUBMARINE
    Or Protecting the Giant Convoy

NAVY BOYS CHASING A SEA RAIDER
    Or Landing a Million Dollar Prize

NAVY BOYS BEHIND THE BIG GUNS
    Or Sinking the German U-Boats

NAVY BOYS TO THE RESCUE
    Or Answering the Wireless Call for Help

NAVY BOYS TO THE BIG SURRENDER
    Or Rounding Up the German Fleet

(Other volumes in preparation)

GEORGE SULLY & COMPANY
PUBLISHERs--New YORK

Copyright, 1919, by GEORGE SULLY & COMPANY

Navy Boys to the Rescue

Printed in U. S. A.

NAVY BOYS TO THE RESCUE




NAVY BOYS TO THE RESCUE

CONTENTS

       I The Friendly Grip
      II The Hun in His Fury
     III The Missing Man
      IV The Paper Chase
       V The Trickster
      VI Work Ahead
     VII On the Grey Waters
    VIII The Yankee Way
      IX “Schmardie”
       X The Terror of the Seas
      XI Action
     XII Wireless Whispers
    XIII The Super-submersible
     XIV The Mirage
      XV Combing the Sea
     XVI Stations
    XVII The Spitfire
   XVIII “Ghost Talk” Again
     XIX A Difference of Opinion
      XX Too Late Again
     XXI The Mystery Message
    XXII The Wireless Call for Help
   XXIII The Sea Pigeon in Sight
    XXIV The Blind Chase
     XXV A New Convoy




NAVY BOYS TO THE RESCUE




CHAPTER I--THE FRIENDLY GRIP


“And yonder’s a snap-dragon; and that’s a buttercup. That is feverfew
growing over there; and there’s foxglove right there in that swampy
place. Those are cowslip blossoms--the English cowslip is different from
ours.”

“Whew!” blew Phil Morgan, unpuckering his lips and breaking off the
haunting little air he had been whistling. “I wouldn’t believe you knew
so much about the _flora_ of this strange land, Frenchy.”

“Oi, oi! Is it Flora he’s bragging about? Then Frenchy’s got a new
girl!”

“Sounds to me,” mumbled Al Torrance, who lay along the flower-bestrewed
bank with his hat over his eyes, “that he was discussing the fauna of
the country--with his snap-dragons, and fox’s gloves, and cows
slipping.”

“Ignoramus that you are!” scoffed Michael Donahue, otherwise “Frenchy.”
“I am talkin’ to Whistler. _He_ knows something and appreciates the
profundity of me learnin’.”

“Ye-as,” drawled Torrance, otherwise “Torry,” as their leader began
droning away, his lips puckered again. “He knows just enough to whistle
the same awful tune for an hour. What is it, anyway, Phil?”

“The tune the old cow died on, I guess,” suggested Ikey Rosenmeyer.

“It’s a tune Phoebe was playing on the piano a good deal the last time
we were home,” said Whistler with some gravity. “Wish I’d hear from the
folks again. I am worried about Phoebe.”

He spoke of his eldest sister, who during the last few months had not
been well. Although, like many brothers and sisters, Philip Morgan, by
his chums usually called Whistler, and Phoebe had their differences, now
when far from home, “the folks” seem nearer and dearer than ever in his
mind.

Philip Morgan lay with his chums on a bank beside a tiny trickle of
water called a brook in that shire, although it was nothing more than a
rill. They were high up on “the downs,” overlooking a port in which the
American destroyer _Colodia_ lay at anchor amid a multitude of naval
vessels of three nations.

Over the sea a thick haze, on land the yellow sunshine, so welcome when
it is seen in England that it seems more beautiful than elsewhere. The
boys had forty-three hours’ shore leave, and for that brief space of
time they desired, as most sailors do, to get just as far away in spirit
and in surroundings from the ship as possible.

They had tramped into the country the day before, spent the night in
four wonderful beds in an old inn that might have harbored some of Sir
Francis Drake’s men at the time of the Armada, and were now due at the
wharf in a few hours.

Life aboard a destroyer or an American submarine chaser in foreign
service is not very pleasant if it is exciting. The space for sleeping,
for instance, on these fast vessels is scarcely greater than that
assigned to the crews of submarines. As Ikey Rosenmeyer, who possessed a
riotous imagination, had said at the inn:

“Oi, oi! sleeping in a real bed again is better than bein’ at home in
Ireland, and Frenchy says that’s heaven ’cause his mother came from
there. Why, it is better’n heaven! You could spread out your legs and
wiggle all your toes without havin’ the master-at-arms down on you like
a thousand of brick.”

Frenchy, in a dreamy and poetic mood, not infrequent when the romantic
Irish blood in his veins was stirred, was gazing off over the sea at the
fogbank.

“Think of it,” he murmured, “How many hundred an’ thousan’ of ships have
sailed out of this harbor into just such a fogbank as that--”

“And never came back,” interrupted Torry. “Some tough old gobs, the
ancient British seamen, boy.”

“‘Tough’ is right,” chuckled Frenchy, his poetic feelings exploded. “And
they haven’t got over it yet. They’ve got old-timers in the British Navy
now that can remember when the cat was used on the men’s backs,
reg’lar.”

“And every British sailor had tar on his breeches--that’s why they used
to call ’em ‘brave British tars,’” scoffed Torry. “Can it! These English
chaps are all right. They aren’t much different from us garbies.”

“Is _that_ so?” exclaimed Ikey, whose sharp eyes allowed little to
escape them. “What kind of a deep-sea crab do you call this comin’ down
the road right now, I want to know?”

Phil Morgan paid no attention to what his mates were talking about. The
peaceful English landscape charmed his eye.

Down the gently sloping road which, after a mile or so, led into the
Upper Town, as it was called in distinction from the port, or Lower
Town, the stone cottages--some almost hidden by vines--stood
sentinel-wise along the way.

One rather larger house was a schoolhouse. Nothing at all like the
schoolhouses in America in appearance. But Phil Morgan knew it was a
schoolhouse, and that the school was in session, for he had seen the
children filing in not long before and their voices had been raised in
song just before Frenchy had begun to note the different flowers.

The excited chatter of the other boys finally aroused Morgan from his
contemplation of the peaceful scene. In the other direction, toward
which his mates were looking, the outlook was not so peaceful. At least,
not at one particular spot in the hedge-bordered road. It did not need a
sailor’s weather eye to see that the situation was “squally.”

The “deep-sea crab,” the presence of which Ikey had announced, proved on
further examination to be two individuals, not one. But they were
closely attached to one another and the way they “wee-wawed,” as Torry
said, from one side of the road to the other, certainly would lead to
the supposition that intoxication was the cause of such tacking from
hedge to hedge.

“And one of ’em’s one of our own garbies,” declared Frenchy. “Isn’t that
a shame?”

“But look at that big feller, will you?” gasped Ikey. “Why, he must
weigh a ton!”

“You’re stretching that a bit, Ikey,” admonished Whistler, breaking off
in his tune to speak. “But he is a whale of a man.”

“Biggest garby I ever saw,” breathed Torry, amazed.

It was the big fellow only, it proved, who was partly intoxicated. He
was a British sailor. His companion was both perfectly sober and
perfectly mad. His face was aflame as he and his unwelcome companion
approached the four Navy Boys.

The big fellow gripped him by the collar of his blouse, and it was
utterly impossible for the Yankee lad to get away from “the friendly
grip.”

“Talk about this ‘hands across the sea’ stuff,” murmured Torrance.
“Here’s a case where it is going too far. We’ll have to rescue a brother
garby, won’t we?”

“Believe me, that’s a reg’lar mamma’s boy Johnny Bull has got his grip
on, too,” chuckled Frenchy.

“Hush up, you fellows,” advised Phil Morgan, with sudden interest. “I
believe I know that fellow.”

“Not Goliath yonder?” cried Ikey Rosenmeyer. “I didn’t know you sailed
with such craft.”

“The other chap,” Morgan explained.

“If he’s a friend,” began Torrance, commencing to roll back his sleeves
suggestively.

“Sit down!” advised the older boy, sharply. “We’d look nice piling onto
that big fellow, wouldn’t we?”

“And the whole of us couldn’t handle him,” murmured Frenchy.

“You never know till you try,” said the optimistic Torrance.

“This is a case for strategy,” stated Morgan. “Now, don’t any of you
fellows lose your heads.” Then he hailed the two tacking along the road:

“Ahoy! Hey, you!”

The American lad who was held in durance by the British sailor looked up
and showed something besides the red flag of annoyance in his
countenance.

“I say, you fellows!” he cried. “Help me out of this, will you?”

At this the huge British seaman for the first time appeared to see the
four boys on the bank beside the road.

“My heye!” he bellowed, standing still, but wagging his head from side
to side in a perfectly ridiculous way. “My heye! ’Ere’s a ’ole bloomin’
ship load of ’em. Ahoy, me ’earties, let the heagle scream!” and he led
off in a mighty cheer that awoke the echoes of the heretofore peaceful
countryside.

Frenchy and Ikey, in great glee, sprang up and cheered with him. But the
expression in the countenance of the giant’s captive caused the two
older Navy Boys to smother their amusement.

“That’s the way he’s been going on for four hours--and more,” groaned
the captive. “Why! he hung on to my collar all the time we were eating
dinner up there at that inn. Made the barmaid cut up his victuals for
him. Paid her a shilling for doing it.”

“Say, is her name Flora?” Ikey asked, at once interested. “Is that the
girl Frenchy was just talking about?”

But Torrance quenched him with a hand on his mouth. The situation of the
Yankee youth in that giant’s hands seemed more serious than they
supposed. The grip of the big hand never relaxed.

“’Ere we are, all together, me ’earties,” rumbled the giant. “Hi’m glad
to know yuh. Hi’m Willum Johnson, ’im that ’ad a barrow hin the Old Kent
Road before the war. Hand jolly well knowed Hi was to the perlice,”
confessed the man frankly.

“Hit allus took six bobbies to take me hin, lads. Hand now _one_ o’ the
bloomin’ hofficers makes me walk a chalkline, haboard ship. Hi tell yuh,
ain’t this war terrible?”

“That’s what it is,” admitted Frenchy, staring at the man with wide-open
eyes.

“Come over here and sit down--and tell us all about it,” Whistler Morgan
said, beckoning.

“Hi’ll go yuh!” declared the giant seaman. “Hand so wull me friend--one
o’ the nicest little Yankees Hi ever come across.”

The strange Yankee sailor was too much disturbed by his situation to
look very closely at Phil and his comrades. The viselike grip of the
semi-intoxicated giant on his collar was the principal thing in the
victim’s mind.

Almost as soon as the British seaman sprawled on the grassy bank his
head began to nod and his eyes to close.

“He’s going off,” whispered Al Torrance.

“You’d think he would,” returned the victim of the over-friendly seaman,
in the same tone, “if you could have seen him eat and drink. You never
saw such an appetite! He had everybody at that inn standing around and
gaping at us.”

It was evident that the young sailor felt his position deeply. He was a
nice looking fellow, very neat in his dress, and with delicate features.

“How did you come to fall in with him in the first place?” Al asked, as
the giant began to snore.

“Why,” explained the stranger, “I started to walk down to the port
because it was so pleasant. He was sitting outside the place where I
stopped for tea and muffins after I’d walked a way. I had no idea he was
so--so far gone. But he must have been drinking for days,” casting a
disgusted glance at his close companion whose hamlike hand never
relaxed. “He learned where I was going, and he at once got a grip on my
collar. He hasn’t let go since--I never saw such a man!” concluded the
stranger morosely.

“His hand will drop off when he gets sound asleep,” Whistler said
comfortingly. “Then we’ll sneak.”

“Don’t you believe it!” whispered the other in vast disgust. “He fell
asleep after dinner, but his fingers are just clamped on to my collar.
When I tried to wriggle away, he awoke. See!”

He tried to pull away from the friendly grip. At once the British seaman
half aroused; but his fingers never relaxed.

    “William Johnson his my nyme--
      Seaman’s my hav-o-cation!
    Hi’m hin this war for a penny-bun--
      Hand so is hall my nation!

Hoo-roo!” mumbled the gigantic sailor, and fell asleep again.

“Now, what do you know about that?” demanded the victim of brotherly
love. “And me--Well, I’m due aboard the _Colodia_ to-day.”

“The _Colodia_!” exclaimed the four Navy Boys in chorus.

None of them wore a designating mark, for they had on their white
service caps. But the _Colodia_ was the Yankee destroyer to which
Morgan, Torrance, Donahue and Rosenmeyer belonged. The four gazed on the
stranger with increased interest at his statement.

“Say,” Whistler asked, “aren’t you George Belding? Didn’t you and your
folks come up to Seacove from New York five or six years ago and spend
the summer in the old Habershaw House? I’m Phil Morgan. We lived right
next to the Habershaw House.”

“My goodness!” exclaimed the strange youth, sticking out his hand to
grab Whistler’s. “And your father, Dr. Morgan, and mine went to college
together. That’s what brought us up to Seacove. Sure! My mother wasn’t
well. We all got fat and sassy up there. I declare I’m glad to see you,
Phil Morgan!”

“Me long lost brother!” whispered Frenchy to the others. “Have you still
got the strawberry mark upon your arm?”

But Al Torrance was quite as serious as Whistler and the
newly-introduced George Belding.

“Say, fellows,” Al said, “if he’s going to be one of us on the old
destroyer, we’ve got to help him out of this mess.”

“Go ahead! How?” demanded Ikey.

Al produced a pocketknife which he opened quickly. It had a long and
sharp blade. He approached the snoring giant on the bank.

“Oi Oi!” gasped Ikey Rosenmeyer. “Never mind! Don’t kill him in cold
blood. Remember, Torry, it’s Germans we’re fightin’, not these
Britishers.”

“What are you going to do?” demanded Belding.

“Cut your collar away,” said Torrance. “That’s about all you can do. If
he wants to hang on to the collar, let him.”

“It’ll spoil his shirt,” objected Ikey.

“Sh! Go ahead,” murmured Belding. “It’s a good idea. I couldn’t get at
my own knife and do it, with him hanging on to me so tightly.”

“Take care, Al,” advised Whistler. “And you other fellows stand aside.
Be ready to run when George is free.”

His advice was good. The giant seaman still snored, but it would not
take much to rouse him.

The five boys were now so much interested in the attempt to get Belding
free that they took no heed of anything else. So they were all shocked
when a chorus of steam whistles and sirens suddenly broke forth from the
port below them. A gun boomed on the admiral’s ship. Pandemonium was let
loose without warning.

“Oh, my aunt!” groaned George Belding, “what is _that_?”

“Willum Johnson” awoke with a start and a grunt, and, sitting up on the
bank, demanded of everybody in general, “’Oo’s shootin’ hof the bloomin’
gun?”

But Whistler and Torry had whirled to look out to sea. They had heard a
similar alarm before. Out of the blue-gray fogbank over the sea, and
high, high up toward the hazy sky, whirled a black object, no bigger at
first than a bird. But how rapidly it approached the port, and how
quickly its outline became perfectly clear!

“A Zep, boys!” cried Al Torrance. “There’s a raid on! That’s a German
machine, sure’s you are a foot high!”

“Are you sure?” murmured Belding, who had been dragged quickly to his
feet by the giant.

“Hit’s the bloomin’ ’Uns--no fear it ain’t!” ejaculated the big British
seaman. “Ah! There goes the a-he-rial guns.”

Splotches of white smoke sprang up from several shoulders of the hill
that overlooked the port. The watchful coast-defense men were not
unprepared; but the enemy airship, rapidly growing bigger in the boys’
eyes, winged its way nearer to the land, boldly ignoring the shells sent
up to meet it.

“She’s going to drop her bombs right over the town!” gasped Whistler,
grabbing Belding, who was nearest.




CHAPTER II--THE HUN IN HIS FURY


Wheeling up from behind them on the higher shoulder of the hill, an
airplane spiraled into the upper ether, in an attempt to get above the
huge machine that had, two minutes before, appeared out of the sea fog.
But this attempt to balk the Hun, like those of the anti-aircraft guns
in their emplacements about the port, promised little success.

The fog had made the close approach of the huge Zeppelin possible, and
now the rumble of the motors of the enemy machine could be heard clearly
by the four Navy Boys on the hillside and their two companions.

“Oh, cracky!” gasped Al Torrance. “She’s coming!”

“And right this way!” gulped Ikey Rosenmeyer. “If she drops a bomb--”

“Good-night!” completed Frenchy in a sepulchral tone.

“Let’s get under cover!” cried George Belding, striving again to get
away from the “friendly grip” of the British sailor, Willum Johnson.

“Hold on!” commanded Whistler Morgan. “No use losing our heads over
this.”

“If one of those bombs lands near us we’ll likely lose more than our
heads,” grumbled Torry.

“Wait! If we run like a bunch of scared rabbits, we are likely to run
right into danger rather than away from it.”

“Those horns down there say ‘Find a cellar!’” whispered Frenchy.

“Oi, oi!” added Ikey. “There ain’t no cellars up here on this hill yet.”

“Keep cool,” repeated Whistler. The other boys were used to listening to
him, and to following his advice. He was a cautious as well as a
courageous lad, and his chums were usually safe in following Philip
Morgan’s lead.

These four boys, all hailing from the New England coast town of Seacove,
had begun their first “hitch,” as an enlistment is called, in the United
States Navy as apprentice seamen, several months before America got into
the Great War, and some months before the oldest of the four was
eighteen.

They had now spent more than a year and a half in the service, and their
experiences had been many and varied. After their initial training at
Saugarack, the big Naval training camp, the four chums, with others of
their friends and camp associates, had been sent aboard the torpedo boat
destroyer, _Colodia_, one of the newest, largest, and fastest of her
type in the United States Navy.

The _Colodia’s_ first two cruises were full of excitement and adventure
for the four Navy Boys, especially for Philip Morgan; for he fell
overboard from the destroyer and was picked up by the German submarine
U-812, and his experiences thereon and escape therefrom, are narrated in
the first volume of this series, entitled: “Navy Boys After the
Submarines; Or, Protecting the Giant Convoy.”

The second of the series, “Navy Boys Chasing a Sea Raider; or Landing a
Million Dollar Prize,” relates the experiences of these four friends on
a longer and even more adventurous cruise of the _Colodia_. Under the
command of Ensign MacMasters, the Navy Boys as members of a prize crew,
took the captured _Graf von Posen_ into Norfolk; and their experiences
on the captured raider made a dramatic and exciting story of the
day-by-day work of the boys of the Navy.

Through their kind friend Mr. Alonzo Minnette, who was holding a
volunteer position at Washington in the Navy Department, the four chums
obtained a chance to cruise with the superdreadnaught _Kennebunk_, a
brand new and one of the largest of the modern American fighting
machines launched during the first months of the war. The _Colodia_
having gone across the Atlantic while the boys were with the captured
raider, they with Ensign MacMasters were very glad to join the crew of
the huge superdreadnaught in the interim.

The third volume of the series, “Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns; Or,
Sinking the German U-Boats,” took our heroes into perils and adventures
which they will long remember, for they included work in the gun turrets
of the _Kennebunk_, a wreck that threatened the lives of all four chums,
a mix-up with German spies, and finally a record trip across the
Atlantic by which the huge superdreadnaught arrived at the rendezvous in
time to take part in a naval engagement which put a part of the Hun navy
to flight.

Now the four friends were back on the _Colodia_ which was doing patrol
duty off the English and French coasts, and convoying troop and food
ships through the submarine and mine zones. The base of the squadron of
which the destroyer was a member was at this English port, on the
hillside above which Philip Morgan, Alfred Torrance, Michael Donahue and
Ikey Rosenmeyer have been introduced just as they met the American
sailor lad, George Belding, and his doubtful friend, the giant
ex-coster, “Willum” Johnson.

“Keep cool,” Whistler urged again, as the Zeppelin sailed inland. “There
is no use running----”

His further speech was smothered by a terrific explosion from the port
below. A lurid burst of flame, stronger than the sunlight, shot into the
air where a wharf and warehouse had been. Smoke followed, instantly
hiding the mark the bomb from the Zeppelin had found.

This daylight raid was the boldest the Germans had attempted. The enemy
must have supposed the fog was over the land as well as the sea, or he
would never have risked the attack.

Again a nerve-racking explosion following a flash of light that seared
their eyeballs, and the middle of the town--the market place--was
shrouded by thick smoke.

“The dirty ’ounds!” bawled the British seaman, suddenly finding his
voice. “The dirty ’ounds! They’re killin’ women an’ kids down there!
Lemme get my bloomin’ ’ands on ’em!”

He dropped George Belding’s collar at last and would have started in a
clumsy run down the hill. It was Whistler who stopped him, with a
two-handed grip on the Englishman’s collar now.

“What good would you be down there, man?” the American youth demanded.
“You’d only get yours, too, maybe. Those bombs are falling two or three
thousand feet.”

“Argh!” growled Willum Johnson, shaking his huge fists in the air, his
face raised to the coming Zeppelin. The growl was animal-like, not
human. “Argh! Lemme get ’em----”

A third bomb exploded. A big house below them, half way down the
hillside, disappeared. It was as though a monstrous sponge had been
wiped across that spot and erased the building!

“Oh! Look out! Look out!” sobbed Frenchy, and covered his eyes with his
hands.

His chum Ikey shook beside him, but could not close his eyes to the
horror.

The Zeppelin was curving around, evidently determined to make for the
sea and the fogbank again. Beneath it, on either side, even above it,
the bursts of white smoke betrayed the explosion of aerial shells the
defense guns were firing at the enemy machine. And all the time the
single British airplane on duty was climbing skyward.

“If that thing can only get above the Zep.!” murmured Al Torrance.

Suddenly the airplane darted toward the sea, in a sharp slant upward.
Bravely the pilot sought to cut off the Zeppelin’s escape into the
fogbank out of which she had burst five minutes before.

Guns from the Huns’ airship began to bark. They were firing on the
British plane. The latter’s guns made no reply as she continued to mount
into the upper air.

The course of the Hun machine was changed again. In approaching the
hills surrounding the port the Zeppelin was brought much nearer to the
earth.

The ship was indeed a monster! Swung landward to escape the mounting
airplane, the Zeppelin, its motors thundering, came closer and closer to
the spot where the American sailor boys were standing.

“Bli’me!” roared the apparently fast-sobering Britisher. “They are goin’
to drop one o’ them blarsted buns on our bloomin’ ’eads!”

“‘Buns’ is good,” groaned Al. “_Here she comes!_”

It seemed as though the great airship was directly above them. The boys
actually saw the bomb released and fall!

There was no possible mistake on the part of the brutal crew and
commander of the Zeppelin. They knew very well the bomb would fall upon
no warship in the harbor, or any possible storage place of munitions. Up
here on the hillside were nothing but little dwellings and--the
schoolhouse!

As though it were aimed at that house of instruction, the great shell
fell and burst! If teacher and pupils had descended into the cellar at
the first alarm of the horns and guns, it would scarcely have availed to
save them. The shot was too direct.

One moment the green-tiled, freshly whitened walls of the schoolhouse
stood out plainly against the yellow and green landscape. Then, with a
roar, it was wiped out and a huge balloon of whitish brown smoke took
its place.

The explosion shook the air and the earth. The group of Navy Boys were
struck to the ground. Only the gigantic figure of Willum Johnson
remained erect, and he wavering on his feet and mouthing threats at the
enemy.

“They killed ’em! They killed ’em!” he bawled, when he could be heard.
“The women an’ the kids!”

He started on a staggering run, up the road this time, as though trying
to follow the wake of the fast descending Zeppelin. The British airplane
was above the enemy machine and was raking it with machine gun fire.
Some damage had been suffered by the Zeppelin. She was descending, out
of control.

But Morgan ran down the hill, toward the bombed schoolhouse--or the
place where it had been. The other boys followed him. Frenchy was
frankly crying, and Ikey clung to his hand as though afraid to let go.




CHAPTER III--THE MISSING MAN


The smoking ruins of the schoolhouse and its outbuildings were now
visible. The five boys came to the edge of the crater which marked the
effect of the explosion of the bomb from the Zeppelin.

From somewhere appeared an old man in a smock, and his hard,
weather-beaten face writhed with an emotion unspeakable. His
outstretched shaking hand pointed to the spot where the schoolhouse had
stood.

“I saw her face at the pane but the moment before. She waved her hand to
me,” he said.

His awestricken tone made the American lads tremble. A younger man with
his face bloody from a wound above the temple appeared beside the boys
with the same startling suddenness.

“’Twas his gran’darter. She teached here,” whispered the wounded man. He
laid hold upon the old man. “Come away, Daddie,” he said. “Come away wi’
me now.”

A woman screamed up the road just as Phil Morgan spied a motor ambulance
with a huge red cross on it, mounting from the port. Rescue parties were
afoot already. There really was nothing the American lads could do at
the wrecked schoolhouse. The shrill cry of the woman above them caused
all five to turn to look.

“’Tis down! ’Tis down!”

The Americans were just in season to see the Zeppelin crumble like a
huge concertina and dive toward the earth. Fire broke out amidships.

The landing of the Hun airship took place far up on the open hill, in a
pasture above the road. The boys could see the gigantic British seaman
toiling toward the Zeppelin. He was the nearest person to the burning
airship as it came down, although there were other men running over the
downs toward the spot.

“Cracky!” exclaimed Al Torrance to Belding, “your big chum is going to
fight them single handed!”

“Come on, fellows!” Whistler cried, starting away. “We can do no good
here. But those Germans must not escape!”

“No chance!” exclaimed Ikey. “They won’t even try. If the English hung
every member of the Zep crews they caught the Kaiser would soon have
hard work finding men to man the bomb-droppers.”

“Right you are,” Frenchy agreed. “The baby-killers!”

He was still sobbing. Right then and there the Navy Boys would have been
glad to take vengeance on the crew of the Zeppelin. The first man was
descending out of the burning machine. The Americans saw the huge
British sailor spring upon him.

“There was no _kamerad_ stuff,” Torry observed. The two locked and went
to the ground, disappearing in a wallow.

At this sight the boys uttered a cheer and leaped the hedge beside the
road. They tore up the hill as fast as they could run. A shot sounded,
and the spurt of flame and smoke marked the appearance of a farmer with
a shotgun. He, however, was firing at the balloon of the Zeppelin, not
at her crew.

From the machine a second figure dropped to the ground, and just as the
farmer fired his second barrel. This second member of the crew darted
away from the burning wreck and disappeared into the furze that covered
the summit of the hill.

“That Heinie’s running away, Whistler!” cried Al, but kept on himself
with the younger boys toward the airship.

Belding looked at Whistler. “Shall we let him beat it?” the former asked
the Seacove boy.

“Not on your life!” Whistler cried. “Come on! If we’re not a match for
one Heinie--we two--then----”

They turned directly up the hill, and in two minutes were over the
ridge. Instead of the smooth pasture land they had just crossed this
side of the hill was of barren soil and covered with boulders. To follow
a trail here was scarcely possible, but the two American boys soon found
traces of the Hun, where he had broken through the bushes on the summit.

“We don’t know this country,” Whistler said cautiously. “There may be
lots of hide-outs around here.”

“He doesn’t know it, either,” Belding declared.

“We don’t know that,” the other boy said sharply. “They say every square
foot of England was mapped by German spies before the war. Somehow, that
Heinie slipping away the way he did, looks fishy.”

“How so?”

“They always give up--these Zep crews. They know the worst will happen
to them is internment. Running away like this will put him in dead
wrong, if he’s caught,” added Whistler.

“I suppose that’s so, Morgan,” agreed Belding. “But maybe the poor fish
was scared out of his five senses.”

“Let Frenchy tell it, these Heinies don’t own five senses,” Whistler
chuckled. “He says they haven’t got more than two.”

“Uh-huh. That might be. Maybe this fellow ran for quite another reason.”

“What’s that?”

“Because he is a spy.”

Whistler digested that idea slowly. It looked reasonable. He knew that
it was said sometimes the bombing machines dropped spies on British
soil.

“We’d better be careful, then,” he said at last. “The chap may be
armed.”

“No ‘maybe’ about it. He’s sure to be,” Belding said vigorously. “We’d
look nice getting shot ashore here by a Heinie. What would our folks
say?”

“By the way, George,” Whistler Morgan said, “how are your folks? Do you
hear from them? When did you come across the pond?”

“One at a time!” exclaimed Belding. “Lil writes me--you remember my
sister, Lilian? She was all legs and lanky yellow hair when we were up
there in Seacove that summer.”

“I remember her,” Whistler admitted. “She’s a pretty girl.”

“Huh! Think so? She isn’t a patch on your sister, Alice, for looks. And
that reminds me--have you heard the news?”

“I’ve not heard much news from home lately, if that is what you mean,”
said Whistler. “Guess my mail’s been delayed.”

“Why, say! let me tell you about it. First of all, I came across two
months ago and have been on father’s yacht, the _Sirius_--sub. chaser,
you know. Course it isn’t called the _Sirius_ any more. He let the Navy
Department have it, you know.”

“Why, George!” gasped Whistler, “I didn’t know you folks had a yacht.”

“Father owns a slew of freight ships. It’s on one of his ships that they
are all sailing next month for Bahia.”

“That’s in South America,” said Whistler thoughtfully.

“Yes. Father thinks there is going to be the biggest kind of commercial
opportunity in Brazil and other South American states after the war. The
Germans will be in bad down there. Father is going to establish a branch
of his business in Bahia, and stay himself for a year or more--perhaps
until the war’s end.”

“You don’t say!”

“Yes, I do, Country!” laughed Belding. “And Lil and mother are going to
take your sisters with them.”

“Wha--what’s that you say?” Whistler ejaculated, in blank amazement.

“I guess you haven’t heard from home lately,” Belding said. “Didn’t you
know anything about it?”

“Not a word.”

“They’ll sail on the _Redbird_. That’s one of father’s biggest ships.
You see, Doctor Morgan was in New York and came to see us, so Lil wrote
me. And he said how much he desired to send your sister Phoebe off on a
long sea voyage. So they made it up, right there and then. Your sister
Alice is going, too, and my mother will chaperone the crowd. Tell you
what, Phil, if it wasn’t for this man’s war, I’d like to drop everything
here and go with them. Some sport! What wouldn’t we do to those girls
when the _Redbird_ crossed the equator!”

The boys had been standing in the lee of a big rock while thus
conversing in low tones. Suddenly Whistler saw a movement on the
hillside below them. A man dived behind a boulder, disappearing like a
flash.

“There!” whispered Whistler. “I saw him! Did you?”

“I saw something,” admitted Belding. “Wish that big Johnny Bull friend
of mine was here.”

“He’d be a bigger mark for a pistol ball--if the Hun is armed--than we
make!”

“Good-_night_!” breathed Belding. “I don’t wish to consider myself as
any such target.”

Nevertheless the two lads did not hesitate to approach the spot where
they had caught a glimpse of the escaping German. Whistler Morgan, at
least, had been in many a perilous corner since he had joined the Navy
as apprentice seaman, and he was not likely to show the white feather
now. As for George Belding, Whistler did not know much about him; but
when they were some years younger and George had visited Seacove, he
seemed to be as courageous a boy as one would wish to meet.

The boys on shore leave of course were without arms of any description.
And, as had been suggested, the German might be armed. The Americans
took no chances in their search for the enemy.

There was a big boulder just ahead, and at Whistler’s suggestion the two
climbed this and, lying flat on their stomachs, wormed their way to the
summit, from which a better view of what lay below on the side hill
could be obtained.

“Sh! That’s the fellow!” hissed Belding, seizing Whistler’s arm almost
at once.

The Seacove boy saw the olive-gray figure at the same moment. The two
lay and watched the German making himself comfortable in a little hollow
between two rocks some rods below their station. The man had evidently
scrutinized all his surroundings and believed himself to be unobserved.

“What’s he got in his bundle?” whispered George Belding.

“Got me. I saw he had that when he dropped from the burning Zep.”

The two had not long to wait to learn just what the man carried with
him. Being assured that he was alone, he dropped the bundle and
proceeded to untie it. Then he began to remove his flying clothes.

“A disguise,” were the words Belding’s lips mouthed, and Whistler
nodded.

The latter was making a thorough scrutiny of the German’s face. Whether
they captured the man or not he proposed to know him again if he met
him--no matter where.

He was lean-faced, with a prominent nose, and eyes that Whistler thought
were gray or a pale blue. He wore a tuft of black whisker on his chin
and a little moustache. This, and the way he wore his hair--long and
shaggy--made him look anything but Teutonic.

The boys beheld the fellow, stripped of his outer garments, don loose
trousers, a farmer’s smock, and a cap. Although he did not look English
in the face, he was dressed much as the boys had seen the neighboring
agriculturists and drovers dress. He even put on a pair of heavy boots
instead of the laced shoes he had worn in the Zeppelin.

“That chap means business,” whispered Belding. And then he suddenly
grunted almost aloud, for out of his bundle the spy produced a pair of
automatic pistols which he proceeded to hide under the loose blouse he
now wore.

“He is prepared to fight,” agreed Whistler under his breath. “We can’t
capture him without help, George.”

“You’ve said something, Whistler! One of us will have to go for help.”

“Which shall it be--you or I?” asked Phil in the same cautious tone. “Al
and the others would be glad to be in on this.”

“And my friend Johnson, from the Old Kent Road. He’s sober now and worth
two ordinary men in a scrimmage,” and Belding smiled broadly.

“Shall I go?”

“All right,” agreed Belding. “But be quick. And if I’m not here, I’ll
drop papers to show my trail. I’ve plenty of old letters in my pocket to
tear up.”

“Good idea,” said Whistler, preparing to slide feet first down the rock.
“Don’t get into trouble with that fellow, George.”

With this admonition he left the other American lad and started back up
the hill on the other side of which the huge airship had fallen to the
earth.




CHAPTER IV--THE PAPER CHASE


Once again on the summit of the hill Whistler Morgan could overlook all
the sloping pastureland bordering the pleasant road he and his friends
had been strolling upon when the Zeppelin appeared; and he could view
all the port and the harbor, as well.

It was no peaceful scene now. The bombing of the port had done no damage
to the shipping; but there were fires burning in three places in the
town, as well as on the site of the schoolhouse and where the Hun
airship had fallen. No second Zeppelin had appeared from the sea; but
the guarding airplanes had now gathered like vultures, floating high
above the port.

Whistler did not wish to look in the direction of the schoolhouse site a
second time. The shock of the destruction of all those innocent children
was too fresh in his mind for him to be willing to view the spot closer.
The crowd gathered about the steaming ruins were made up for the most
part, probably, of the bereaved parents and friends of the victims.

In the opposite direction, up the road, where the twisted wreck of the
Zeppelin lay, the American lad could distinguish the figures of some of
his friends. He hurried in that direction, and as he drew near he saw
that the crowd here gathered was very much excited. The man who had
previously used the shotgun was waving his weapon threateningly, and
some of the other people of the countryside were shouting at the group
of gray-green figures that was plainly the crew and officers of the
wrecked airship.

One of these Germans--a big fellow--showed marks of a serious beating.
He was the fellow, Whistler was sure, that Willum Johnson had attacked.

The giant British seaman and the _Colodia_ boys were right up in the
forefront of the threatening crowd facing the Germans. But Whistler saw
that there was a British Naval officer and several constables in charge
of the prisoners.

“Remember, my man, that you wear the King’s uniform,” the British
officer was saying to the giant as Phil approached. “I shall have to
report your attack upon this prisoner. They all gave themselves up--”

“And they were all armed--every one of them,” put in Frenchy, _sotto
voce_.

The officer glared at him; but it gave Willum Johnson courage to add:

“Who says they didn’t try to escape? Hi got the first bloke hout of the
machine, Hi did. Then hother folks run up an’ ’twas hall over.”

“I saw _one_ run,” Frenchy declared, looking boldly at the Naval
officer.

“So did I, sir,” added Al Torrance.

“You mean that one of these Germans tried to run after the seaman here
made his unwarranted attack upon them?” asked the officer sharply.

“Bill jumped on the first fellow out of the machine,” Al said with
confidence. “The second chap ran up over that ridge and disappeared.”

“Nonsense!” exclaimed the officer. “Here are fourteen--all that were in
the crew, so their commander says.”

“And Hi wouldn’t believe him if ’ee swore hit hon a stack of Bibles as
’igh as a ’ouse!” cried the Coster.

Just at this juncture Whistler Morgan interfered. He said very
respectfully to the Navy officer:

“Beg pardon, sir, but the German that escaped is over behind the hill
now. One of my chums and I chased him, and----”

“Do you mean to tell me there were fifteen members of the crew of this
Zeppelin?”

“I’m not sure of that. He may not have been an accredited member. I
think he is a spy brought over for some purpose and dropped here.”

“You know where he is?” demanded the officer.

“Yes, sir. My friend is watching him now. He had a bundle with a
disguise and pistols in it. You’d never know him for a German the way he
looks now.”

“Horray for Whistler, fellows!” shouted Al Torrance. “Let’s all go after
the Heinie!”

The boys from the _Colodia_ started away from the wreck at once, but the
British Naval officer called after them:

“Hold on, my lads. I can’t have you going alone on such a mission. If
there really is a spy at large----”

“He’s at large, all right, sir,” Morgan interposed. “Give us Willum
Johnson and we’ll get the fellow, sure.”

“Aye, lad!” cried the giant sailor. “We’ll git ’im, dead or alive.”

“You see that you get him _alive_, Bill,” said the officer, sternly. “No
mistake about that. I’ll have to explain your pounding this fellow all
up.”

“Bli’me!” said Johnson, “Hi didn’t begin to treat ’im rough enough.”

But this was under his breath and after he had turned away to follow the
four Navy Boys. The officer did not hear the comment.

By Whistler’s advice they all stooped at the summit and crept over the
ridge among the bushes and rocks, endeavoring to keep their bodies out
of the view of anybody below on the hillside, where Phil had left George
Belding and the German spy.

“Hit’s a fair chance, lads, they seed me,” remarked the British seaman.
“But mebbe they’d spot muh for a bloomin’ cow!”

“Where’s that other fellow, Whistler?” asked Al. “Belding, did you call
him?”

“Yes. You ought to remember him, Torry. He was all one summer at
Seacove. And say! his folks and my folks are in the most wonderful
mix-up--wait till I get a chance to tell you all about it!”

The party dodged from rock to rock and from one clump of brush to
another. Soon Whistler was rather surprised that they did not spy George
Belding. He was not lying on the big rock where Whistler had left him.

“W’ere’s your chum, lad?” asked Willum Johnson.

“I guess the spy must have moved. George would follow him,” Whistler
said with confidence.

“But how shall we know which way they have gone? We’re no Red Indians on
the trail,” Frenchy observed.

“Oi, oi!” added Ikey Rosenmeyer. “It’s near sunset, too.”

“Don’t be afeared, lad,” advised the big sailor, wagging his head.
“Nothing will bite yuh around ’ere.”

Whistler then explained that Belding had agreed to drop bits of paper by
which they might follow his trail, and this encouraged them all. Near
the rock and the hollow in which Whistler himself had seen the spy
change his clothes they found no sign of either Belding or the Hun.

The latter must have carried his bundle of clothing with him when he
moved from this spot. It was some minutes before Ikey’s sharp eyes
descried the first handful of torn paper which George Belding had
dropped.

“Here’s the trail!” he shouted.

“Hush up, youngster!” commanded Al Torrance. “Want to tell everybody all
you know?”

“And it wouldn’t take him long at that--unless he stuttered,” said
Frenchy, pounding Ikey between the shoulders.

“Oi, oi! I forgot,” explained Rosenmeyer, hoarsely. “Let up, Mike
Donahue! Who are you taking for a bass drum?”

“Come on now, fellows,” Whistler said, leading the way. “Keep together
and try to make as little noise as possible. We don’t know how near that
spy may be.”

He had already found the second bunch of torn paper. Torry, walking
close behind him, asked: “Will you know that German if you see him,
Whistler?”

“Sure. He’s dressed like one of these farmers or drovers. But he’s got a
goatee and a little moustache. He doesn’t look German at all.”

“You lads just point ’im hout to me!” grumbled Willum Johnson, walking
next in line after Torry.

They got into a piece of woods after a little, finding that the paper
trail led along a well defined path. Whether the German spy knew, or did
not know, this part of England, he seemed to have a direct object in
view, if George Belding’s trail was a thing to judge by.

This wood was nothing like the ordinary woods the American boys were
used to around Seacove. It was cleared out like a grove, all the dry
limbs lopped off the trees and stacked in certain places for firewood,
and even the hedges thinned out for the same purpose.

“Why,” Al Torrance said, “we’d burn all that stuff as rubbish, wouldn’t
we, Whistler?”

“And _that_,” agreed his chum, unpuckering his lips, “is why firewood at
home is worth twenty dollars a cord.”

“Wot’s that?” gasped Willum Johnson. “Four pun a cord? My heye! hit’s no
wonder there’s so many millionaires in Hamerica. Ye _’ave_ to be a
millionaire to live there--eh, wot?”

“Right you are, man,” said Al. “Hi! where’s the next bunch of paper,
Whistler?”

It seemed that the trail of paper fragments stopped abruptly. The party
scattered through the wood, searching thoroughly for yards on either
side of the path.

“Perhaps he ran out of paper,” suggested Frenchy.

Whistler, who was ahead, suddenly came to the edge of a hollow--a steep
fall of some ten or a dozen feet. He parted the bushes and peered down
into this hole. Then he uttered a startled cry that brought the others
to the spot on the run.




CHAPTER V--THE TRICKSTER


“Easy, boy!” Al Torrance advised, hearing Whistler’s cry of surprise.
“Want to give us away to that Heinie if he is in hearing?”

But Whistler Morgan, after his startled exclamation, burst through the
bushes and hurried down the bank of the hollow. A figure lay at the
bottom--a figure dressed in a blue smock, loose trousers, heavy shoes
and a cap. The cap was pulled down over the person’s face, and he was
rolled sideways so that Whistler could not distinguish a feature.

There was, however, something besides these points that had caused
Whistler’s ejaculation and excitement.

“Cracky!” gasped Al, remembering the description his chum had so
recently given of the disguise the German spy had donned. “Is that the
fellow? And who triced him up that way? Looks like somebody has been
ahead of us.”

The other two Navy Boys and Willum Johnson joined Al Torrance at the top
of the bank. They, too, saw the huddled figure below over which Whistler
was standing.

“Oi, oi!” exploded Ikey characteristically. “They got him tied up ready
for the spit yet.”

“Is that the bloomin’ spy?” growled the big British seaman. “Let me get
me ’ands on ’im.”

“Easy, Bill,” said Al Torrance. “You know what that brass hat said about
your bringing the spy in alive.”

“Hi wouldn’t kill ’im--now I’m cooled hoff,” the ex-coster declared.
“But ’ee won’t get awye from hus--no fear!”

Whistler had not joined in this conversation. He turned the body over
and Frenchy uttered an ear-piercing yell:

“What do you know about that?” he added. “It’s George Belding!”

“Say!” growled Al. “They could hear you on the _Colodia_. If that spy is
here----”

“He’s got far enough away by this time!” Whistler exclaimed, swiftly
getting out his knife to cut Belding’s bonds.

The latter was gagged most cruelly with a stick tied between his jaws.
So far had the stick been thrust into the lad’s mouth that the corners
were cracked and bleeding. Whistler cut away his friend’s gag first of
all.

“The nasty villain!” cried Willum Johnson. “’Ow did ’ee do hit?”

“Are you hurt, George?” demanded Morgan.

“I’m bumped some,” admitted the other American lad. “But I’m hurt most
in my dignity,” and he tried to grin.

“The scoundrel cut your lips with that stick,” said Al Torrance. “Where
did he go?”

“Ask me something easier. I only know he went--and if he kept on the way
he started he’s a long way from here by now.”

“But where are your clothes?” demanded Whistler Morgan.

“What do you think?” cried Belding. “The dirty Heinie is wearing them!”

“Good-_night_!” gasped Frenchy. “Is it a U. S. sailor he wants to be?”

“Tell us!” commanded Whistler earnestly.

“Why, you see,” Belding responded, getting up now after having rubbed
his chafed ankles, “it was like this: Just as soon as you got out of
sight, Morgan, the Heinie began to travel. I started right after him,
and he came down here into this wood. I believe I wasn’t very smart--or
he was smarter than I. Guess that is pretty well proved isn’t it?” and
Belding smiled wryly.

“I had in mind all the time that he had two pistols under this smock he
wore, so I tried not to attract his attention. You can see I failed in
my attempt.”

“How did it happen?” Whistler asked.

“I stepped on a stick. I suppose that was what put him wise to me.
Anyway, the stick cracked. I jumped behind a tree. I could see him ahead
of me in the path and he did not turn his head or apparently hear the
crackling stick. But he must have been sharper than I thought.”

“These ’ere ’Uns,” declared Willum Johnson, “is hup to all sorts o’
tricks.”

“He was a trickster, all right,” agreed George Belding, with much
disgust in his tone of voice. “I followed right along like the idiot I
was, and all of a sudden the fellow disappeared. I thought he had moved
faster, so I went faster.”

“And then what?” asked Al.

“I came up to the tree he was hiding behind, and he stepped out and
stuck one of those pistols of his right under my nose!”

“What d’you know about that?” marveled Frenchy.

“Never had that happen to you, did you?” asked George Belding. “It’s the
funniest feeling--believe me! The muzzle of the pistol was under my
nose, but I felt it right at the pit of my stomach! I couldn’t do a
thing, of course. You see fellows disarm an antagonist in moving
pictures without getting hurt, but I wasn’t going to take a chance. I
know he would have blown my head off.”

“What did he do to you then?” asked Ikey Rosenmeyer, his eyes big with
interest.

“He drove me before him down into this hollow. He had got rid of his
bundle somewhere. I didn’t see him drop it. His uniform, you know,
Morgan.”

“I see.”

“And down here he made me strip off my clothes--even my shoes. I tell
you, I just _hate_ that Heinie.”

“That’s wot yuh wants to do,” growled Willum Johnson. “’Ate the ’Un or
yuh can’t lick ’im proper.”

“No fear,” said Belding, nodding. “I have stored up a proper hate for
them now. This fellow is the meanest of the bunch. He got out of the
duds I am wearing as slick as you please--keeping me under the muzzle of
his gun all the time.”

“Sounds just like a wild west movie, doesn’t it?” suggested Ikey.

“Nothing so good--don’t think it,” growled George Belding.

“Anyhow, he got these things off and made me get into them. He put on my
uniform meanwhile--quick as a cat he is. You got a good look at him,
didn’t you, Morgan?”

“I’d know him again,” declared Whistler grimly.

“So would I,” said Belding, shaking his head threateningly. “But what
good is that? I bet we never set eyes on the scamp again.”

“My heye!” exclaimed the big British seaman, “let’s ’unt ’im down.”

“He’s had half an hour’s start,” said Belding, hopelessly. “And he was
going some when he started--believe me! We’d never catch him.”

“’Ow do you know?” returned Willum Johnson. “Let’s send these little
nippers,” indicating Frenchy and Ikey, “back to the bloomin’ port for
’elp, hand then scour the ’ole bloomin’ country.”

“We’d better all go back and report,” Whistler Morgan said seriously.
“We fellows can’t be much longer ashore, Mr. Johnson. We’re due at the
dock pretty soon.”

“Bli’me!” exclaimed the man. “Hi’ve overstayed my leave already. Hin for
a penny, hin for a pun, say Hi!”

But Whistler argued with him, and he became more reasonable. Now that
the fumes of alcohol were out of his head he was rather a tractable
fellow.

“There is going to be trouble over this,” Al Torrance prophesied. “We’d
better give the alarm in a hurry. That Hun must be captured before he
does some damage.”

“He can go almost anywhere in a Yankee uniform--if he speaks English,”
said Whistler.

“Oh, he speaks it all right,” said Belding.

“Hif Hi could honly ’ave got me ’ands hon ’im!” groaned Willum Johnson,
shaking his shaggy head sorrowfully.

But Belding had something very serious to say to Whistler Morgan as the
party started to climb out of the wood to the top of the hill
overlooking the port and harbor.

“No use talking about it, Morgan,” he said, “but I never took my money
out of my clothes. I had a couple of pounds besides silver.”

“Too bad.”

“And that is not the worst. I had papers and letters. Some things in the
letters from my father I wouldn’t want many folks to see--and especially
a Hun. Father is going to take a big sum in cash with him on the
_Redbird_ when he sails for Bahia. Gold, Morgan--thousands and thousands
of dollars in gold coin.”

“Whew!”

“Some prize for a Hun U-boat! And think of my folks and your sisters
aboard the _Redbird_! It’s going to worry me until I know this scoundrel
is captured and I get back my papers.”




CHAPTER VI--WORK AHEAD


When the four Navy Boys and their friends came over the summit of the
hill behind the English seaport which the Zeppelin had so recently
raided and where it had come to grief, the bomb-set fires in the town
had become controlled. Even the conflagration at the point where the
Zeppelin had fallen was now entirely smothered.

Fortunately neither the marine hospital nor the port admiral’s
headquarters had been hit by the Hun bombs. The first named was crowded
with refugees from merchant ships sunk by the Hun submarines or blown up
by floating mines. Almost daily the remnants of the unfortunate crews
were brought in; for by this time the Germans had begun shelling the
boats as they escaped from sinking ships, striving to carry out their
master’s orders, “that no trace be left” of such breaking of the
international law agreed to long since by all civilized nations.

But if the hospital was not hit, damage enough had been done in all good
conscience. The crowds were gone from about the wrecked Zeppelin and
from the bombed schoolhouse. The shelling of open boats at sea was not a
greater crime than the indiscriminate dropping of bombs on this
unfortified town; and the wiping out of that school teacher and her
pupils could never be forgotten. Phil Morgan turned his eyes away from
the place, shuddering as he thought of the horror.

“Let’s go down to the admiral’s station--there where his white ensign
flies--and report about the spy escaping from us,” Whistler said.

“And explain how he’s dressed,” Al Torrance added. “For let me tell you,
that chap, speaking English and all, and dressed like one of us Yanks,
will cause a lot of trouble.”

“I’d like to get something decent to put on myself,” grumbled George
Belding.

“Tee, hee!” giggled Ikey Rosenmeyer. “You don’t look any more like one
of these farmers than nothin’ at all!”

“Must say,” grinned Whistler, “the clothes don’t become you, George.”

“You go fish!” snapped the unfortunate. “I hate to show up aboard and
face--who’s your boss, Lieutenant Commander Lang, isn’t it?”

“Cracky! Yes,” Al said. “And you are billed for the old _Colodia_? Say,
the boys will give you a welcome!”

“How did you come to get billeted to the _Colodia_?” Whistler Morgan
asked curiously. “You came over on your father’s yacht?”

“No,” said Belding, quietly. “I didn’t say that. I joined the crew of
the one-time _Sirius_ because when I arrived in England your old
_Colodia_ was out scrapping with the part of the Hun fleet that tried to
make a break.”

“Oh, yes,” said Whistler. “We were in that fight; but we were on the
_Kennebunk_.”

“And our gun made the first hit and we sunk a Hun battleship!” cried Al.

“Huh!” scoffed Frenchy, “you listen to Al and Whistler, and you’d think
their old gun fought the whole battle.”

“Did you fellows really help work a gun in that fight?” cried George
Belding, in amazement and admiration. Even the giant British seaman
gazed at the Navy Boys with increased respect.

“We were in the fight, and we belonged to one of the gun crews,”
admitted Whistler. “But we are willing to agree that we did not do it
all. Frenchy and Ikey were there.”

Belding laughed. “Well, let’s go along to the admiral’s, and I’ll tell
you how I came to get billeted on the _Colodia_. Uncle Sam is training
more men than he has boats for--yet. But the _Colodia’s_ lost several of
her crew, hasn’t she, from one cause or another?”

“Of course. And are you a ‘filler-in’?” said Whistler.

“Guess so. I came over expecting to go right aboard the destroyer, as I
say. But I had to wait for her to come back from the North Sea. And
there was the old _Sirius_, with a chap in command that I knew. So I got
a chance to take a trip. We took out a convoy bound westward; and on the
way back we had a scrap with a sub.”

“Did you sink her?” asked Frenchy eagerly.

“We did something to it. The boys said they knew she was a goner. Oil
and litter rose to the surface after we dropped a depth bomb. I’m sorry
for her crew; but they are in bad business.”

“Don’t yuh be too bloomin’ sorry for the filthy ’Uns,” growled Willum
Johnson.

“Say, Big Bill,” sang out Frenchy, “don’t you be so bloodthirsty. You
are a regular tiger--to hear you talk.”

“Don’t forget them school kids down there,” replied the man, shaking his
head.

Whistler had hoped to put the memory of the innocents butchered by the
Zeppelin out of his memory for a few minutes. He shuddered, and led the
way into the head of one of the steep streets, lined on either side by
white painted cottages.

The streets leading down to the harbor were so steep that Al said he
always felt like putting out his hands to brace himself against the
walls of the little houses as they went down.

The boys grew silent when they heard the weeping and wailing from inside
the houses. Here the children had lived who were so mangled in the
explosion of the Hun bomb. The destruction below in the middle of the
town could not have been so bad, for there were few women and children
there. This was not market day.

It scarcely seemed possible that the raid should have been accomplished
and done so much damage ashore three hours before. The harbor lay
peacefully enough now in the last light of the setting sun. The ships of
the merchant fleet, all camouflaged most fantastically, lay swinging at
their moorings. There were several gray cruisers and a number of
destroyers, for this was a busy port. Both foodstuffs and troops were
landed here. The destroyers were all so painted that one could scarcely
be distinguished from another. Only the four Navy Boys knew just where
the _Colodia_ was anchored.

The party arrived at the admiral’s station and were stopped by the
sentinel at the gate. The admiral was not at his desk, for he was out
viewing the damage the bombs had done, and to interview the prisoners
brought in.

But there was an officer who heard the boys’ report and thanked them for
what they had tried to do. George Belding gave a complete description of
the daring spy who had landed from the Zeppelin. It was pretty sure that
he and Whistler Morgan would know the fellow if they ever came
face-to-face with him again.

The ex-coster would have to face punishment when he got aboard his ship.

“Hit’s me for the dungeon,” was the way he expressed his expectation of
spending some time in the ship’s brig. “Good-bye, lads,” he said on
parting from the Americans. “Yuh’re a bloomin’ bunch o’ sports, that’s
wot’ yuh his. There’s no manner o’ doubt you Hamericans is hall right.”

“And you are all right, Bill, when you are sober,” George Belding said
rather grumpily. “I hope I’ll never meet you again when you have been
indulging in liquor.”

He said this with feeling; but Big Bill only grinned. “You’ll ’ave to
visit me haboard ship, lad,” he said, shaking his head. “Wot’s bred hin
the bone his bloomin’ ’ard to change, hand don’t yuh forget hit!”

George Belding merely grunted. He was in no pleasant mood because of the
“hick” costume, as Frenchy called it, which he was obliged to wear
aboard ship. The ridiculous garments and shoes occasioned much hilarity
when they reached the _Colodia’s_ launch.

“Hey! what you got there? Going to bring a cow along for him to milk?”
was the jocular demand.

Isa Bopp, who would never be anything but a greenhorn himself, no matter
how long he was at sea, demanded:

“Where did you fellers pick up that farmer?”

“Farmer yourself!” whispered Ikey behind the sharp of his hand. “It’s
the port admiral in disguise. He’s going aboard to see Commander Lang on
a secret mission. Something big’s coming off, Isa.”

“There’ll be something big come off when he shucks them shoes,” chuckled
Bopp.

Meanwhile Phil Morgan was explaining to the petty officer in charge of
the launch just who George Belding was, and how he came to be without a
uniform. Belding would otherwise have had trouble getting aboard the
_Colodia_, without his papers that the spy had run away with.

The loiterers were soon brought in by the guard and the launch put off
for the destroyer. It was dark when they arrived at the _Colodia_.
Ensign MacMasters, the Navy Boys’ very good friend, was at the gangway,
and he passed Belding on Whistler’s word. Phil and the new boy went at
once to Commander Lang.

It was eight bells, and the anchor watch was just being mustered. There
was no searchlight or signal drills on this evening because of the air
raid. There might be other Zeppelins in the fog that hung over the sea.

The boys coming aboard at once swung their hammocks and had a chance
before the first call at 8:55 to visit around with their friends and
swap experiences. Of course, everybody was excited over the air raid;
but nobody had been in the thick of it as had Philip Morgan and his
chums.

As there is no smoking allowed below the main deck after 7:30 p. m. the
lads could gather on the berth deck and talk until the first anchor
watch was set. Then the thrill of the boatswain’s pipe called for
silence on the berth deck and the boys that were not on watch or already
in their hammocks prepared swiftly to be under covers when taps was
sounded at five minutes past nine.

But on this night, almost immediately after nine o’clock, there was a
chattering of the wireless. The boys on watch saw the messenger dash
along the deck from the wireless station with the message for the
commander.

A murmur passed from group to group about the main deck of the
destroyer. It even seeped below, and the boys who were not yet asleep
heard the whisper.

Orders! Something of moment afoot that had not been expected; for the
_Colodia_ was not supposed to leave port till the next day.

Whistler, whose watch it was, almost stumbled against Ensign MacMasters
in the waist of the ship. It was the ensign’s own fault, for he was on
the starboard side.

“Hello, my boy!” he said to Phil. “Heard the news?”

“I know there is news, sir,” said Whistler. “But I don’t know what it
is.”

“You’ll all know soon. We’ll up anchor and sail in half an hour. Orders
from the port admiral. He has got information from the prisoners that
there may be another Zeppelin fallen in the sea outside. They saw her
fall, and it may be possible for us to rescue some of her company.”

“More of the baby-killing Heinies?” exclaimed Whistler.

“Ah, well, we have to be merciful,” said the ensign. “They were obeying
their orders. We must obey ours.”

“But you know, Mr. MacMasters,” said Morgan earnestly, “if our superiors
ordered us to commit the crimes the Huns commit, there would be mighty
few of us who would obey orders.”

“Aye, aye, my lad,” sighed the older man. “But remember we have not
lived under Prussian masters all our lives. We have different teaching
and different ideals, thank God!”

In ten minutes the whole ship’s company was making ready for departure.




CHAPTER VII--ON THE GREY WATERS


For the most part the American destroyers on duty in British and French
waters were doing patrol service, scouting over designated areas in
quest of enemy submarines, meeting and escorting troop and merchant
ships into port, and on occasion, when the S O S calls came, rushing to
the aid of torpedoed or of mined craft.

Even during the short experience Philip Morgan and his chums had had on
the _Colodia_, they had often seen the wreckage-littered waters where
ships had gone down and men and women had suffered exposure in
lifeboats.

The destroyer had roared through the grey seas, in fog and gale and
darkness, in answer to the tragic calls for help. Never, since men went
down to the sea in ships, had there been such adventure on the waves as
in those years of the World War.

For never before had the sharklike submarine abounded nor the airplanes
swept overhead, both carrying death and destruction. When the _Colodia_
left port her crew had small surety that they would return. This present
night call was a new one for them.

The crew of the supposedly wrecked Zeppelin had been possibly five hours
in the sea when the captured Germans told of their comrades’ fate. The
British port admiral had communicated with Commander Lang within a few
minutes of his hearing the tragic tale.

There was perhaps a particular reason why the order to find the wreck of
the Zeppelin and her crew (if they were not drowned) was given to one of
the American destroyers instead of to a British patrol boat.

After all, the Yankees could not feel the same degree of bitterness and
hatred of the Hun and his works as the British sailor did. The murder of
the school children and their teacher was known to every British sailor
in the port. To their horror was added personal bitterness. And this
order sent the _Colodia_ on a mission of mercy!

“The best I can hope for them,” said Morgan to George Belding, who had
been placed in Whistler’s watch and had donned such uniform as the
master-at-arms could supply him, “is that they will all be comfortably
drowned before we find any trace of the Zep. That maybe is wicked; but
it is the way I feel.”

“That would be better than they deserve,” Belding agreed. “Just think
what that spy did to me!”

He was still very much disturbed in his mind regarding the loss of his
letters and valuable papers.

“Why, you can’t tell, Phil,” said he, “what the Huns might try to do. If
they read father’s letters and learned about all that gold----”

“You really mean the _Redbird_ will take out treasure to Bahia?” asked
Whistler in great concern.

“Yes. More gold coin than there is any use talking about,” whispered
Belding. “Father knew I would be interested in all the details, so he
told me.”

“And my sisters and your mother and Lilian going along!” sighed
Whistler.

“Nice mess, isn’t it?” groaned the other. “That spy will make use of the
information sure!--if he can.”

“When will the _Redbird_ sail?”

“Next month, some time. Of course, I’ll try to send father word about
this. But you know what the censor does to a fellow’s letters. And to
cable would be worse.”

“Wait a minute!” cried Whistler. “That spy couldn’t benefit very well by
the information himself. He’s here in England and your father’s ship
will sail from New York, won’t it?”

“I suppose so. From ‘an Atlantic port.’ You know, that’s as near as they
would let him tell in a letter. And don’t worry about the Huns not being
benefited by the information. They’ll find some way. They have wireless
stations along our United States coast. And every U-boat carries a
wireless.”

“So do our subs,” Whistler rejoined. “But they are of small radius. The
English coast is cleaned out of Hun radio stations.”

“They have ’em on the islands off Ireland and Scotland,” returned
Belding. “That spy is some smart chap, Phil. I’m awfully worried. I’ll
write father, of course, as clearly as the censorship will allow. But it
may be too late. The _Redbird_ may have sailed--or a U-boat may sink the
mail ship.”

“You don’t want to lose your courage over it,” advised the Seacove
youth. “We mustn’t expect the worst. Of course, with Phoebe and Alice
aboard I shall be worried until we hear that they have arrived safely at
Bahia.”

“And it takes a long time for a sailing ship to reach that place from
our North Atlantic seaports,” responded Belding.

They talked thus in whispers while hanging to a wire stay. The _Colodia_
was running without lights, every inboard lamp carefully screened,
although the night was black. Before Whistler and Belding went off watch
it had begun to rain, and a fierce, chill wind was blowing. The sea was
beginning to kick up, and a sailor had to be a good acrobat to get into
his hammock on the destroyer.

The new watch went on deck in rubber boots and slickers, and the gun
crews, who were always on duty at sea, day or night, sought such cover
as they could find. It was a nasty voyage, and they were not inspired
with the thought that they might be able to save the Germans’ lives.

The bearings of the spot where the second Zeppelin had fallen had been
given to the port admiral and by him transferred to Commander Lang with
precision. It was a long run to this point, the boys knew. The destroyer
could not possibly make the point indicated before daybreak.

Yet most of the younger members of the crew, whether it was their call
or not, were up in season for five o’clock coffee. The excitement grew
as the light became stronger and more could be seen of the gray, tossing
sea.

It was a bad lookout for rescuing anybody. To put out a boat in such a
sea would be a task that the hardiest of the _Colodia’s_ crew shrank
from. Now and then a comber rose over the destroyer’s rail and tried to
wash her deck. But the thousand-ton fast steamer escaped most of these
“old he waves” as Boatswain Hans Hertig called them.

Hertig was from Seacove, too, and was a particularly good friend of
Whistler and his chums. “Seven Knott” was his nickname aboard the
_Colodia_, and the boys had had many adventures afloat and ashore in his
company.

“I ain’t got much use for them squareheads,” Hans declared, “and after
what they done back there, I dunno as these fellers, what would have
done the same had they reached land, should be helped yet.”

“Not much likelihood of our finding them at all,” one of the other men
said. “Ten hours in the water now! And the bag of the Zep is bound to
fill with water and sink the whole framework. Those Heinies will be
kicking about in pretty wet water.”

This was the attitude of most of the crew; yet there was great curiosity
among them to see what was left of the Zeppelin that had fallen into the
sea. Commander Lang conferred with the navigation officer and his other
chiefs. The _Colodia_ had reached the spot indicated in their orders
from the port admiral.

Now all they could do was to sweep in circles about the designated place
and keep an extra sharp lookout.

In fact, every man who could get on deck was watching the tumbling seas
for any sign of wreck or castaway. After all, as the minutes passed and
nothing at all was descried where they had expected to find survivors of
the Zeppelin, even the roughest members of the crew stopped growling
about “the Heinies.”

It was one thing to give vent to the bitterness they felt against the
Germans in speech, it was another thing to think of those fourteen or
sixteen men struggling for so many hours in the icy water, and finally
being drowned so miserably.

The hammock stowers had just stopped down the hammock cloths and the
boys had got their mess gear preparatory for breakfast at 7:30 A. M.
when there came a hail from the mast. One of the lookouts had descried
something in the east. He pointed, and excitedly yelled his directions
to the watch officer.

The _Colodia’s_ engines began to speed up. When she went her full
thirty-odd knots her hull shook as though she would rattle to pieces.
The life of a destroyer in such work as the _Colodia_ had been doing
since she was launched, can be only a few months. Commander Lang was
already talking to his officers of the time when she would have to be
scrapped.

Meanwhile her record would amply repay the Navigation Bureau for
building her. There was no doubt of that.

Now she pounded away at top speed for the point where the lookout had
seen something afloat on the tumbling seas. All through this trip, not
only the destroyer’s commander, but many of the more thoughtful members
of the crew, had half suspected a German trick.

It would not be outside of possibility, or probability, for the crew of
the Zeppelin brought down ashore to send a rescue ship to sea into a
trap arranged with the usual German ruthlessness. It was possible that
there had been no second Zeppelin at all, but that the _Colodia_ was
steaming at her best pace to a rendezvous with a U-boat prepared to
torpedo her.

Tricks quite as vile had been played before by the Hun. Commander Lang,
with his binoculars to his eyes, got the spot on the sea that the
lookout had observed and kept his glasses trained there. It certainly
was not a periscope they saw, yet it might be some wreckage held
together for the special purpose of masking a periscope.

The gun crews were at their stations and the men handling the depth
bombs were ready on either side, and fore and aft, to drop the deadly
explosives if it was found that the _Colodia_ had run into a trap.




CHAPTER VIII--THE YANKEE WAY


The sharp hull of the three hundred foot destroyer cut through rather
than rode the waves. She was seaworthy enough, but in a cross sea like
this, she rolled and dipped tremendously, as well as bucking right
through the combers after the fashion of a pilot fish. One had to be
well seasoned to her habit to stand such a tumbling about as the
_Colodia_ gave her crew.

If George Belding felt any qualms, he was able to repress them. He was a
good sailor anyway, and having just come from a stiff cruise in the Bay
of Biscay in his father’s transformed yacht, he proved himself to be a
tolerable seaman.

Belding was a manly fellow without being as rough as many of the
sailors. Like the four Navy Boys, he was greatly interested by the view
they all acquired very soon of the floating débris that had first been
spied from the mast. The distance being so great, they could not
immediately be sure whether the wreck was that of a boat or an airship.
It was at first merely a blotch of darker color on the tumbling grey
sea.

“Looks more like a dead whale with a framework of scantling about it
than anything else,” Ensign MacMasters told the boys.

“It might be a whale at that,” commented Al Torrance eagerly. “They say
that many a whale has been killed by depth bombs.”

“Hi!” ejaculated Frenchy Donahue. “There’s a flag flying from a staff. I
can see it.”

“No dead whale would be likely to fly a flag,” Whistler said, smiling.

“Commander Lang had better have a care,” grumbled George Belding. “This
may be a trap, after all.”

The _Colodia_ steamed on at undiminished speed. The outlines of the
wreckage grew clearer despite the raging rainstorms that swept now and
then across the gray waves.

The vast hulk of a collapsed bag of silk cloth--it was never
canvas--could have belonged to nothing but one of the German airships.

“Half sunken Zep, sure as you are a foot high!” declared Al Torrance.

“No argument on that score,” admitted another of the boys. “Do you
suppose any of the poor chaps can be alive?”

“‘Poor chaps’ is good!” growled Al. “Like Willum, the coster, I don’t
believe in wasting sympathy on ‘the ’Un.’”

The dashing rain and spray almost blinded at times the _Colodia’s_ boys,
but they searched the remains of the wrecked dirigible keenly as the
destroyer drew nearer.

Now and then a great wave dashed completely over the twisted framework
and sprawling bag of silk cloth. And, yes! over several specks that were
apparently lashed to the wreckage. These specks were bodies of men,
whether dead or alive could not at first be decided with the wind
driving the spindrift head-on.

Commander Lang discussed the situation with his chief officers
amidships. How could they reach the wreck of the Zeppelin under such
weather conditions as these? Scarcely could a boat live in such a sea!

“I’ll order no boat’s crew out into such a mess as that,” said the
commander, with a gesture indicating the gray, leaping waves. “And I
hate to ask for volunteers when those people out there are what they
are. It is hardly possible for the boys to think of them as human
beings. They are set aside from us; they belong to another race--a race
that has shown neither mercy nor compassion.”

“It will have to be volunteers, if anybody,” said one of the other
officers. “But I’ve a wife and children. If I am ordered, I’ll go. But
no volunteering to get those Huns, for me!”

Among the crew the indications were that they felt about the same as the
officers. Said Hans Hertig:

“Who would volunteer to save them squareheads yet? Not me!”

“What would they do if they were in our place?” another of the seamen
asked. “They can watch women and babies drown! Why should we worry about
them?”

“Because we’re Americans, I suppose,” said Al Torrance gravely. “It’s
not done any more--not by real folks. Yankees to the rescue, old man!
Somebody’s got to go and pick those Heinies off like ripe blackberries
off the vine.”

But more than a few of the seamen shook their heads and said “Not me!”

Of course, volunteers had not yet been asked for, nor did anybody seem
to know just what course should be pursued in striving to rescue the
crew of the Zeppelin. Whistler Morgan and George Belding, standing well
forward, looked long and earnestly at the imperiled men on the wreck,
then they looked into each other’s faces.

“What do you think?” Belding asked, his lips making no sound that Phil
Morgan could hear, but his words easily read by Whistler.

“If the _Colodia_ shoots beyond the wreck?” asked Whistler, moving his
lips in the same way so that George could read what he said. “I could
drift down to it with the current.”

“In a boat?” asked Belding doubtfully.

“With life buoys,” Whistler explained.

Belding understood the scheme and nodded. Whistler said:

“I’ll speak to Mr. MacMasters.”

He went aft immediately to find the ensign. Finding Belding close at his
shoulder, Whistler said:

“You don’t need to get into this, George. What would your folks say?”

“Just about what yours will say if you chuck your life away for the sake
of a lot of Heinies,” returned Belding briefly. “You can’t do it alone.
It will take two of us to fasten each Heinie into the buoy so he can be
dragged back to the ship.”

“You’ve got the right idea,” agreed Phil, and turned to speak to Mr.
MacMasters.

“What do you two chaps want to do--throw your lives away for scum like
them?” was the ensign’s first comment upon Whistler’s proposal.

MacMasters had risen from the forecastle himself, having won his billet
by hard work. He was apt to look upon most things from the sailor’s
standpoint. The crew of the _Colodia_ had already seen enough of the
despicable work of the Hun to hate almost with the intensity of Willum
Johnson.

“They have to be saved, haven’t they?” Whistler asked quietly and
respectfully.

“But why should you do it?” rejoined MacMasters, who really loved the
lad and feared for his safety. “Those men over there are not worth it.”

“_We_ are worth it, sir,” put in George Belding with earnestness. “Phil
has the right idea, and I want to help him. One fellow can’t do it
alone, anyway.”

MacMasters threw up his hands in a helpless gesture. “Of course,” he
grumbled, “I’ll take your proposal to Commander Lang,” and strode away
toward the bridge.

Whistler’s suggestion was in line with what the chief officers had
already seen must be done. “If those lads demand the privilege, I will
not stop them,” said the Commander. “They are both smart and well set-up
boys. But I wish some of the older men had come before them. In a case
of this kind, it’s ‘first come, first served.’ Tell them to make ready,
Mr. MacMasters. And I adjure you to take care that they have proper
help.”

When Mr. MacMasters brought back the word Whistler Morgan and George
Belding at once prepared to put their idea into practice. But the
_Colodia_ had yet to steam past the mass of wreckage that had been the
Zeppelin. There were nine men lashed to the half sunken framework.
Feeble gestures from some of the figures showed they were alive.

As the destroyer drew so near and the sorry state of the Germans was
made apparent, the Americans grew silent. There were no more curses for
the Huns. The most bitter suddenly thought of the castaways in different
mood. Those were dying men lashed there to the sorry wreck of the
Zeppelin.

Word swiftly passed all over the ship that Morgan and Belding were about
to make an attempt to rescue those of the castaways who were still
alive. Al Torrance came raving to his chum and wanted to know what it
meant--why he was left out of it? If Whistler Morgan was going to risk
his “fool neck to rescue a parcel of Huns, (so he put it) why couldn’t
he be in it?”

“You can, old man,” said the wise Whistler. “You are just the fellow I
want to hang on to the life buoy line and pay out for me. My life will
be in your hands. Catch hold here!”

Al grumbled some, but did as he was bid. Cold as it was, the two boys
making the attempt to reach the wrecked Zeppelin stripped to their
underclothes. The _Colodia_ had passed the wreck, and now swerved so
that the current would carry the two venturesome lads straight down upon
the wreck.

The two buoys were flung overboard, and Morgan and Belding slipped down
the ropes and plunged into the sea. The first shock of it was
tremendous. It seemed as though the water would freeze the blood in
their veins and the marrow in their bones.

But they cheered each other, each diving and coming up within the ring
of the buoyant life buoy assigned him. Al and others payed out carefully
but swiftly. All realized how icy the waters were. This rescue--if it
was to be successful--must be made in quick time.

The two rescuers whirled down upon the wreck. The framework was raised
high upon first one wave and then another. There was danger of its
parting and carrying away the men lashed to it. Phil Morgan and Belding
knew that they had to do their work swiftly if they would accomplish the
task they had set out upon.




CHAPTER IX--“SCHMARDIE”


The _Colodia_ was drifting more than a cable’s length from the wreck of
the German airship that had fallen into the sea. Philip Morgan and
George Belding were some minutes in dropping down to the wreck, each
upborne by his life buoy, the lines of which were payed out by their
comrades on the destroyer’s deck.

The ropes soon grew very heavy and had the ship been much further away
the two boys would have found the life rings of little aid to them.
However, when the waves swept them against the twisted framework of the
Zeppelin, they were still held well above the surface of the sea and
were able to seize parts of the wreckage.

Whistler signaled those on the _Colodia_ to cease paying out. Then he
turned to look up at the struggling men above his head. George Belding
cried:

“All right, Phil?”

He bawled the query so loud that Whistler heard him above the noise of
the sea and the creaking of the wreckage.

“Hunky-dory!” he returned. He pointed above, and Belding could easily
read his lips: “Which of these Heinies shall we get first?”

One man was already letting himself down toward the rescuers. By the
trimming on his uniform the American boys were positive he was an
officer--perhaps the commander of the Zeppelin.

“Tell that fellow to pass down those who are injured,” Whistler yelled
so that his friend could hear him. “I believe he’s going to try to hog
one of these buoys!”

Belding put up a hand to stop the German. The latter addressed the two
American lads in English.

“I am Herr Hauptman von Hausen. I am in command. Will your comrades draw
me aboard in the bight of that rope?”

“Not now, mein Herr,” shouted Whistler. “You’ve got gall to want to
leave your comrades who may be helpless! Get some of them down here--and
have a care that you do help them, too, or I’m not so sure that you will
ever get to the destroyer at all!”

“Impudence! I shall report you to your commanding officer,” declared the
Zeppelin’s captain fiercely.

“Believe me!” exclaimed Whistler, “that will do you a lot of good. Look
out for this fellow, George! Let’s see that he is hauled in last just
for that.”

“I’m with you,” agreed the other American. “Can you reach that young
chap just above your head? I believe he’s got a broken arm.”

Whistler had managed to climb out of the sea and stood upon one stay,
clinging to another. Now he reached up to aid the fellow George Belding
had spoken of. The German was no older than the lads from the
destroyer--a thin, pale fellow, his face drawn with pain, and his left
arm strapped clumsily to his side.

“He’s got a broken arm, all right,” Whistler shouted. “When I pass him
down, George, do you unbuckle his belt and fasten him with it to the
ring. Then he won’t be swept away, even if he has but one hand to cling
with. All ready?”

“Here, you!” exclaimed Belding, addressing the “Herr Hauptmann” in no
respectful tone. “Lend a hand, will you? If you don’t I’ll cut you
adrift.”

Belding had out his knife to cut a lashing and he looked as though he
would carry out his threat. The Zeppelin commander slid down the stay
and aided in lowering the younger German out of the wreck.

In five minutes they had him lashed as Whistler suggested to the life
buoy, and the young German was on his way to the destroyer. A third
inflated ring had been floated down to the tangle of débris drifting in
the rising sea. Both Morgan and Belding were aware that they must work
rapidly if they would save those of the Germans who were still alive.
The wreckage was shifting from moment to moment. One body suddenly
plunged beneath the tossing waves, but the Americans knew that the
victim was already dead.

The men beside the captain had cut themselves loose and crawled down to
the level of the sea. These two the rescuers sent away clinging to one
of the inflated rings, for they could both handle themselves pretty
well. But they kept Commander von Hausen until the first life buoy was
emptied and was sent back again,

The four bodies left above were not all of live men; the boys were sure
of that. And when they had got the first quartette of castaways started
for the destroyer, Belding climbed up to cut away the nearest man. He
was very weak, and after he was loosened from the stays he proved to be
unable to help himself.

The situation of the two boys from the destroyer was now becoming very
precarious indeed. They could not hang on here for much longer
themselves.

“One of us will have to go back with this fellow,” declared Belding.
“You take him, Phil. I am in better shape than you are.”

“Who told you so?” demanded the Seacove boy. “You take him. I’ll get
that other fellow up there and follow you. Al and the others are
floating another buoy down to us.”

“No,” said Belding. “I’ll lash this fellow here and he’ll have to take
his chance until we get his mate. Those two beyond are dead, aren’t
they?”

“Sure,” returned Whistler. “Poor things! Just think of their hanging on
here for so long.”

“Oh, yes,” growled Belding, but with some scorn. “You can see just how
much good it’s done that captain.”

They were close together or they could not have heard each other speak.
The wind shrieked and the waves roared, making a chorus of sounds that
well nigh drowned their voices.

With great difficulty they brought the second man down. Then, having
lashed each sufferer to a life buoy, Whistler Morgan and Belding set out
to swim beside them to the destroyer.

The waves were much higher now and the two lads were not so strong as
when they had come out to the Zeppelin. They never could have reached
the _Colodia_ without help, and, withal, they were pretty well exhausted
when they were drawn to the side of the pitching destroyer.

Cheers greeted them. The crew was generous always in acknowledging the
individual bravery of its members. However, when it was all over and
Phil and Belding had been treated by the doctor and were between
blankets, Frenchy was inclined to “josh” a little.

“By St. Patrick’s piper that played the last snake out of Ireland!” he
cried, “it will keep you broke for polish to shine up all your medals,
Whistler. If Commander Lang reports this to the port admiral, you and
Belding will get some junk to wear on the proud young chests of yez! And
there’s the medal ye got, Whistler, for grapplin’ wid the depth bomb and
sub chaser Three Eights!”

Whistler tossed a boot at his tormentor’s head, but Frenchy dodged it
and escaped from the sick bay where the doctor had ordered Morgan and
Belding to remain for the time being. They were kept there with the
German lad with the broken arm until the next morning, when the friends
were ordered to appear before Commander Lang. The latter said with a
quizzical smile:

“I hear a bad report of you young chaps on one point. The Herr Hauptman
Frederich Wilhelm von Hausen says you were not sufficiently respectful
to him.”

“We weren’t, I guess,” admitted George Belding. “How about it, Phil?”

“I am afraid we did not pay sufficient attention to his High Mightiness,
sir,” rejoined Morgan. “You see, sir, we sent the wounded boy over
first. That captain was in too big a hurry.”

“Yes. Well,” drawled the commander, “I suppose I shall have to pass this
complaint along to the proper authorities. But I believe I can
congratulate you two lads on drawing down the United States gold life
saving medal for your act.

“You, Belding, have made an excellent mark for yourself on joining the
_Colodia_. We already knew what sort of metal Morgan was built of. Thank
you, my lads! If the surgeon gives you a true bill, you may turn to with
your watches.”

The boys saluted and departed for their stations. The destroyer was
making for port and the headlands were visible. But the storm had not
blown over and the ship was rolling forty-five to fifty degrees. If an
ordinary merchant ship rolls forty degrees her crew think that the end
has come and they will be wrecked; forty degrees is ordinary for a
destroyer to roll in the sea. Often moving about the _Colodia_ was
almost like climbing a sheer wall.

The two boys who had done so brave an act the day before were commended
on all sides; but their mates’ approbation took the form of good natured
joking, for which both Morgan and Belding were thankful.

They heard much comment regarding the German captives from the other
members of the crew. Especially did they learn certain things about the
youth with the broken arm whom they had first sent off to the destroyer
from the wreck of the Zeppelin.

He was named Franz Eberhardt, and he was in the sick bay instead of
being confined with the other prisoners. Hear Hans Hertig rail about
him:

“That feller is a schmardie--one o’ them German schmardies what you hear
about. I would like to have him workin’ on this _Colodia_. We would work
some of the schmardness out of him yet.”

“What’s the matter with him, Boatswain?” demanded Al Torrance.

“Huh! He tells me the Germans ain’t begun to fight yet! Sure! They will
lick all the world--let him tell it. He iss one Prussian.”

Phil Morgan got a chance to go down to the sick bay and interview the
young prisoner. The latter knew that Morgan was one of those who had
rescued him and his mates; but there was a certain arrogance about his
manner and speech that was not likely to make him friends among his
captors.

“Aren’t you worried about your position at all?” asked Whistler, when
they had talked for some time.

“Me?” repeated the German in very good English. “Why should I fear? I am
an Eberhardt. My uncle lived long in England and has friends there. I
shall make friends. The English do not dare treat us Germans badly, for
they know that in the end they will be beaten and we will punish them
severely if they treat prisoners unkindly. Oh, yes!”

“Say!” drawled Whistler, “where do you get that stuff? You must have
caught it from that von Hausen. He wanted to push you out of the way and
take your place in the life buoy.”

“Yes,” admitted the German youth simply. “He is _Hauptman_. Why not?”

“Good-_night_!” growled Whistler. “Our officers don’t do that. They
would consider it beneath them to be saved before their crew.”

Eberhardt, who was sitting up, shrugged his shoulders. “Yes?” he
repeated. “But of course, they are not _gnädige Herren_.”

“That means ‘noble sirs’,” scoffed Whistler. “No, thank heaven, we do
not have such a caste as that in America!”

“You have some very rich men--very rich. I have heard my cousin Emil
say. He knows many of them. Many are from German blood. Of course,
_when_ we finish the war, they will create a caste, as you call it, in
your United States. Cousin Emil says----”

“Who is your Cousin Emil?” demanded Phil Morgan more amused than angered
after all, by this kind of talk. “Is he in the States now?”

“Not yet,” said young Eberhardt, slyly looking at his inquisitor. “But
he is going.”

“Before the war ends? Not much chance of that.”

“Poof!” rejoined the German youth. “You cannot stop Emil. What he wants
to do, he does. He is a great man. He has been decorated by the
Emperor.”

“What department does he fight in?”

“Ah, he is greater than a fighter,” said young Eberhardt, shaking his
head. “He goes hither and yon--where he chooses. In France, England,
Italy, and now to your country, America.”

“A spy?” growled Morgan.

“Call him as you like. Cousin Emil is a wonderful man. Why, to fly from
our bases in Belgium to this England is nothing to Cousin Emil. He has
so traveled a dozen times. But this was my first trip.”

“You were not traveling with your cousin in that Zep, were you?”

“Ah, no. You say our sister _Luftshiff_--she is fallen?”

“Smashed all to pieces,” declared Whistler with satisfaction. “And her
crew prisoners--all but one.”

“Ah!” breathed Eberhardt, slyly smiling again. “And he who escaped?”

“What do you know about him?” asked Whistler in surprise. “That fellow
is a spy I bet! He was not a regular member of the Zep’s crew.”

“No? You saw him?”

“Yes.”

“Is he a man with a very sharp eye, a moustache like our Emperor, a tiny
beard here?” touching his lower lip.

“That’s the fellow!” cried Whistler. “Do you mean to say he is your
cousin Emil, and a spy?”

“Oh, no, my friend,” chuckled the “schmardie.” “Oh, no. I do not say
that. I merely say that man with the little beard on his lip--a goatee,
do you call it?--plays the cornet. You know, most cornet players wear
the little goatee, isn’t it so?”

Eberhardt laughed again and wagged his head, refusing to say more. As
for thanking Whistler for what he and Belding had done toward saving his
life, such a thought never seemed to enter the German youth’s mind.




CHAPTER X--THE TERROR OF THE SEAS


Phil Morgan, on thinking over the conversation with Franz Eberhardt, was
not at all sure that he should have discussed the wreck of the other
Zeppelin so freely with the prisoner. Yet Eberhardt was a prisoner, and
was not likely to be in a position to use any information he might have
gained to benefit his nation for a long time to come. If Eberhardt’s
cousin was a spy, perhaps this young chap was one too.

The hint Franz had dropped about the man who had escaped from the
Zeppelin that had been brought down on land, Whistler passed on, through
the proper channels, to the commander of the destroyer. He could do no
more than that. Possibly the man who had tied up George Belding and
escaped in the latter’s clothes, might be the “Cousin Emil” of whom
Franz was so proud.

The _Colodia_ steamed into the port at which she was stationed to find
the convoy and most of the naval vessels cleared out to accompany the
merchant craft. The American destroyer would be held for any emergency
call and there would be no present shore leave for her crew.

Phil received a long letter, one long delayed, from his sister Alice.
The whole story of how the Beldings had come to invite Whistler’s two
sisters to accompany them to Bahia was here set forth, and the young
fellow’s mind was much relieved when Alice assured him that even the
suggestion of the voyage had so delighted Phoebe that she already showed
improvement in her health.

Kind words from many neighbors and friends were included in the letter
for the other Seacove boys. Of course, Alice did not know at the time of
writing that George Belding was booked for a billet on the _Colodia_,
too, or she would have sent a message to him.

No thought that the _Redbird_ might come to grief on her voyage to the
South American port seemed to trouble Alice Morgan’s mind when she wrote
to her brother. At that time it was thought all German raiders and
U-boats were driven from the Western Atlantic waters.

However that might be, the Huns were active enough in the waters through
which the _Colodia_ plied. It was only two days after Whistler and
George Belding had saved the living remainder of the Zeppelin crew when
an S O S call was picked up by the port wireless station and transmitted
to the destroyer. It was possible that the ship in peril was too far
away for the _Colodia_ to be of service; nevertheless she started out of
the harbor within ten minutes of the reception of the aero plea for
help.

The weather was rough, and the ship barely dropped the headlands below
the horizon at sunset. They were bound, doubtless, on a useless night
trip. And yet, such ventures were a part of the work of the destroyers
and must be expected by their crews.

When night had fallen there was only a pale radiance resting on the sea
while broken wind clouds drove athwart a gray and dreary sky. No stars
were visible. From behind the weather screen of the bridge, where the
two watch officers were stationed, nothing could be seen ahead but the
phosphorescent flash of waves otherwise as black as ink. These flashes,
where the waves broke at their crests, decreased rather than aided the
powers of vision.

The crew of the _Colodia_ were by this time so well used to their work
that there were few false alarms as the ship tore on through the dark
seas. Such errands as this were part of the expectation--almost of
routine. The destroyers at night fairly “smelled” their way from point
to point.

Now and then a porpoise shot straight toward the _Colodia_, leaving a
sparkling wake so like that of a torpedo that the lookout might be
excused for giving a mistaken warning. But the men knew the real thing
now, and the gunners did not bang away at fish or floating débris as
they had in the beginning.

“Why, even Isa Bopp has not for a long time raised a flivver,” said Al
Torrance, discussing this matter with George Belding and Whistler. “And
Ikey has stopped straining his eyes when he’s off duty. One time he
would have hollered ‘wolf’ if he’d seen a dill pickle floating three
hundred yards off our weather bow.”

“That’s all right,” said Whistler. “But Ikey won the first gold piece
for sighting a German sub when he first went to sea on this old
knife-blade. He’s got eyes for something besides dill pickles, has
Ikey.”

The crackling radio was intercepting messages from other ships--all
kinds of ships. The S O S call was no longer being repeated; but the
_Colodia’s_ officers had learned the position of the vessel that called
for help at the start, and the destroyer did not swerve from her course.
She roared on through the dark sea directly for the spot indicated.

“There’s nothing fancy in this job, George,” Phil Morgan said to their
new chum. “Nothing like a good, slap-dash battle with the Hun fleet,
such as we had a few weeks ago, or even chasing a Hun raider out of
Zeebrugge, or Kiel. But the old _Colodia_ has had ‘well done’ signaled
her by the fleet admiral more than once.”

“You bet!” Al Torrance put in. “We’ve sunk more than one of the U-boats.
We’re one of ‘the terrors of the sea,’ boy--like the song tells about.
That is what they call our flotilla.”

“Ah! I’ve heard all that before,” Belding said, in some disgust. “I want
to see action!”

As it chanced, he saw action on this very cruise. First, however, came
the conclusion of the incident that had brought them out of port,
chasing a phantom S O S.

A light burning low on the water was spied about ten o’clock. It could
be nothing but an open boat, and the _Colodia’s_ prow was turned more
directly toward it. The sea was really too rough for a submarine to be
awash, yet the Huns had been known to linger in the vicinity of their
victims so as to catch the rescuing vessel unaware. A sharp lookout was
maintained as the _Colodia_ steamed onward.

The torch in the open boat flared and smoked, while the boat pitched and
tossed--seemingly scarcely under command of its crew. There was no sign
of any other craft in the vicinity. The signal from the attacked ship
having stopped hours before, without much doubt she had sunk.

And but one boat remained!

The destroyer sped down within hailing distance of the open boat,
burning signals of her own meanwhile. Getting on the weather quarter of
the castaways, the latter were ordered to pull to the _Colodia_.

The boat held only nineteen survivors of the _Newcastle Boy_, a collier
that had been torpedoed by a submarine. There had been a second boat,
and both had been shelled after the collier sank, and the mate, who was
in command of these rescued castaways, feared his captain’s boat was
utterly lost. Had the sea not been so rough, he said, the Germans would
have succeeded in sinking his boat, too.

Whistler was on duty amidships and he overheard much of the report made
by the collier’s mate to Lieutenant Commander Lang and the conversation
among the officers thereon.

He was particularly impressed by the inquiries the destroyer’s commander
made regarding the nature of the attack, the type of U-boat that did the
deed, and similar details.

A close track was kept of all these submarine attacks. The methods of
certain submarine commanders could usually be traced. These reports were
kept by the British Admiralty and were intended, at the end of the war,
to assist in identifying U-boat commanders who had committed atrocities.
Those men should, in the end, not escape punishment for their horrid
crimes.

This attack upon the _Newcastle Boy_ had been particularly brutal. There
were four wounded men in the mate’s boat. If the captain’s boat were
lost, the missing would total twenty-six.

The _Colodia_, swinging in wide circles through the rough sea, remained
near the scene of the catastrophe until morning. They discovered no
trace of the sunken ship, although the mate declared she had gone down
within a mile of the spot where the destroyer had picked up the
survivors.

But at daybreak the watchful lookouts did spy a broken oar and part of
the bow of the captain’s lifeboat--its air-compartment keeping it
afloat. No human being was there to be seen, and the conclusion was
unescapable that the Hun had done his best to “sink without trace”
another helpless boat’s crew.

It was mid-afternoon, however, before the _Colodia_ left the vicinity of
the tragedy. There was a desire in the hearts of her crew and officers
to sight the submarine that had committed this atrocity.

Finally, however, the American naval vessel was swung about for port and
began to pick up speed. These destroyers never seem to go anywhere at an
easy pace; they are always “rushed” in their schedule.

Having given up hope of catching the particular submarine that had sunk
the _Newcastle Boy_, the _Colodia’s_ lookouts did not, however, fail to
watch for other submersibles. Men stationed in the tops, on the bridge,
and in both bow and stern, trained keen eyes upon the surrounding sea as
the destroyer dashed on her way.

Ikey Rosenmeyer and his special chum, Frenchy Donahue, were in the bows
on watch. Even those two “gabbers,” as Al Torrance called them, knew
enough to keep their tongues still while on duty; and nobody on the
destroyer had keener vision than Ikey and Frenchy.

Almost together the two hailed the bridge:

“Off the port bow, sir!” while Ikey added “Starboard your helm!”

A great cry went up from amidships. The _Colodia_ escaped the object
just beneath the surface by scarcely a boat’s length. Men sprang to the
depth-bomb arms and the crews to their guns.

But it was not a submarine. A great wave caused by the swift shifting of
the _Colodia’s_ helm, brought the object almost to the surface.

“A mine!” roared the crew.

The destroyer’s speed was slackened instantly. She swung broadside to
the menace. A few snappy commands, and two of the deck guns roared.

Instantly a geyser of water and smoke rose from the sea. The explosion
of the mine could have been seen for many miles. Had the destroyer
collided with it----

“We’d have gone to Davy Jones’ locker, sure enough, fellows,” said Al
Torrance. “Those mines the Huns are sowing through these seas now would
blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. Suppose the _Leviathan_, troop ship,
scraped her keel on that thing?”

There was much discussion all over the destroyer about the mine. It
suggested that the submarine that had sunk the _Newcastle Boy_ might be
a mine-sower. That fact would help identify the submarine, for all types
of German submersibles are not fitted with mine wells.

“You see how it is, George,” said Phil Morgan to their new chum. “These
seas around here are just as safe as a powder factory--just about! How
does it make you feel?”

“Pshaw!” returned Belding, “didn’t I tell you we almost caught a sub
when I was out on the _Sirius_? I don’t believe the Heinies have got so
many of ’em, after all.”

“Never you mind,” said Whistler. “They’ve got enough if they have but
one, believe me! Just think how we fellows used to gas about submarines
and all that. Before the war, I mean! We never dreamed any country would
use them as the Germans have.”

The tone of the whole crew after the narrow escape from the mine was
intense. They were on the lookout for almost anything to happen. Before
mid-afternoon, while still out of sight of land, the top hailed the deck
officers.

“Steamer in sight, sir!”

The position and course of the stranger was given, and immediately
everybody who had glasses turned them in the indicated direction. The
destroyer’s course was changed a trifle, for everything that floated on
the sea was examined by the Allied patrol.

Soon the high, rusted sides of an ancient tramp steamship hove into the
view of all. She was a two-stack steamer, and despite her evident age
and frowsiness she was making good time toward the Thames.

“Taking a chance,” Ensign MacMasters said to Whistler and his friends.
“That is what she is doing. She’s not even camouflaged. Her owner has
found some daredevil fellows to run her and will make a fortune in a
single voyage--or lose the ship, one or the other. Great gamblers, some
of these old ship owners.”

“Gamblers with men’s lives,” said George Belding. “I should know. My
father is in the business; but he does not take such chances as that.”

“Not even with the _Redbird_?” whispered Whistler anxiously. “I don’t
know about Phoebe and Alice sailing on her.”

“Oh, pshaw! there’s no danger over yonder,” declared George. “We’ve
driven all the Huns from the Western Atlantic.”

“Hope so,” returned Whistler.

Just then a cry rose from some of the men on deck. The destroyer was
near enough to the tramp steamship now to observe what went on aboard of
her. They saw men running about her deck. Then followed the “Bang! Bang!
Bang!” of her deck guns.

The guns were aimed for the far side of the tramp--the object they were
aiming at being out of sight. But the destroyer’s crew knew what that
fusillade meant.

“A sub! She’s got a sub under her guns!” was the yell that rose all over
the _Colodia_.

Swift orders from the bridge and instantly the destroyer shot ahead like
a mettlesome horse under spur and whip.




CHAPTER XI--ACTION


If action was what George Belding craved, he was getting it. Everybody
aboard the United States destroyer _Colodia_ was on the alert as the
craft leaped ahead to full speed for the spot where the rusty-sided
tramp steamship was popping away with her deck guns at some object as
yet not in view from the destroyer.

The merchant ship was being conned on a zig-zag course, evidently in an
attempt to dodge an expected torpedo. Her hull hid whatever she was
shooting at from the crew of the _Colodia_; but the latter did not doubt
the nature of the big ship’s erratic course.

At top speed the _Colodia_ rushed to the fray, and on suddenly rounding
the stern of the tramp, a great shout rose from the boys ranged along
the destroyer’s rail:

“There she is!”

The cry was drowned by the salvo of guns discharged at the conning tower
of the German submersible not more than a thousand yards from the tramp
ship. The position of the German craft had been excellent at first for a
shot at the merchant vessel; but her first torpedo had evidently missed
its objective. Now with the destroyer in view, the Hun let drive a
second missile and then began to submerge.

The torpedo’s wake could be seen by the lookouts on the _Colodia_ the
instant it left its tube. The tramp vessel evaded the explosive; but the
destroyer was directly in the torpedo’s path.

There was real danger at this moment. Quickly swerved as she might be,
it was not at all sure that the _Colodia_ could escape the torpedo.
Every man and boy aboard was at his station; among them Al Torrance was
placed at the starboard rail. He was armed, like many of his mates, with
a rifle.

As the destroyer shot across the path of the torpedo Torry fitted the
butt of his rifle into the hollow of his shoulder, huddled his cheek
against the stock, and brought the cross-sights of the rifle full upon
the sharklike projectile.

The rifle report was almost instantaneous with the roar of the torpedo.
The latter blew up not twenty yards from the destroyer’s rail!

“Hi! Hi! Hi!” yelled the mates of the keen-sighted Torrance.

“Well done!” called the officer of the watch through his megaphone.
“Well done, Torrance!”

The whole crew cheered again, and Al’s flaming face acknowledged their
appreciation. Mr. MacMasters came quickly to wring the lad’s hand in
appreciation.

“Good for you, Torrance,” he said. “Your name goes down on the log for
that.”

“Aw, she wouldn’t have hit us anyway,” said Al, quite overcome by so
much praise.

“Never mind. It showed accurate marksmanship and good work, too. Those
autoprojectiles are dangerous to leave drifting about the seas. You get
a good mark, my boy.”

Meanwhile the _Colodia_, swerving not a hair from her course, reached
and overran the spot where the submersible had sunk. The order rang out
and the depth bomb was dropped. Then the destroyer scurried out of the
way to escape the effect of the deep-down explosion.

Up from the depths rose a mound of muddy water. It rose twenty feet
above the surface, and the spray shot twice as high. The thundering
explosion shook the running destroyer in every part. The effect of the
discharge upon what was under the sea must have been terrible.

Half a mile away the _Colodia_ swerved and circled, to pass again over
the spot where the bomb had been dropped. The boys leaned over the rails
to watch for anything in the water that might prove that the submarine
had been wrecked. There was not a bit of wreckage; but suddenly Ikey
Rosenmeyer shrieked:

“Oil! Oil! Oh, bully! Oil!”

A roar of other voices took up the cry. Great bubbles of oil rose to the
surface. The _Colodia_ passed over a regular “slick” of fluid that could
mean nothing but that the tanks of the submersible had been ripped open
by the explosion of the depth bomb.

Morgan found George Belding standing beside him and looking back at the
oil-streaked waves with a very serious visage.

“What’s on your mind?” asked the Seacove lad.

“It seems terrible, doesn’t it, Phil?” said Belding. “All those fellows!
Gone like _that_!” and he snapped his fingers.

“Well,” returned Whistler, “you wanted action, didn’t you? Now I guess
you’ve had enough for a while.”

“I believe you,” agreed his friend solemnly.

But the work and life of the boys on the destroyer was not altogether
made up of such scenes and incidents as these that have been related.
Just at this time the troop ships were coming across from America in
great convoys and the _Colodia_ sometimes had less than half a day in
port between trips. Four or five hours ashore in the English port, or at
Brest where the greater number of ships from America landed their
freight and human cargoes, was the utmost freedom that the Navy Boys and
their mates secured.

There were extra calls, now and then, like these which have been related
herein. When an S O S call is picked up by shore or ship radio, every
Naval vessel within reach is sure to make for the point of peril.

The life was not altogether exciting, however, for there were many days
of tedious watching and waiting in which it seemed that the Hun boats
had all scurried back to their bases and the patrols scarcely raised a
porpoise, much less one of the “steel sharks of the sea.”

At Brest, well along in the month following the introduction of George
Belding to the _Colodia_, the young fellow from New York got a cablegram
from his father mentioning the date of the _Redbird’s_ sailing for Bahia
with his own family and Philip Morgan’s sisters aboard.

Whether the treasure of gold coin was to be part of the ship’s burthen
or not, the cablegram did not state. George had written his father about
his lost letters and papers and of the probability that the knowledge of
the treasure would reach those Germans who would consider the ship bound
for South America, and all she carried, their legitimate prey.

If information of the treasure of gold coin had been sent by the spy
from the Zeppelin to his associates in the United States, there might be
already afoot a plot to get possession of Mr. Belding’s gold. The boys
of the _Colodia_ had not heard of the capture of the spy who had
disappeared in George Belding’s uniform. Much as they had inquired in
England, they had been able to learn absolutely nothing.

Phil Morgan had even been to see Franz Eberhardt at the port hospital
where the young German was confined while his arm was being skilfully
treated by the English surgeons. Later the German youth had been taken
to an internment camp in one of the back shires. Before he had gone
Whistler had tried to get him to talk again about “Cousin Emil.” But
Franz had become wary.

He was no longer acting “the schmardie,” as Hans Hertig had called him.
He had begun to see something of England and had learned something of
the character of the English. To be a prisoner, and well treated as he
was, was a much more serious situation than had at first appeared.

But he refused to say anything at all of Cousin Emil. Whether it really
was Franz Eberhardt’s cousin with whom the Navy Boys and “Willum”
Johnson had had their adventure, the fact remained that as far as the
boys knew, a German spy was at large in England, And he had information
in his possession that might possibly injure Mr. Belding and his
affairs.

The Seacove boys were all now interested in the sailing of the
_Redbird_. If Whistler’s two sisters alone had been sailing for Bahia
the others would have felt a personal anxiety in the matter.

“Wish the old _Colodia_ was going to convoy that _Redbird_,” Al Torrance
said. “Eh, fellows?”

“By St. Patrick’s piper that played the last snake out of Ireland!”
declared Frenchy Donahue, “’twould be the foinest of luck if she was.”

“Oi! oi! Ain’t it so?” murmured Ikey. “And that Alice Morgan such a
pretty girl! I hope that _Redbird_ gets to Bahia safe.”

“As far as we can hear,” said Whistler cheerfully, “there are neither
submarines nor raiders now in the Western Atlantic. They seem to have
been chased out, boys.”

This supposition, however, did not prove to be founded on fact; for on
the very next occasion that the _Colodia_ was in the French port, Brest,
there was much excitement regarding a new German raider reported to have
got out of Zeebrugge and run to the southward, doing damage on small
craft along the French coast. This was before the British Captain
Carpenter with the _Vindictive_ bottled up that outlet of German ships.

Some denied that it was a raider at all, but a big, new submarine that
was built with upperworks to look like a steam carrier when she was on
the surface. However, she had a name, it being the _Sea Pigeon_, instead
of a letter and number. The whole fleet of destroyers was soon on the
lookout for this strange vessel, and the American commanders offered
liberal rewards to the owners of the sharp eyes who first spotted the
new Hun terror of the seas.

The _Colodia_ went to sea to meet a new convoy from America, “all set”
as the boys said, to make a killing if they ran across the _Sea Pigeon_.

“Well, we got the _Graf von Posen_,” Ikey Rosenmeyer said, with cheerful
optimism, “so why not this here _Pigeon_ ship? We’re the boys that bring
home the bacon, aren’t we?”

“Aw, Ikey!” groaned Frenchy Donahue. “Can’t you ever forget you were
brought up in a delicatessen shop? ‘Bring home the bacon,’ indade!”




CHAPTER XII--WIRELESS WHISPERS


On duty with the morning watch, just after sick call at half past eight,
Phil Morgan and George Belding met right abaft the radio station. There
was half an hour or so before the divisions would be piped to fall in
for muster and inspection, and the two friends could chat a little.

“Well, the folks are on the sea, as we are, Phil, if the _Redbird_
sailed as per schedule,” Belding said.

“I sha’n’t feel really happy till we hear they are at Bahia,” responded
Whistler, shaking his head.

“Right-o! But the _Redbird_ is a fine ship, and just as safe as a
house.”

“But she’s a sailing ship--and slow.”

“Not so slow, if anybody should ask you,” returned Belding smiling.

“A four-master?”

“And square rigged. A real ship. No schooner-rig, or half-and-half.
Captain Jim Lowder thinks she is the finest thing afloat. Of course, she
is thirty years old; but she was built to last. Regular passenger
sailing ship, with a round-the-world record that would make the British
tea ships sit up and take notice. Her cabin finished in mahogany,
staterooms in white enamel--simply fine!”

“I didn’t know they had such sailing ships,” said Whistler in wonder.

“Oh, there are a few left. The Huns haven’t sunk them all. Nor have the
steam craft put such as the _Redbird_ out of commission. You couldn’t
get Captain Jim Lowder to take out a steam vessel. He abominates the
‘iron pots,’ as he calls the steam freighters.

“But sailing ships like the _Redbird_ are kept out of the European trade
if possible. Even Captain Lowder must admit that a sailing ship is not
in the game of fighting subs.”

“That is the way I feel. Wish your folks and mine were going south on a
steamer, George.”

“No fear. They will be all right,” was Belding’s reassuring reply.

“Just the same I’d feel a lot better if all the Hun subs and raiders
were bottled up at their bases.”

“By the way,” said Belding, “what do you think of this _Sea Pigeon_ we
hear so much talk about? Think there is such a craft?”

“Why not? We know that some kind of an enemy vessel slipped along south
and evaded our patrol, leaving a trail of sunken and torpedoed ships
behind her.”

“But a huge submarine, with superstructure and all----”

“_That_ is only a guess,” laughed Whistler. “Personally, I believe this
_Sea Pigeon_ is a raider and no submarine at all. A submarine of the
size reported would use up a lot of petrol.”

“That’s all right,” said Belding quickly. “She could get supplies down
along the Spanish coast. There are plenty of people that way friendly to
the Germans.”

At the moment they heard the sudden chatter of the radio instrument.
Belding turned instantly to put his head into the little room. The
operator smiled and nodded to him.

“Something doing,” he muttered. “One of you chaps want to take this
message to the com?”

“Let’s have it,” said Whistler, quickly, holding out his hand.

“I’d like to put on that harness myself,” said Belding. “We had a
wireless on the roof of our house in New York before the war. Government
made us wreck it.”

“Jinks!” exclaimed Whistler, waiting for the operator to write out the
message received and slip it into an envelope. “Do _you_ know how to
work one of these things, George?”

“I know something about it,” admitted Belding. “What’s it all about?” he
asked the operator.

“Orders for us,” said the man. “You’ll know soon enough. We’re due for
new cruising grounds, boys. But keep your tongues still till the com
eases the information to all hands.”

He had finished the receipt and “repeat” of the message. Whistler took
the envelope and sprang away with it to the commander’s quarters.

He knew by the expression on Mr. Lang’s face when he scanned the message
that there was something big in view. The commanding officer of the
_Colodia_ swiftly wrote a reply and gave it to Whistler for the radio
man. Belding was still hanging about the wireless room. His face was
flushed and his eyes shone.

“Do you know what it is all about, Phil?” he whispered.

“Not a thing. But the Old Man,” said Whistler, “is some excited.”

Rumor that changed orders had reached the _Colodia_ spread abroad before
muster and inspection. The usual physical drills were gone through while
the boys’ minds were on tiptoe. Even the order at four bells to relieve
the wheel and lookout startled the crew, so expectant were they.

But nothing happened until just before retreat from drill at
eleven-thirty. Commander Lang then made his appearance. He went to the
quarter and addressed the crew.

“We have been honored by an order to go freelancing after a suspected
vessel, supposed to be a German raider, last and recently reported to be
off the Azores,” he said. “Because we were successful some months ago in
taking the _Graf von Posen_, we are assigned to this work.”

At this point the crew broke into cheers, and with a smile the
commanding officer waved his hand for the boatswain’s mates to pipe
retreat.

The _Colodia_ was at this time sailing within sight of half a dozen
other destroyers bound out to pick up the expected convoy. After a
little her wireless crackled a curt “good-bye” to her companions, and
the _Colodia_ changed her course for a more southerly one.

The chances, for and against, of overhauling the _Sea Pigeon_ were
volubly discussed, from the commander’s offices to the galley, and
everybody, including the highest officer and the most humble steward’s
boy, had a vital interest in the destroyer’s objective.

To attempt to chase a ship like this German raider about the ocean was a
most uncertain task.

“But if the luck of the _Colodia_ runs true to form,” Al Torrance
expressed it, “we shall turn the trick.”

“That this _Sea Pigeon_ is a raider and not a submarine, seems to be an
established fact,” Belding said. “Sparks got some private information
from the radio station at the Azores and says the ship is a fast steamer
made over from some big, fat Heinie’s steam yacht he used to race before
the war. She has just sunk a wheat ship from the Argentine.”

“Sparks” is the nickname usually applied to the radio operator
aboardship, and George Belding was quite friendly with the chief of the
wireless force on the destroyer.

“George gets all these ‘wireless whispers’ because he has a pull,” said
Whistler, smiling. “If anything ever happens to Sparks, I expect we’d
see George in there with his head harnessed.”

“And it’s no bad job!” cried Al enthusiastically. “I’ve often wished I
could listen in on this radio stuff.”

“Oi, oi! That just goes to show the curiosity of you,” declared Ikey
Rosenmeyer, with serious air. “It is a trait of your character that
should be suppressed, Torry.”




CHAPTER XIII--THE SUPER-SUBMERSIBLE


The boys from Seacove and George Belding--but especially the last and
Phil Morgan--had a second topic of daily conversation quite as
interesting, if not as exciting, as that of the German raider, in chase
of which the _Colodia_ was now driving at top-speed into the southwest.

This topic was the fruitful one of the _Redbird_ and her cruise to
Bahia. If the big sailing ship had left New York on the date promised,
then the Belding family and Phil’s sisters would now be off
Hatteras--perhaps even farther south.

“For you can believe me, Belding,” Al Torrance declared earnestly, and
speaking with all the sea-wisdom acquired during his naval experience,
“that Captain Lawdor would not sail right out across the Gulf Stream and
make the Azores or the Canaries a landfall, as he might have done before
Hun submarines got to littering up the Atlantic as they do now.”

“We cannot be altogether sure of his course,” murmured George Belding.

“Sailing vessels hate to head into the current of the Gulf Stream,”
added Whistler, likewise in doubt.

“You chaps are determined to expect the very worst that can happen,
aren’t you? Like a fellow going to have a tooth extracted,” said Al,
with disgust. “Now, listen here! It stands to reason that news of this
new raider, the _Sea Pigeon_, or whatever it is they call her, was
transmitted to the other side of the periscope pond. George’s father and
the captain of the _Redbird_ would be warned before they sailed from New
York of this new danger--if not afterward, by wireless. Of course the
ship has a radio plant, hasn’t she?”

“Of course,” agreed the shipowner’s son.

“Nuff said! They never in this world, then, would take the usual course
of sailing ships for South America. They would not cross the Gulf
Stream. It will take the _Redbird_ a little longer to buck the northerly
set of the current; but that is what Captain Lawdor will do, take it
from me! I figure they are now about off Hatteras, following the usual
course of the coasting vessels.”

“Not much leeway for a big sailing ship,” muttered George.

“Better hugging the shore, even stormy old Hatteras, which _we_ know
something about, eh, fellows?” added Al, “than dodging subs and raiders
out in the broad Atlantic.”

He had an old chart and was marking off the possible course of the
_Redbird_ with a lead pencil.

“Good work, Torry,” said Frenchy Donahue. “It’s navigation officer
you’ll be next.”

They were all five deeply interested, and each day they worked out the
probable course of the sailing ship, as well as figuring the distance
she probably had sailed during the elapsed twenty-four hours.

“I only hope,” George Belding said, “that we overtake this _Sea Pigeon_
and finish her before her commander takes it into his head to steam
across the ocean to the western lanes of travel. If the raider should
intercept father’s ship----”

“Ah, say!” cried Frenchy, “that ‘if’ is the biggest word in the
language, if it has only two letters. Don’t worry, Belding.”

That advice was easy to give. George and Whistler remained very anxious,
however; indeed, they could not help being. Nor did the activities
aboard the destroyer during the next few days much take their thought
off the _Redbird_ and her company and cargo.

They talked but little--even to their closest boy friends--about the
possibility of there being a great store of coined gold aboard the
_Redbird_. Just the same, this fact they knew would cause the ship to be
an object of keen attraction to any sea-raider who might hear of it.

The spy from the Zeppelin had secured George Belding’s letters in which
the gold treasure was mentioned and Mr. Belding’s voyage in the
_Redbird_ explained. More than a month had elapsed between the spy-chase
behind the little English port and the sailing of the square-rigged ship
from New York for Bahia, Brazil.

“And you know,” George once said, “a whole lot can happen in a month.
Those Germans have an ‘underground telegraph’ that beats anything the
negroes and their Northern sympathizers had during, and previous to, our
Civil War.”

“Aw, don’t bring up ancient history,” growled Al, who tried to be
cheerful, but who found it hard work when the older boys seemed
determined to see the dark side of the shield. “I’ve forgotten ’most all
I ever knew about every war before this one we’re into with both
feet--and _then_ some!”

“Sure, Torry,” put in Frenchy Donahue, “don’t you remember the war of
that showman who antedated Barnum--the one they say got a herd of
elephants over the Alps to fight for him?”

“Oi, oi! Hannibal!” cried Ikey.

“Say! it would take a friend of yours to do that, Frenchy,” said Al in
disgust. “I’ve always had my doubts about that fellow, Hannibal.”

“Besides,” went on Ikey, going back to Belding’s statement, “it’s
nothing to do with ‘underground’ or any other telegraph. The Germans use
wireless. If that spy got news across the pond----”

“Right-o!” broke in George, with increased good-nature and an answering
smile. “But let’s ‘supposing.’ That spy has had ample time to transmit
to friends on the other side of the ocean information about the gold my
father is carrying to South America.”

“Why,” said Whistler, slowly unpuckering his lips, “he might even have
crossed to New York himself by this time--if the British didn’t catch
him.”

“If they had caught him wouldn’t we have been told?” asked Belding
quickly.

“How? By whom?” demanded Whistler.

“Say!” declared Al vigorously, “the British War Office makes a clam look
like it had a tongue hung in the middle and running at both ends!”

“Now you’ve said something!” muttered Frenchy.

“That’s right! The world doesn’t even know how many submarines have been
sunk and captured, already yet,” declared Ikey excitedly. “And we
_won’t_ know, it’s likely, till the end of the war.”

“What’s the odds?” growled Al.

“You got to hand it to them,” sighed Whistler. “The British have great
powers of self-restraint.”

“You said it!” again put in Frenchy.

“Well,” Ikey said, more moderately, “if that chap that came near sending
Belding here west, was that schmardie’s brother----”

“Cousin!” interposed Whistler.

“Well--anyhow and anyway--Emil Eberhardt--I say!” cried Ikey, “he might
have got free and gone over to New York by submarine, or someway, like
Whistler says.”

“What do you suppose he’d do if he wanted to get that money off the
_Redbird_?” asked Frenchy, big-eyed.

“Ask us an easier one,” begged Al Torrance.

“You kids are letting your imaginations run away with you,” put in Phil
Morgan.

But in secret the two older boys--Belding and Whistler--did not consider
the idea of the spy reaching New York before the _Redbird_ sailed at all
impossible.

“That chap with the broken arm we took off the wrecked Zep,” Belding
remarked once to Morgan, “told you his cousin, the ‘super-spy,’ was
bound for America, didn’t he?”

“He dropped such a hint,” admitted the Seacove lad. “But pshaw! we don’t
even know that Franz Eberhardt referred to the fellow we had our
adventure with.”

“I know! I know!” muttered George Belding. “But I do wish Willum
Johnson, the strong man, had got his hands on that spy.”

“‘If wishes were horses----’”

“Sure! And perhaps it is all right. At any rate, father must have got my
letter before he sailed, in which I told him all about losing the papers
and warning him about German plotters. Of course he must have got that
letter.”

But this thought would have afforded them little comfort had the two
friends known that the ship which bore George Belding’s letter of
warning had been sunk off the Irish coast by a German U-boat, and that
that particular freight or mail for the United States would probably not
be recovered until after the war.

The _Colodia_ touched at St. Michael and then at Fayal, receiving in
both ports information of the escapades of the new raider. Lastly she
had been heard of far to the west.

Perhaps she was going across the ocean to prey on the American coastwise
trade! This was a suggestion that put the Seacove boys and Belding on
edge.

There was, however, something rather uncertain about the stories
regarding the _Sea Pigeon_. Some of the merchant crews that had already
met her, declared her to be a huge new submarine--a submersible that
looked like a steam freighter when she was afloat, and that she was all
of three hundred feet long.

“Some boat, that!” observed Mr. MacMasters. “We’ve seen ’em with false
upperworks, boys. But you know, even the _Deutschland_ was no such
submarine as this one they tell about.”

Whistler put forth the idea that there were two ships working in these
waters; but not many accepted this until, the day after they left Fayal,
and the destroyer was traveling west, Sparks suddenly picked up an S O S
from the south. The Argentine steamship _Que Vida_ was sending out
frantic calls for help. She was being shelled by a monster submarine two
hundred miles off the port of Funchal of the Madeiras.

“This is the real thing--_Sea Pigeon_ or not!” the radio operator
confided to George Belding. “She’s the super-sub we’ve been hearing
about. The operator on this Buenos Aires’ ship says she came right up
out of the sea at dawn and opened fire with guns fore and aft. Has used
a torpedo, and has upperworks like a regular honest-to-goodness steam
freighter.

“There! He’s off again!” he exclaimed, as the radio began to spark, and
he turned back to the machine.

So was the _Colodia_ off again, and at full speed, dashing away in quest
of the _Que Vida_ and the great submersible that had attacked her.




CHAPTER XIV--THE MIRAGE


Phil Morgan, coming up suddenly from the berth deck just as sweepers
were piped at 5:20 in the morning, fairly overturned a smaller lad who
had been straddling the top of the ladder.

“Hi, you sea-going elephant, you!” complained Ikey Rosenmeyer’s voice.
“Look where you are going!”

“‘Keep off the engine room hatch’,” chuckled the older lad, quoting one
of the emphasized orders from the manual. “Haven’t you learned that
yet?”

“No more than you have learned that ‘Whistling is never permitted aboard
ship’,” rejoined Ikey, getting up and rubbing his elbows.

“Wasn’t whistling!” denied Morgan.

“Well, your lips were all puckered up, just the same. And you know what
old Jehoshaphat,” he observed, using the nickname for the chief
master-at-arms, “said that time about your doing that. It’s just as bad
to look like you were whistling as to do it.”

“Aw, he’s deaf and was afraid I was putting something over on him,”
Morgan declared, and immediately proceeded to “pucker up” again in a
silent tune.

It was true that Phil Morgan had received more than one demerit when
first he had come to sea because of this proclivity of his for
whistling. He had really been driven to the extremity of carrying a
couple of small burrs under his tongue to remind him of the infraction
of ship rules he was about to commit whenever he thoughtlessly prepared
to whistle.

The Navy Boys had had a good many rules besides these two quoted above
to learn. And not only to learn, but to obey! Excuses are not accepted
in the Navy. Anybody who has ever looked through the Bluejacket’s Manual
will be impressed by these facts.

Every waking hour of the day has its duties for the men and boys aboard
ship. Especially for the apprentice seamen class to which Whistler and
his friends belonged. Their “hitch” was for four years, or until they
were twenty-one. And the more they learned and the higher they stood in
their various classes, the better their general rating would be if they
enlisted for a second term.

This last was their intention and expectation. They were by no means
cured of their love for the sea or their interest in the Navy by the
hard experiences they had suffered.

For that Philip Morgan and his chums had been through some serious
experiences since the war began could not be overlooked. But they were
just the sort of lads to enjoy what some people might consider extremely
perilous adventures.

The daily routine of duty aboard the _Colodia_ at times seemed tedious;
but the Navy Boys managed to stir up excitement in some form if routine
became too dull. In fact, the two younger chums, Ikey Rosenmeyer and
Frenchy Donahue, were inclined to be venturesome and at times they got
into trouble with the authorities.

This fact occasioned Whistler at this early hour to wonder what Ikey was
doing at the head of the berth deck ladder. This was not the younger
lad’s watch. He caught Ikey by the arm and led him to the rail. They
were careful not to lean on the rail or on the lifelines, for that was
against orders.

“What are you watching here for, anyway?” the older lad demanded.

“For the sun,” grinned Ikey.

“What you giving me? You don’t suppose the sun has forgotten to rise, do
you?”

“Dunno. Haven’t seen him yet.”

“It isn’t time.”

“Well, I’m keeping my eyes open,” said Ikey with twinkling eyes but
serious face.

“Shucks! What’s the game, anyway?” demanded Whistler.

“Why,” said Ikey, “the sun went down so blamed sudden last night that I
wasn’t sure whether it really set same as usual, or just that the old
fellow went out of business entirely. Didn’t you notice it?”

“Ah!” exclaimed the older lad, seeing the light, if not the sunlight.
“Don’t you know that we are getting nearer and nearer to the tropics,
and that there is mighty little twilight there?”

“No!”

“Fact. Night falls very suddenly.”

“‘Sudden!’ You said it!” ejaculated Ikey. “It’s enough to take your
breath. I told Frenchy I wasn’t sure the sun would ever come up again.”

The fingers of Dawn were already smearing pale colorings along the
eastern sky. The two boys watched the growing day wonderingly. No two
sunrises are alike at sea, and Whistler was never tired of watching the
changing sky and ocean.

This was the morning following the S O S call regarding the attack of
the super-submarine on an Argentine ship. The _Colodia_ was pounding
away at a furious rate toward the place which the wireless had
whispered; but the spot was still some leagues away.

It was a cloudy morning, the clouds being all around the horizon with
the promise of clear sky overhead. Windrow upon windrow of mist rolled
up above the horizon. The light in the east was half smothered by the
clouds.

“I guess the old sun will get here on the dot,” said Whistler, in a mind
to turn away to go about his duties.

“I’m going to wait for him,” said Ikey stubbornly. “No knowing what
tricks he might play. Hi! Look there!”

Whistler, as well as Ikey, suddenly became interested in what they saw
upon the western sky. There was a stratum of cloud floating there,
beneath which the horizon--the meeting line of sky and sea--was clear.
The spreading light of dawn imparted to this horizon line a clearness
quite startling. It was as though it had been just dashed on with a
brushful of fresh paint.

The floating cloudland was pearl gray above and rose pink beneath; and
that streak of “fresh paint” on the horizon line separated this
cloudland from the dull blue water.

The sun would soon pop up above the eastern sea line, despite Ikey’s
pessimism, and his coming rays were already touching lightly the clouds
above.

“Look at that! Isn’t it great?” breathed Whistler. “Why, you can just
about see through that cloud. It doesn’t seem real.”

“Clouds aren’t supposed to be very solid,” scoffed Ikey, unappreciative
of the poetry in his mate’s nature. “Only air and water.”

“Huh! Two of the three principal elements,” snapped Whistler. “Where’s
your science, smart boy? And that plane of cloud----”

“Looks just like the flat sea below it,” suggested Ikey, his interest
growing.

“You’re right, it does!” admitted Whistler. “See! I believe that cloud
is a reflection of the sea beneath. I bet it isn’t a cloud at all!”

“Then I guess I was right,” chuckled Ikey. “Nothing very _real_ about
it, is there?”

Mr. MacMasters came forward along the _Colodia’s_ deck just as Ikey made
this reply. He addressed the two friends smilingly:

“What is all the excitement, boys? Haven’t spotted a submarine, have
you, Rosenmeyer?”

Whistler turned to the ensign and waved a hand toward the phenomenon in
the west.

“What do you think of that out there, Mr. MacMasters?” he asked.

“I am not sure, but I think we are being vouchsafed a sight not often
noted at sea--and at this hour. It looks like a mirage.”

“Oi, oi!” murmured Ikey. “I understand now why it looks so funny.”

Whistler said: “Then that is a reflection of the sea up there in the
air?”

“Hanging between sea and sky, yes,” said the ensign. “A curious
phenomenon. But not, in all probability, a reflection of the sea
directly under that cloudlike vision.”

“No, sir.”

“Probably a reflection photographed on the clouds of a piece of the
ocean at a distance--just where one could scarcely figure out even by
the use of the ‘highest of higher mathematics’,” and the ensign laughed.

“A mirage,” repeated Whistler. “Well, I never saw the like before.”

“It looks just like a piece of the ocean, doesn’t it?” said Ikey
eagerly. “But there are no ships----”

He broke off with a startled cry. Mr. MacMasters and Whistler echoed the
ejaculation. Everybody on deck who had paid any attention to the mystery
in the sky showed increased interest.

Rising slowly and distinctly upon the reflective surface of the
reflected sea was an object which the onlookers watched with growing
excitement and wonder. It was the outlines of a ship--but not an
ordinary ship!

It had upperworks and the two stacks of a steam freighter. It was of the
color of the sea itself--gray; yet its outlines--even the wire
stays--were distinct!

The sea shown in the mirage had been absolutely empty. Now, of a sudden,
this ghostly figure had risen upon it. Whistler Morgan caught Mr.
MacMasters by the arm. He was so excited that he did not know he touched
the officer.

“Look at it! Do you know what it is?” he gasped. “That’s a submarine--a
huge submarine. She’s just risen to the surface.”

“It’s the sub we’re looking for!” cried Ikey, hoarsely. “My goodness,
see it sailing up there in the sky!”




CHAPTER XV--COMBING THE SEA


Suddenly the red edge of the sun appeared above the eastern sea line. He
had not forgotten to rise! For an instant--the length of the intake of
the breath the two astonished boys drew--the mirage painted by nature
against the western sky was flooded with the rising glory.

Then the wonderful picture was erased, disappearing like a motion
picture fade-out, and there no longer remained any sign of the startling
vision in the sky, save a mass of formless and tumbled cloud.

“What do you know about that?” murmured Ikey Rosenmeyer, in amazement.

“You’ll never see the like of it again, boys--not in a hundred years,”
Ensign MacMasters said with confidence. “That was a wonderful mirage!”

“But, Mr. MacMasters,” cried Whistler Morgan, “that vision was the
reflection of something real, wasn’t it? An actual picture of a part of
the sea?”

“So they tell us.”

“Where do you suppose that piece of water lies?” demanded the youth
eagerly.

“I have no idea. ‘Somewhere at sea’! It may be north, east, south, or
west of the _Colodia’s_ present position. As I tell you, there is no
means of making sure--that I know anything about,” he added, shaking his
head.

“Oi, oi!” exclaimed Ikey. “Then we don’t know any more than we did
before where that super-submarine is.”

“If that was a picture of her,” said Whistler thoughtfully.

“It is truly ‘all in the air’, boys,” laughed Ensign MacMasters. “We saw
something wonderful. Every mirage is that. But it is a mystery, too.”

“Maybe that wasn’t the picture of the submarine, after all,” Ikey
suddenly suggested. “Maybe that was the mirage of a real freighter we
saw. Two stacks and as long as this old destroyer, I bet! Maybe it only
looked as though it rose from the sea.”

“I’d wager money on it’s being a picture of a huge German submarine,”
said Whistler with confidence.

“Why so sure, Morgan?” asked the ensign with curiosity.

“You couldn’t see the water pouring off her sides as she came up in that
mirage,” scoffed Ikey.

“No; but another thing I did notice,” Whistler declared, answering both
the doubting ones. “She had no flag or ensign flying!”

“Good point!” cried Mr. MacMasters.

“If she had been a regular steamship, no matter what her business might
be, she would have shown at least a pennant. And we would have seen it
fluttering, for there is a good breeze.”

“Right, my boy,” admitted Mr. MacMasters. “I must report to the chief.
But, of course, we can have no surety as to the direction of the craft,
nor of her distance from us.”

The mirage caused considerable excitement and a good deal of discussion
aboard the destroyer. Aside from the more or less “scientific”
explanations offered by the old-time garbies in the crew, Ikey
Rosenmeyer suggested one very pertinent idea: As he had sighted the ship
which two other witnesses agreed was a submarine, was he not entitled to
the twenty-dollar gold piece which was Commander Lang’s standing offer
for such a discovery?

“Catch Ikey overlooking any chance for adding to his bank account,” Al
Torrance declared. “Why, he’s got the first quarter he ever earned and
keeps it in a wash-leather pouch around his neck.”

“Bejabbers!” agreed Frenchy in his broadest brogue, “an’ that’s the
truth. Did yez iver see the little flock of trained dimes Ikey’s got?
Wheniver they hear the spindin’ of money mintioned, they clack in Ikey’s
pocket as loud as a police rattle.”

“You certainly can stretch the truth, Frenchy,” admonished Belding.
“Truth in your facile fingers becomes a piece of India rubber.”

“Gab, gab, gab!” ejaculated Ikey, seriously. “It doesn’t prove anything.
I want to know if I am going to get the twenty? I saw the submarine
first.”

“A mirage,” scoffed Frenchy.

“That’s all right. It was a reflection of a real ship. Mr. MacMasters
said so. If I’d seen a submarine picture in a looking glass, rising
right off yonder,” and he pointed over the rail of the destroyer,
“wouldn’t I have yelled, ‘There she blows!’ and got the double-eagle?”

“But you gave no alarm,” grinned Al. “Did he, Whistler?”

“I guess he did call the attention of an officer to it,” Whistler
responded, with great gravity. “Are you going right up to the Commander
with your claim, Ike?”

While the boys and the rest of the crew were joking about the mysterious
submarine, the officers of the _Colodia_ were seriously engaged in
discussing the immediate course of the destroyer. They were under orders
to find the _Sea Pigeon_, a very fast raider; but they could not refuse
very well to try to pick up this big submersible, if she could be
overtaken.

The wireless messages from the _Que Vida_ had ceased hours before. That
afternoon they sighted a regular flotilla of small boats on the quiet
sea and knew at once that the submarine had again been at work. This
time, however, the Germans had been more merciful than usual to the crew
of the sunken ship.

Nevertheless the two life crafts and four boats were a long way from
either Fayal or Funchal. The sea was quiet, but the German submarine
commander did not know it would remain so. He had gone directly contrary
to international law in deserting these people.

They proved to be the crew and passengers of the _Que Vida_, more than
twenty-four hours in the boats. The captain had been carried away, a
prisoner, by the huge submarine that had attacked the steamship from
Buenos Aires.

The story of the chief officer of the lost ship was illuminating. The
_Que Vida_ might have escaped the Germans, being a fast vessel, had it
not been for the fact that the former appeared to be a merchant ship,
and flew a neutral flag, as did the _Que Vida_.

This enabled the submersible to get within gunfire range. Suddenly she
revealed her guns fore and aft and threw several shells at the Argentine
vessel. The latter was then so close that she was obliged to capitulate
immediately.

The German then ran down nearer and ordered her victims to abandon ship
within half an hour. She sent a boat for the captain of the merchant
vessel.

When the boats and rafts were afloat, a boatload of Germans on their way
to put bombs aboard the _Que Vida_ stopped and pillaged each boatload of
victims, taking their money, jewelry, any other valuables they fancied,
and especially pilfering the woolen garments of both men and women.

The _Que Vida_ carried some coin and her captain was evidently made to
tell of this. The Germans searched the ship before putting the time
bombs in her hold.

“Then, Señores,” said the chief officer, in concluding his story, “when
the poor _Que Vida_ was sunken, the great submarine steamed away with
Señor Capitan di Cos. Perhaps they have killed him.

“But we--Well, you see us. That gr-reat submarine is the most wonderful
ship. I would not myself have believed she could submerge did I not see
her go down with my own eyes not a mile away from our flotilla.

“And three hundred feet long she is, I assure you! As long as this
destroyer, Señores. A so wonderful boat!”

“Once we drop a depth bomb over her, we’ll knock her into a cocked hat,
big as she is,” growled one of the _Colodia’s_ petty officers in
Whistler’s hearing.

“And the captain of the Spanish ship--what of him?” murmured the Seacove
lad.

The taking aboard of the wrecked ship’s company caused considerable
excitement on the destroyer. These torpedo boat destroyers do not have
many comforts to offer passengers, women, especially.

“Cracky, Whistler!” observed Al Torrance to his chum, “there are girls
come aboard the old destroyer. What do you know about that?”

“Well, the Old Man couldn’t very well leave them to drown, could he?”
responded Morgan gravely.

“Spanish girls, too. One is a beauty; but the other is too fat,” said
Frenchy who claimed to be a connoisseur regarding girls and their looks.

“Hold him, fellows! Hold him!” advised Ikey, sepulchrally. “He’ll be off
again, look out!”

“Aw, you----”

“Don’t forget how he fell for that Flora girl when we were back there in
England.”

“Shucks!” said Belding laughing. “Flora was the goddess of flowers.”

“Ah,” said Ikey, shaking his head, “you don’t know Mike Donahue. He’ll
call this Spanish girl a goddess, yet. You just see.”

The _Colodia_, however, was driven at top speed for the nearest port,
there to be relieved of the shipwrecked company from the Argentine
steamship. So the susceptible Frenchy was soon out of all possible
danger.

There was a keen desire, on the part of both the destroyer’s crew and
officers, to overtake the craft that had brought the _Que Vida_ to her
tragic end.

It was well established now that the big submarine and the _Sea Pigeon_
were two different vessels, though they might be working in conjunction.
But either or both of the German craft would be welcome prey to the
United States destroyer. The latter continued her tedious work of
“combing the sea” for these despicable enemies.




CHAPTER XVI--STATIONS


Since sailing out of Brest and before receiving her special orders by
wireless telegraph, the _Colodia_ had made no base port where the crew
could receive either mail or cablegrams. Two weeks and more had passed.
Philip Morgan and George Belding had no idea where the _Redbird_ was, or
whether or not their relatives were safe.

“The fate of a ship at sea is an uncertain thing at best,” Phil Morgan
said seriously to his friend, “in spite of the old salt’s oft-repeated
prayer: ‘Heaven help the folks ashore on this stormy night, Bill!’”

“Don’t joke about such serious matters,” Belding replied. “Wonder how
far the folks have got toward Bahia?”

“Well, you know where we stuck the pins in the chart to-day, boy?”

“To be sure. But we don’t really know a thing about it.”

“Courage!” urged Whistler. “We are just as likely to be right in doping
out the _Redbird’s_ course as not.”

“It’s the confounded uncertainty of it that gets me,” said Belding
bitterly, and then changed the subject.

Interest in the _Colodia’s_ search for German raiders and submarines did
not flag even in the minds of these two members of her crew. For several
days, however, the destroyer plowed through the sea, hither and yon,
without picking out of the air a word regarding either the _Sea Pigeon_
or the huge submarine which some of the boys believed they had surely
seen in the mirage reflected against the morning sky.

The detail work of a naval vessel at sea even in wartime, unless
something “breaks,” is really very monotonous. Drills, studies, watch
duties, clothes washing, deck scrubbing, brass polishing. All these
things go on with maddening regularity.

Every time the wireless chattered the watch on deck started to keen
attention. But hour after hour passed and no word either of the German
raider or the big submarine was caught by Sparks or his assistants.

Yet there was a certain expectation of possible action all of the time
that kept up the spirits of the men and boys of the destroyer. At any
moment an S O S might come, or an order from the far distant naval base
for immediate and exciting work.

The _Colodia_ and her crew were supposed to be ready for anything--and
she was and they were!

The daylight hours were so fully occupied with routine detail that the
boys made little complaint; but during the mid-watch and the first half
of the morning watch when the time drags so slowly, the crew sometimes
suffered from that nervous feeling which suggests to the acute mind that
“something is about to happen.”

On this particular night--it was mid-watch--things were going very
easily indeed on the _Colodia_. It was a beautiful tropical night, with
a sky of purple velvet in which sparkled more diamond-stars than
Whistler Morgan or George Belding seemed ever to have seen before.

They were lying on the deck, these two, and gazing lazily skyward, it
not being their trick on lookout. The _Colodia_ was running as usual
with few lights showing; but not because it was supposed that there was
any other craft, either friendly or of the enemy, within miles and miles
of her course.

They lay within full hearing of the radio room. Suddenly the wireless
began to chatter.

“Hold on!” exclaimed Whistler, seizing his friend’s sleeve. “That isn’t
a call for you, George.”

“I’ve got so I jump everytime I hear it,” admitted Belding, sinking back
to the deck.

The messenger soon darted for the commander’s cabin. It was no immediate
order or signal for help, or he would have first hailed the bridge. But
soon Mr. Lang’s orderly appeared with a message for the officer of the
watch.

There were a few whispered words at the break of the bridge. Then the
officer conning the ship gave swift directions for her course to be
changed and signaled the engine room as well. Almost immediately the
pace of the destroyer was increased.

“I wonder what’s in the wind?” murmured Whistler.

“I’m going to see if I can find out,” said Belding, rising again.

He went around to the door of the radio room. Sparks himself was on
duty. He sat on the bench with the helix strap and “eartabs” adjusted.
He had just taken another message, but it was nothing meant for the
commander of the _Colodia_.

“That’s the second time to-night, George,” he said, removing his
head-harness. “I don’t know what to make of it.”

“What’s the matter, sir?” asked the young fellow.

“Why, I guess it’s static. Nothing more, I suppose. Yet it is a regular
‘ghost talk.’ I can almost make out words.”

“Goodness! What do you mean?” asked the young fellow, mightily
interested. “I never heard of ‘ghost talk’, though I know ‘static’ means
atmospheric pressure.”

“Pah! It means electricity in the air that we can’t wholly account for,”
said Sparks. “But this----”

“What?”

“Why, I tell you, George; twice to-night I have almost caught something
that seemed to be a message in one of our codes and tuned to this length
of spark. But I can’t really make head nor tail of it.”

“That wasn’t what you just sent aft to the Old Man?”

“Shucks! No! I’ll give you a tip on that, young fellow,” and the radio
man smiled. “We’ve been zigzagging across the steamship routes, but now
you will notice that we have an objective. That message was from
Teneriffe in the Canaries. That big sub has been seen down that way.”

“Bully!” exclaimed Whistler, who had come to look into the room over his
friend’s shoulder.

“Oh, that you, Whistler? Well, there is nothing secret about it. But
this confounded ‘ghost talk’----”

“Sounds interesting,” Whistler said.

“I’m puzzled. I hope I’ll catch it again. It is just as though
somebody--a slow operator, regular ham--was trying to put something over
and couldn’t quite do it. Funny things we hear in the air, anyway, at
times.”

He went back to his machine, grumbling, and the boys came away after a
bit. The news that the super-submersible had been heard of again was
something to talk about, at least, and served to keep them awake through
the rest of the watch.

In the morning the news that the German submarine was again active in a
certain part of the ocean to the southward became generally known. It
was likely that the strange and threatening craft, which plainly could
make longer cruises than most submarines, had been sent forth to prey
upon food ships from South America.

She expected to lurk along steamship lanes, like a wolf crouched in the
underbrush beside a forest path; and like that wolf, too, she was
relentless. Yet, her treatment of captured ships thus far had been more
humane than most, as shown by her use of the _Que Vida’s_ crew and
passengers.

“Still, she’s a regular pirate,” Whistler Morgan said in speaking of
this. “See how her men robbed those poor sailors, and even the women.”

“Ah, you said something then, boy!” Al Torrance agreed.

“I wonder,” George Belding said reflectively, “if the war should end
suddenly, and some of these U-boats are out in the various seas, if
their commanders won’t become veritable pirates?”

“How’s that?” cried Frenchy Donahue. “It’s pirates they are already!”

“But to go it on their own hook,” put in Ikey. “I see what Belding
means. Just think of a new race of buccaneers! Wow!”

“Begorra!” murmured the Irish lad, his eyes shining, “they might infest
certain seas like the old pirates of the Spanish Main.”

“I hope you see what you’ve started, George,” growled Whistler with mock
anger. “Those kids are off again.”

The friends from Seacove were not alone excited by the renewed chase of
the super-submersible. That day, too, there were two messages about the
German craft. She had sunk a small freight boat and a fishing sloop. It
was evident that she had run somewhere for supplies, and had now come
back to the island waters.

How many Canary fishermen’s sloops and turtle catchers she sank during
the next few days will never be known. Mark of such vessels could not be
taken until their crews rowed ashore--if they were fortunate enough to
get to shore. The tales the _Colodia_ got by wireless, however, showed
that the Germans were robbing all crews, as they had the people from the
Argentine ship.

From these shore reports, it seemed that the huge submarine was circling
about the steamship lane again, boldly attacking everything that came in
her way; but it was not until next day that the destroyer got out of the
air a _bona fide_ call for help. This was from the radio of the British
steamship _Western Star_ bound up the Cape of Good Hope.

She had merely time to repeat her S O S signal when her spark was cut
off. Doubtless the radio plant of the freighter was destroyed by
shellfire.

She had, however, given the _Colodia_ clearly her situation, and the
United States destroyer started upon another of those remarkable dashes
for which she and her sister ships were originally built.

There was a chance that they might reach the spot where the _Western
Star_ was being held up before the submarine could get away; and the
_Colodia’s_ crew was at stations, ready for what was coming.




CHAPTER XVII--THE SPITFIRE


That was a great race, as the boys declared. The engines of the
_Colodia_ seemed to pick her right up and fling her onward over the sea.

They passed no other ship, and after the breakdown of the _Western
Star’s_ wireless, they got but vague whispers out of the air, and
nothing at all about the huge German submarine that was attacking the
British freighter.

The lookout tops were filled with excited men and boys; every member of
the crew was on the alert. Tearing on through the calm sea, the
destroyer reeled off the miles as fast as ever she had since her
launching.

Two hours passed. Keen ears distinguished intermittent explosions from a
southerly direction. Then a smudge of smoke appeared on the horizon, as
though a giant’s thumb had been smeared just above the sea line.

“There she is!” went up the cry from the destroyer’s crew.

Their eagerness was increased, were that possible. As the cloud of smoke
grew, they were all aware that it was from a ship in flames. For some
reason the submarine had not torpedoed the freighter, but had set her
aflame with fire bombs.

Had the crew of the steamship been given a chance to escape? That
question was really the mainspring of the Americans’ desire to reach in
such a hurry the scene of the catastrophe.

There was the thought of vengeance, too. If they could but overtake the
German pirates and punish them as they deserved!

“It is all very well,” said Belding, “to put forth the excuse that these
Heinies only do what they are ordered to do. But how many of us Yankees,
for instance, would obey our officers if they ordered us to commit such
fiendish crimes as these submarine crews do, right along?”

The chance that the German submarine would remain in the vicinity of the
freighter till she sank, was not overlooked by the commander of the
_Colodia_. All on board were urged to keep their eyes open for the first
sign of the enemy.

But it was the refugees from the _Western Star_ that the destroyer first
raised--a flotilla of small boats being pulled steadily to the eastward
where lay the islands surrounding Teneriffe.

The _Colodia_ kept away from the survivors, fearing that she might draw
the fire of the submarine and that thereby the safety of the small boats
would be endangered.

The _Western Star_ was a roaring furnace, from stem to stern. The smoke
and flame billowed out from her sides, offering a picture of devastation
that was fairly awe-inspiring.

But the sea immediately about the burning ship, as far as the
_Colodia’s_ crew could see, was quite empty. There was no sign of the
enemy submarine.

A signalman called to the bridge, flagged the survivors, and a man arose
in the leading boat to answer. The Americans made out that the German
submarine had been in the vicinity until within a very few minutes. She
had but recently disappeared beyond the burning steamship, but had not
at that time submerged.

Commander Lang gave orders for a dash around the stern of the _Western
Star_. It was hoped that the approach of the destroyer might have
escaped the notice of the submarine’s commander.

Suddenly there was heard an explosion of a shell in the hull of the
burning ship. A great balloon of smoke belched forth and the craft shook
from bow to stern. It was evident that the Germans were getting
impatient and wished the big freighter to sink.

The gunners of the destroyer were at their stations. There was a chance
that they would get a shot at the submarine before she could submerge.

The _Colodia_ roared on, rounding the stern of the doomed ship. Another
shell burst within her fire-racked hull; a second explosion followed,
and the hull fairly fell apart amidships!

Then the American destroyer dashed into view of the enemy. The big
submarine lay only two cable lengths from the sinking ship, all her
upper works visible to the excited Americans. Even her conning tower was
open.

She really did look like a small freighter, even at that distance. She
had collapsible masts and smokestacks, and there were more than a dozen
men on her deck. It would take some time to submerge such a craft.
Plainly the Germans had not apprehended the approach of the American
destroyer.

“Hurrah, boys!” yelled one of the petty officers, “we’re going to take
tea with Heinie!”

A roar of voices went up from the decks of the destroyer in reply to
this cheer. A gun fore and aft spoke; both crews had been ordered to
fire at the same object. That was the open conning tower of the
submarine.

If ever American shells fell true, those two did! Right at the start the
submarine’s chances for escape were made nil. The conning tower was
wrecked and the craft could not safely submerge.

But she could fight. Her gunners turned their weapons on the destroyer,
and the shells began to shriek through the upperworks of the fast naval
ship. There were several casualties aboard the _Colodia_ within the
first few minutes.

But the submarine’s most dangerous projectiles, the auto-torpedoes,
could not be successfully used. As the destroyer swept past, the Germans
sent one of these sharklike things full at her. But the _Colodia_ darted
between the submarine and the flaming ship, and the projectile passed
her stern, landing full against the side of the _Western Star_.

The reverberating crash of the explosion was enough to wreck one’s
eardrums, so near was it. But all the time the destroyer was giving the
crippled submarine broadside after broadside of guns; the upperworks of
the German craft were fast becoming a twisted mass of wreckage!

Again and again the Americans’ guns swept the fated submarine. But the
latter was a spitfire. Behind armored fortresses her men fired her guns
with a rapidity that could but arouse the admiration of the boys on the
_Colodia_.

“Got to hand it to the Heinies!” yelled somebody. “They have bulldog
pluck.”

“Put a shell where it will do some good, boys!” begged one of the
officers. “We haven’t landed a hit in her ‘innards’--and that is where
the shells tell.”

“My goodness!” gasped Whistler, working beside Al Torrance on one of the
forward guns, “_that_ shell told something--believe me!”

The shot he meant seemed to have exploded under the deck of the
submarine. Yards upon yards of the armorplate was lifted and splintered
as a baseball might splinter a window.

The destroyer was rounding the submarine at top speed. Volley after
volley was poured into the rocking German craft. One shell wiped out a
deck gun and all the Germans manning it. The slaughter was terrible.

And yet her remaining guns were worked with precision--with desperate
precision. She could not hold the range as the Americans did, but her
crew showed courage as well as perfect training. The position of the
submarine was hopeless, yet they fought on.

Sweat was pouring into Phil Morgan’s eyes as he worked with his crew
members over the hot gun. The sun was scorching, anyway; it was the very
hottest place he and Al Torrance had ever got into, counting the big
fight when they were with the _Kennebunk_, and all!

The destroyer received very little punishment. If the submarine did
fight like a spitfire, her shells accomplished little damage.

The Americans saw the big burning steamship fall apart in the middle and
sink after the torpedo struck her. Great waves lifted their crests over
the spot, and it was at this time the submarine was put in the greatest
danger.

The spreading billows caught the helpless submersible and tossed her on
their crests. Those on the _Colodia_ saw the Germans running about the
deck like ants about a disturbed ant hill. Then a huge wave topped the
ship and broke over her!

A cheer started among the crew of the destroyer. But it was quenched in
a moment. When the great wave rolled past they saw that the submarine
had been flung upon its side and that it was sinking.

“She’s going down, boys! She’s going down!” cried George Belding. “Don’t
cheer any more--now.”

Indeed the awful sight completely checked cheering. It is all right to
fight an enemy; it is another matter to see that enemy sink beneath the
waves.

And the strangeness of this incident impressed the lads seriously as
well. The submarine’s own act had sunk her. She had been overborne by a
wave from the sinking of the freighter.

“She brought about her own punishment,” remarked Whistler, voicing the
general opinion of the crew of the American destroyer. “In other words,
it was coming to them and they got it!”




CHAPTER XVIII--“GHOST TALK” AGAIN


The _Colodia_ was put about, and at reduced speed approached the spot
where the submarine had gone down. There was very little wreckage on the
surface of the ocean; but several black spots seen through the officers’
glasses caused two boats to be hastily launched and both were driven
swiftly to the rescue of the survivors of the German craft.

Morgan was in one of these boats. All through the fight he had thought
of the Argentine skipper, Captain di Cos of the _Que Vida_. The
possibility of his still being aboard the submarine worried the American
lad. If there were prisoners, they had gone down with the enemy craft.

These were the fortunes of war; nevertheless, that the unfortunates
should be lost with the members of the German crew, was a hard matter.
Only three survivors were picked up, and one of them, with his arm torn
off at the socket, died before the boats could get back to the
destroyer.

The two were Germans. Questioned about possible prisoners aboard the
submarine, they denied knowledge of them. Yet it was positive that
Captain di Cos, at least, had been carried away by the German craft when
the _Que Vida_ was sunk.

Later some information was gleaned from the two prisoners brought back
to the _Colodia_. The super-submarine had been known as the One Thousand
and One. She was the first of a new type of subsea craft that the
Germans hoped to use as common carriers if they won the war.

According to the story told by the prisoners--especially by one who was
more talkative than his fellow--the huge submarine had a crew of sixty
men, with a captain for commander, a full lieutenant and a
sub-lieutenant. She was fully provisioned and carried plenty of shells.
Her commander’s desire to save torpedoes, their supply of which could
not be renewed nearer than Zeebrugge or Kiel, was the cause of the
submarine being caught unaware by the destroyer.

Had the _Western Star_ been sunk at once by the use of a torpedo, the
underseas boat would have been far away from the scene when the American
ship arrived. It was an oversight!

“And it is an oversight her commander can worry about all through
eternity,” Mr. MacMasters growled, in talking about it with the boys he
took into his confidence now and then. “It is my idea that that big sub
could get stores and oil without running home to her base; but she could
not get torpedoes.”

He did not explain further what Commander Lang and his officers
suspected. But the German prisoners had been interrogated very carefully
along certain lines, especially regarding that German raider called the
Sea Pigeon for which the _Colodia_ had really been sent in search.

The big submarine had taken considerable treasure and valuable goods
from the vessels she had sunk. Then, for a time, she had disappeared
from the steamship lanes. Where had she gone with the stolen goods?

The prisoners hesitated to explain this. Indeed, one of them became
immediately dumb when he saw what the questioning was leading to. From
his companion, however, was obtained some further information.

It was a fact that the submarine had left her base with the raider known
as the _Sea Pigeon_. The underseas boat convoyed the bigger craft
through the danger zone. It was not a difficult guess that when the two
German boats had separated arrangements had been made for certain
rendezvous at future dates--when and where? Besides, both boats were
furnished with wireless.

“I would make that Heinie tell the whole story,” Ensign MacMasters said.

“He might not tell the truth, sir,” suggested Whistler Morgan.

“Then I’d hang him,” declared the officer. “A threat of that kind will
make these brave Heinies come to time. I know ’em!”

Commander Lang had his own way of going about this matter. He used his
own good judgment. Whether he believed he had obtained the full truth
from the prisoners or not about the _Sea Pigeon_, he turned the
destroyer’s prow toward the reaches of the western Atlantic, leaving the
eastern steamship lanes behind.

The crew only knew that the _Colodia_ must be following at least some
faint trail of the raider. For the destroyer had been sent to get the
German ship, and Commander Lang was not the man to neglect his work.

The radio men picked plenty of chatter out of the air; but, as far as
the Navy Boys knew, though they tried to find out, little of it referred
to the German raider.

One thing George Belding did learn from his friend, Sparks: The “ghost
talk” was rife in the static once more. This wireless spectre had all
the operators in a disturbed state of mind, to say the least.

“Sparks seems to have lost his common sense for fair, over it,” Al
Torrance observed. “You know more about this aero stuff than any of us,
George. What do you really think it is? Somebody trying to call the
_Colodia_?”

“That is exactly what Sparks doesn’t know. He admitted to me that he
caught the destroyer’s name, but not her number. It’s got so now this
‘ghost’ breaks in at a certain time in the afternoon watch--just about
the same time each day. One of his assistants says he has spelled out
‘_Colodia_,’ too. But it may be nothing but a game.”

“How ‘game’?” asked Ikey eagerly.

“Somebody fooling with a machine. Sparks says the sounds grate just like
‘static!’”

“And that is as clear as mud,” complained Frenchy Donahue.

“Could this unexplained talk be some new German code?” Whistler Morgan
asked.

“All Sparks got is in English; but it doesn’t amount to any sense, he
says. If it is a code, he never heard the like before.”

“It might be a German code with English words,” put in Al. “One word in
code means a whole sentence.”

“I believe you! Wish Sparks would let me put on the harness and listen
in on it,” grumbled Belding. “I haven’t forgotten the wireless Morse I
learned back there before the war.”

“Go to it, George,” urged Al.

“I wish I knew Morse,” added Whistler. “Get into it, George. Get Sparks
to let you try a round with the ‘ghost talk.’ He is friendly to you.”

Thus encouraged, Belding took a chance with the chief of the radio
during that very afternoon watch. It was during these hours, it was
reported, that the strange and mysterious sounds broke in upon the
receiving and sending of the operators aboard the _Colodia_.

“It is against the rules to let you into this room, boy,” Sparks told
him, smiling. “I can’t give up my bench to a ham.”

“I’m no ham, Mr. Sparks,” declared Belding. “I’ve shown you already that
I can read and send Morse.”

“I don’t know,” the radio man murmured, shaking his head.

But he was really fond of George Belding, and the latter had to coax
only a little more. This, as a rule, was not a busy hour.

He allowed the youth to slide in on the bench and handed him the head
harness. George slipped the hard rubber discs over his ears and tapped
the slide of the tuner with a professional finger.

“Plenty of static,” he observed, for it was trickling, exploding, and
hissing in the receivers.

“No induction,” Sparks suggested.

Belding slid up the starting handle. The white-hot spark exploded in a
train of brisk dots and dashes. Belding snapped up the aerial switch and
listened. The message he was catching from the air was nothing to
interest him or the _Colodia_.

He was sensitizing the detector and soon adjusted the tuning handle for
high waves. The chief watched him with a growing appreciation of the
boy’s knowledge of the instrument and its government.

On these high planes the ether was almost soundless. Only a little
static, far-removed, trickled in. It was in the high waves that most of
the naval work is done and the sending of orders to distant ships is
keyed as fine as a violin string--and sounds as musical.

Sliding the tuning handle downward, Belding listened for commercial
wave-lengths. Something--something new and unutterably harsh--stuttered
in his ear.

He jerked back from the instrument and glanced suspiciously at Sparks.

“Do you hear it?” the latter demanded.

“I hear something,” said the young fellow grimly. “It--beats--me----”

Were these the sounds that had been disturbing the radio men, off and
on, for a week or more? Laboriously, falteringly, the rasping sounds
grated against Belding’s eardrums. It was actually torturing!

The atrocious sending began, in Belding’s ear, to be broken into clumsy
dots and dashes. The wave-lengths were not exactly commercial; nor did
the sending seem to be in the Continental code.

He listened and listened; he turned the tuner handle up and down. He got
the soundwaves short and got them long; high and low as well. But one
fact he was sure of: they were the same sounds--the same series of
clumsy dots and dashes--repeated over and over again!

George Belding swung at last from the instrument and tore off the
receiving harness. Sparks was grinning broadly upon him.

“Ugh!” ejaculated the youth. “Is it a joke? I am almost deafened by the
old thing.”

“What do you make out the ghost talk to be, George?”

“Are you sure it isn’t a joke?”

“Not on my part, I do assure you,” declared the radio man.

“Then,” said Belding slowly, “I believe somebody is trying to
communicate a message and for some reason can’t quite put it through.”

“Did you get the word ‘_Colodia_’?” Sparks asked quickly.

“No, sir. But one word I believe I did get,” said the young fellow
gravely.

“What’s that?”

“‘Help,’” Belding repeated. “‘H-e-l-p, Help.’ That’s what I got and all
I got. I do not think I am mistaken in that!”




CHAPTER XIX--A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION


Had George Belding not been such a stubborn fellow he never would have
stuck to his opinion about the strange call received by the _Colodia’s_
radio men, by wireless telegraph. For neither the chief, called Sparks,
nor his assistants or students (the latter scornfully entitled “hams”)
had spelled anything like “help” out of the strange sounds to which
Belding’s attention had been called.

“Don’t tell me such stuff,” insisted the chief. “That’s as old as the
hills, George. When I first went into wireless, it used to be the
standing joke to feed the student a ‘Help! We are lost’ call to steady
his nerves. It was called C D Q in those old times.”

“I am not kidding,” said George Belding rather sullenly, for he did not
like to be laughed at.

“No. And don’t try to make me believe that anybody is trying to kid you
with a ‘help’ call,” Sparks said, shaking his head.

But as we have said, George was stubborn. Sparks thought he had spelled
out the name of the destroyer in those grating sounds. If so, why
shouldn’t it be just as reasonable that Belding had heard the dots and
dashes spelling ‘h-e-l-p’?

Belding put this up to Whistler and Al when he had a chance to tell them
about it in the first dog watch. He was not excited at all. He simply
did not like to have his word doubted or be laughed at by Sparks.

“As for being laughed at,” the very sensible Philip Morgan said, “it
strikes me that I wouldn’t be worried by that. Your opinion is just as
good as old Sparks’ or anybody else’s, for that matter. Eh, Al?”

“Why not?” returned the other Seacove boy. “It was George heard the
sounds, not Sparks. Get a chance to listen in again, George.”

“Can it be possible that there is somebody trying to send a message for
help to the _Colodia_?” Whistler went on slowly.

“Cracky!” ejaculated Al, “I didn’t think of that.”

“Sparks says that he thought he spelled out the destroyer’s name. George
has heard the word ‘help.’ Get after it, George!” he added, earnestly.
“Don’t let ’em put you down.”

“But who under the sun would be doing such a thing?” demanded Al. “Is it
a joke, after all?”

“It will be a sorry joke if our Government gets after the sender. The
law is mighty strict about private wireless plants, you know,” said Phil
Morgan.

“There is one sure thing,” declared Belding. “If anybody is trying to
call this ship, they don’t know much about the regulation codes and
sendings. They don’t know the destroyer’s number, and the way they
handle Morse is a caution to cats!”

“Stick to it,” advised Whistler.

But George did not really need to be urged in this direction. The next
afternoon watch he was back at the radio room begging to “listen in”
again. Because of the interest the radio men had begun to feel in the
“ghost talk” in the air at this time of day, both Sparks and one of his
assistants were on hand.

The regular radio men were listening for the peculiar voice in the
wireless, at all hours; but it seemed to be confined now to an hour or
two in mid-afternoon. One after the other the _Colodia’s_ radio force
slipped on the receiving harness and listened to the mystery. Belding
got his chance, in spite of the fact that Sparks laughed at him.

This time Belding kept the instrument tuned down to the commercial waves
on which it seemed the “ghost talk” was the more easily transmitted. Now
and then he got the spelling of a letter clearly. But not a word in its
entirety did he hear on this day--not even “help.”

“I get ‘r’, ‘d’, and ‘b’ a lot,” he signed, turning the receiver over to
Sparks again. “They are in rotation--‘r’, ‘d’, ‘b’--and sometimes there
follows another ‘d’. There are letters missing between them, excepting
between the ‘b’ and the first ‘d’.”

“No ‘help’ stuff, eh?” queried Sparks.

“Nor any ‘_Colodia_’,” snorted Belding.

But he sat and watched the radio chief give his full attention to the
mystery, and after a minute or two saw that the man was spelling
something out carefully on the pad of scratch-paper under his hand.
Belding peered over his shoulder and saw Sparks set down these letters
as he heard them in the sound waves:

    R DB
    R DB R
    R DB D
    RE B D
    R D RD
    R DB
    RE I

Sparks pulled off the harness and swung about to look at George Belding.

“Is that about what you heard?” he demanded.

“Yes, sir. At least, in part.”

“Well, hang it all!” cried Sparks. “That’s a still newer combination.
It’s neither ‘_Colodia_’ nor ‘help.’ I tell you it beats me, George.”

When Belding left the wireless room he took with him the piece of paper
on which Sparks had written. The letters in combination seemed to mean
nothing; but he showed them to Whistler and Al Torrance when he found
those two chums together.

“Looks like one of those puzzles they have on the back page of the
papers at home,” said Al. “You know: The ones you are supposed to fill
in with other letters to make ’em read the same up and down and across.”

“This is no acrostic,” said Belding firmly.

But Whistler stared steadily at the paper for some minutes without
saying a word. Only his lips slowly puckered, and Al nudged him to break
off the thoughtful whistle which he knew his chum was about to vent.

“Huh? Oh! All right,” murmured Morgan, accepting Al’s admonition.

“What do you see?” asked Belding.

“I see that it is the same word each time, of course,” replied Whistler.
“But I don’t believe my eyes.”

“What’s that?” demanded the other two boys.

“If the ghost of the air,” said Whistler gravely, “did not spell out the
name of this destroyer this afternoon, it certainly did try to put over
the name of another ship.”

“Wow!” exclaimed Al. “Tell us.”

“What ship do you mean?” asked Belding, scowling thoughtfully at the
paper.

Quickly Whistler covered the letters on the sheet as, with his own
pencil, he filled in the gaps between them. When he flashed the sheet
before the eyes of his two friends each of the lines of letters made the
same word. And that word was:

    REDBIRD

“My goodness! You have gone crazy, Phil Morgan!” almost shouted Belding.

“Cracky! that’s the ship your sisters and Belding’s folks are aboard,
you know,” gasped Torry. “Why, Whistler, I believe with George that you
_are_ crazy!”

“All I see,” said Morgan, quite unruffled, “is that George brought us
some letters that, very easily and sensibly, make the name of his
father’s ship now bound for Bahia.”

“Cracky!” exclaimed Al again.

“But--but do you suppose anything has happened to father, mother and the
girls? Do you really, Morgan?”

“Who said anything about ‘something happening’ to them?” demanded his
friend with some heat. “I am merely pointing out the possibility that
the name of that ship is in a wireless message that somebody seems
anxious to put over.”

“But who--what----”

“Exactly!” exclaimed Whistler, stopping Belding at that point. “We don’t
know. We have merely learned that the radio men first spelled out the
name of this destroyer. Now you and the chief have caught the name of
the _Redbird_. The two names seem to be in the combination. Therefore,
is it ‘crazy’, as you fellows say, for me to suggest that perhaps the
mysterious message deals with both of the vessels named?”

“I begin to see your idea, Phil,” admitted Belding. “But it did shake
me. You know, I spelled out ‘help’ first of all.”

“But you did not get that to-day,” said Whistler quickly. Then he added:
“We know the _Redbird_ is fitted with wireless.”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps somebody aboard is trying to send a message to us just for
fun.”

“For fun, indeed!” exclaimed Al Torrance. “People aren’t fooling with
the radio ‘for fun’ in these times.”

“I don’t know. You know how girls are,” drawled Whistler. “George, does
your sister Lilian know anything about Morse and the radio?”

“Oh, my prophetic soul!” gasped Belding, suddenly arousing to the point
Whistler made. “I should say she did! Lil got to be fairly good at both
sending and receiving when we had the plant on the roof of our house.”

“Could this be Lilian trying to get a message over to us--just for fun?”

“Cut out the ‘fun’ business,” implored Al. “That doesn’t sound
reasonable.” But that was the very idea that caught George Belding.

“She’s that kind of girl,” he declared. “Tell her she must not do a
thing, and she’s sure to try it. But I don’t understand----”

“Of course, it’s only a guess on my part,” Whistler said quickly. “But
can’t you think of some way to try her out--identify her, you know? Tell
Sparks what you think and get him to let you try to send her a message.”

“Whew!” exclaimed Al. “So there’s nothing more than _that_ in it?
Shucks! Another mystery gone fooey.”

“Phil’s idea does sound awfully reasonable,” added Belding, evidently
much relieved in his mind.

Phil Morgan’s countenance did not reveal his secret gravity. He still
remembered that the word “help” had been connected with the names of the
two craft--the destroyer and the merchant vessel--which seemed to be a
part of the strange message out of the air.




CHAPTER XX--TOO LATE AGAIN


If the Seacove boys, George Belding and the radio force, found an
interest aside from the general object of the _Colodia’s_ cruise, the
bulk of the crew were not so fortunate. Their keen outlook for the
German raider the _Sea Pigeon_, began to be dulled as the tropical days
dragged by.

The destroyer was running down a westerly course near enough to the
equatorial regions to cause every one to feel the languor that usually
affects the northern-born in southern climes. The boys lolled around the
decks, and found drill and stations hard tasks indeed.

Everybody said: “Is it hot enough for you?” And with the permission of
the executive officer more than half the crew slept on deck instead of
below in their hammocks.

During a part of the afternoon watch the engines of the destroyer were
stopped, a life-raft was lowered on the shady side of the ship, and the
boys in squads were allowed to bathe, the quartermaster’s boat with two
sharpshooters in it, lying off a few yards on the watch for sharks.

The _Colodia_ had an objective point, however, toward which she was
heading without much loss of time. Hour after hour she steamed at racing
speed and through an ocean that seemed to be utterly deserted by other
craft.

In those wartimes the lanes of steam shipping, and sailing craft as
well, had been changed. Ships sometimes sailed far off their usual
course to reach in safety a port, the track to which was watched by the
German underseas boats. The _Colodia_ would ordinarily have passed half
a hundred ships on this course which she followed toward the American
shores.

Cruising the seas, whether for pleasure, profit, or on war bent, is a
very different thing nowadays from formerly. Practically this change has
been brought about by a young Italian who had a vision.

No longer does a ship go blindly on her course, unable to learn who may
be her neighbor, deaf to what the world ashore is doing as long as she
remains out of port.

The wireless telegraph has made this change. The radio furnishes all the
gossip of sea and land. Even in wartime the news out of the air puts
those at sea in touch with their fellowmen.

All day long, and through the night as well, the radio force on the
_Colodia_ might listen to the chatter of the operators on land and sea.
Unnecessary conversation between operators is frowned upon; but who is
going to “listen in” on a couple of thousand miles of wireless and
report private conversations between working radio men?

On the _Colodia_ a man was at the instrument practically every minute,
day or night. Commercial messages, weather warnings, code sendings of
three or four Governments, the heavy soundwaves from Nauem, the German
naval headquarters, flashes from ship to ship--all this grist passed
through the wireless mill of the destroyer.

All the time, too, they were seeking news of the _Sea Pigeon_, the
German raider, which the _Colodia_ had been sent out particularly to
find. Of course, the finish of the submarine One Thousand and One had
been reported to the naval base, and an emphatic, “Well done!” had been
returned. But the sinking of the submarine, after all, was not the main
issue.

As the destroyer had combed the sea for her prey, so she combed the air
by her wireless for news of the raider. And when the news came it was as
unexpected as it was welcome. The men were offering wagers that the
destroyer would end in seeing New York again rather than sighting the
_Sea Pigeon_, when just after the wheel and lookout were relieved at
four bells of the morning watch, the radio began to show much activity.

Messengers passed, running to and fro from the station to the officers’
quarters. There was not usually much radio work at this hour, and the
watch on deck began to take notice.

George Belding slid around to the radio room and showed a questioning
countenance to Sparks who was himself on duty.

“What’s doing, sir?” he asked the radio chief.

“Well, we haven’t picked up your particular S O S; but there is trouble
somewhere dead ahead.”

“I can feel that the engines are increasing speed, sir,” Belding said.
“Does it mean that we may have a scrap with a sure-enough Hun?”

“The message sounds like it,” admitted the radio man softly. “There’ll
be trouble, I reckon. You’ll hear all about it, soon enough.”

Commander Lang himself appeared on the bridge, and this was a
surprisingly early hour for him. Other officers gathered, and there
began a somewhat excited conference. The boatswain’s mates failed to
pipe the clothes lines triced up. Half an hour earlier than usual the
hammocks were ordered stowed. Ikey Rosenmeyer, who loved to sleep till
the last minute, was tumbled out unceremoniously and had to stow his
hammock in his shirt!

The hammock stowers likewise stopped down the hammock cloths early, and
the whole crew had their mess gear served out long before the galley was
ready to pipe breakfast. During the meal hour word was passed to shift
into uniform instead of work clothes.

“It’s extra drill, I bet,” declared one of the boys pessimistically.
“More work for the wicked.”

“There is something doing, sure enough,” Phil Morgan declared. “I think
we shall be piped to stations before long.”

He had not seen George Belding then. When the latter reported what he
had heard at the radio room Whistler was more than ever confident that
there was something of importance about to take place. It was some time,
however, before the real fact went abroad among the members of the crew.

The radio had indeed brought news at last of the raider. She was
supposed to be lurking near a point not more than two hours’ run ahead
of the _Colodia_. A report from a cattleship had been caught, stating
that she was chased just at daybreak by a steamship that was heavily
armed with deck guns, and that she surely would have been overtaken by
the enemy had fog not shut down and given the cattle boat a chance to
zig-zag away on a new course.

The description of the attacking vessel fitted that of the raider, _Sea
Pigeon_. Commander Lang and his officers believed that there was a
chance of meeting the German--of approaching her, indeed, unheralded.

There was a good deal of fog about; but overhead the sky was clear and
there was the promise of a hot day before noon. Having the approximate
latitude and longitude of the cattleship when she sighted the raider,
Commander Lang believed the _Colodia_ had a good chance of overtaking
the German ship while she was lingering about on the watch for her prey.

The fog was growing thinner, but had by no means entirely disappeared
even in the vicinity of the destroyer, when her wireless began to
chatter. Sparks sent a messenger on the run to the bridge. This incident
visibly increased the excitement of both officers and crew. Word was
passed in whispers from the petty officers stationed near the bridge
that the call was another S O S.

A second message followed almost immediately. The _Colodia’s_ engines
were speeded up. The crew was piped to quarters. The gun crews made
ready their initial charges. Everything about the decks was properly
stopped down and the destroyer was quickly put into battle trim.

Message after message came from the radio room. Belding came
breathlessly to Whistler and Al Torrance with the announcement that it
was a sugar ship being attacked, and surely by the raider. Soon the
distant reports of guns could be heard.

“If the _Susanne_ can only hold the Heinies off till we get there,” said
Belding, who had learned the name of the sugar-laden ship, “we will show
them something.”

“We will show them if the German raider isn’t too fast for us,”
responded Al. “They say this _Sea Pigeon_ is mighty fast and a pretty
nifty boat into the bargain.”

“The old _Colodia_ will show her,” said Whistler with confidence. “Just
give us a chance!”

The destroyer plowed on through both sea and fog, while the rumble of
the guns grew in magnitude. Whether much damage was being done or not, a
good many shots were exchanged by the combatants. It might have been a
veritable naval engagement.

The fog swirled about the bows of the _Colodia_, and the lookouts
strained their eyes to catch the first glimpse of the fighting ships. As
the fog was thinning from above, the watchers in the tops had the best
chance of first sighting the sugar ship and the raider that had attacked
her.

A wireless transmitted news of the fight as it progressed. The Germans
had not yet succeeded in putting the merchant ship’s radio out of
commission. In response, the destroyer had assured the _Susanne_ of her
own approach.

“Hold on! We are coming!” the _Colodia’s_ radio had sent forth.

“Enemy half mile off. Steaming two knots to our one,” came the response
from the sugar ship.

“Fight it out! We are coming!” repeated Sparks from the destroyer.

“Shell has burst abaft the afterhouse companion. Two of after gun crew
killed. Volunteers take their places. We have put a shell through
enemy’s upperworks.”

“Great! Keep it up!” chattered the _Colodia’s_ radio.

“Another shell has reached us aft. Women and children sent forward to
forecastle.”

The final sentence, read aloud by an officer from the bridge, excited
the crew of the _Colodia_ to the utmost.

The American seamen were spurred to fighting pitch now. Their only
desire was to get at the raider and her crew.

“It’s a running fight between her and the _Susanne_,” Morgan said to Al
Torrance. “Otherwise the German shells might have reached the sugar
ship’s engines before this.”

“Think of them shelling that merchant ship that has women passengers
aboard!” groaned Al. “What can those Germans be thinking of? What will
happen to them after this war is over?”

“They all believe they are going to win,” Belding said gloomily. “That
is what is the matter. And if they _should_, the whole world will be
treated just as ruthlessly as the Germans please.”

“Don’t talk that way! Don’t talk that way!” shouted Al. “I won’t listen
to such a possibility! They can’t win this war, and that’s all there is
to it!”

“Quiet, there,” admonished the voice of an officer, and the boys
subsided to whispered comments, one to the other.

Again and again the wireless chattered the cry for help. The guns
thundered ahead. Suddenly there arose a rosy light in the sky, spreading
through the fog in a wide wave of color.

“She’s blown up!” was the general and hopeless ejaculation from the crew
of the destroyer.

“Her engines went that time, sure enough--and her boilers, too,” groaned
Ensign MacMasters, who chanced to stand near the gun crew to which
Whistler and Al belonged and where Belding was stationed in reserve.
“She’s helpless now. If we don’t get there soon----”

There were no more radio messages. The calls to the _Susanne_ were not
answered. The melting fog soon gave the lookouts a clearer view ahead.

“Steamship tops and rigging in sight, sir!” was the cry to the bridge.
Then, a minute later: “She’s on fire, sir, and sinking by the stern.”

“Ah!” muttered Ensign MacMasters. “We are too late again!”




CHAPTER XXI--THE MYSTERY MESSAGE


In a very few minutes the crew of the _Colodia_--all those above deck,
at least--gained a view of the burning ship.

She was completely wrecked at the stern, and it was probably true, as
Ensign MacMasters had said, that her engines and boilers had been blown
up. She lay helpless and sinking.

All her passengers and her crew had been driven forward by the flames.
The bow of the steamship was slanting up into the air at a threatening
angle. The men were lowering such boats as there remained from the
forward davits.

The _Susanne’s_ bulk, the smoke, and the last shreds of the fog hid the
enemy from the view of the destroyer’s crew. But suddenly they saw a
high-powered motor-boat appear beside the crippled steamship. Armed men
filled it. Two stood up as the boat swung in to the steamship’s side and
caught the hanging davit ropes. They hooked these ropes to the launch,
fore and aft.

As quickly as one can tell it, the Germans “tailed on” to the ropes and
hauled their own boat into the air. In a minute she overhung the rail of
the sugar ship and the Germans swarmed out upon her deck.

The forward guns of the _Colodia_ might have thrown shells into this
launch, but such missiles would have imperiled the lives of the people
on the _Susanne_.

The _Colodia’s_ officers through their glasses could see the remaining
passengers and crew of the sugar ship lined up against the rail under
the threatening rifles of the Germans. There was considerable activity
on the deck of the sinking ship during the next few minutes.

The destroyer swerved in her course, her commander hoping to get around
the _Susanne_ and mark the position of the raider before the motor
launch could get away from the sinking ship. But the Germans worked so
quickly that this chance was very small indeed. The destroyer was still
a long shot away from the exciting scene.

A number of men were seen staggering along the deck of the sugar ship
bearing some heavy object. It was hoisted into the launch and then the
latter was lowered quickly into the sea, most of the Germans scrambling
down as best they might.

“It’s the purser’s strong box!” shouted one of the lookouts in the
destroyer’s top. “And they are going to shoot the poor guy, I bet, for
not giving up the combination!”

Other members of the _Colodia’s_ company had already observed a man’s
figure, with his hands tied behind him, standing at the farther rail of
the _Susanne_. The four last men from the raider’s launch, all ready to
descend into the boat, raised their rifles and fired across the deck at
the victim. The man fell, and the murderers swarmed down the rope into
the launch.

All this the excited crew of the destroyer saw while they were yet too
far away to be of any help. Commander Lang might have ordered his guns
to open fire; but the danger of hitting the _Susanne_ was too great.

The officer commanding the German launch was too sharp to give the
coming destroyer any safe chance of making a hit without damaging the
sugar ship. He steered his motor-boat right along the hull of the
crippled _Susanne_, under the shower of flaming débris that had begun to
fall, and went out of sight in a cloud of smoke that had settled upon
the sea.

This smoke offered a splendid bit of camouflage for the raider and the
launch. Up to this point the lookouts in the destroyer’s tops had caught
no glimpse of the _Sea Pigeon_. She was a very wary bird indeed!

The smoke cloud from the burning ship spread across the sea and
supplemented the fast dissolving fog in hiding the German craft. But
suddenly a lookout hailed the _Colodia’s_ quarter:

“Steamship’s top, sir! Six hundred yards abaft the sinking ship, sir!”

Orders snapped to the forward gun crews. They could see nothing but fog
and smoke astern of the _Susanne_; but their knowledge of elevation,
distance, and other gunnery lore, encouraged them to hope for a
“strike.”

The guns began to speak, and the shells shrieked over the stern of the
sinking steamship, exploding somewhere in the smoke cloud. There
followed no shots in reply. The Germans were shy. The thickening smoke
shut out again all sight of the _Sea Pigeon_.

The condition of the _Susanne_ was threatening. Commander Lang dared not
consider a pursuit of the German raider when lives were in such peril
here.

Two boats were all that had been put out from the sugar ship. Her other
small craft were smashed by the shellfire of the raider.

Some forty or more people were gathered in the bows of the _Susanne_,
and they must needs be taken off quickly. The big merchant vessel was
surely going down.

Her two boats had already pulled away to a safe distance. Commander Lang
would not risk his own small craft near the trembling hull of the
_Susanne_, but swerved the course of the destroyer that she might run in
under the high bows of the ill-fated ship.

Signals were passed, and the remaining members of the _Susanne’s_ crew
hastened to prepare slings in which to lower the passengers to the
destroyer’s deck.

“Volunteers to go up there and help those people! Smart, now!” sang out
the executive officer of the _Colodia_ through his trumpet.

Ikey Rosenmeyer and Frenchy Donahue, who were both free, leaped forward
at the call. With Seven Knott and two other sailors, they swarmed up to
the high bows of the imperiled ship.

The two Seacove boys were well trained in the uses of cordage and in
knotting and splicing. They seized a coil of rope and, working together
swiftly, safely lowered three women and a wounded man over the rail to
the destroyer’s deck before they were piped down from the _Susanne_.

Even the dead body of the murdered purser was sent aboard the _Colodia_.
The flames were by that time surging upward, and it was almost too hot
to stand upon her forward decks. The bows of the ship were being thrust
up as her stern sank. At any minute the wreck might plunge beneath the
sea.

“Back all!” rose a stentorian voice from the destroyer.

Ikey and Frenchy went over the rail and swarmed down their respective
lines. They were guided inboard to the firm deck of the destroyer. The
other workers followed. The _Colodia_ backed swiftly away.

Nor was this done a minute too soon. The wreck was already wallowing
from side to side like some wounded monster of the sea. The air pressure
blew up the forward deck. Had the survivors remained longer they would
have been overwhelmed!

A roaring like that of a great exhaust pipe came from the interior of
the sugar ship. The sea began to seethe in a whirlpool about her. She
stood almost upright on her stern as she sank.

Down, down she went, while the destroyer turned tail and scudded away at
top speed. To be caught in that whirlpool would have spelled disaster
for even as staunch a craft as the _Colodia_ undoubtedly was.

The _Susanne_ disappeared slowly, with great combers roaring about her.
Beaten to a froth, the waves leaped, white-maned, upon her tossing
sprit, and finally hid even that from sight. The sea was a cauldron of
boiling waters, and that for hundreds of yards around.

The two boats that had escaped from the wreck had been pulled far away.
They were loaded heavily, but were not at the time in any danger. The
_Colodia_, therefore, did not swing her nose in their direction.

Instead, she was speeded into the rapidly thinning smoke cloud which
covered the sea astern of the sugar ship. There the German raider was
somewhere hiding. It was possible that one of the shells from the
destroyer might have done her some damage, or might even have struck the
motor launch.

These hopes were doomed to disappointment, however. Five minutes after
the _Susanne_ was utterly sunk, the smoke was so dissipated that the
lookouts on the destroyer could view the ocean for miles about.

In the distance, and reeling off the knots at most surprising speed, was
a steam vessel that could be naught else than the _Sea Pigeon_. She had
picked up her motor launch and escaped. The _Colodia_ might have
followed and overhauled her in a long chase; but she could not desert
the two boatloads of survivors from the sugar ship here in the middle of
the Atlantic.

The radio man was sending queries for help for the survivors of the
_Susanne_; but no ship answered nearer than two hundred miles. It was
the first duty of the naval vessel to save the helpless, and she could
not fight the German pirates and make these people comfortable, too.

So pursuit was abandoned, much to the dissatisfaction of her crew, and
the _Colodia_ swung around and approached the two open boats. These,
with their cargoes of human freight, were picked up. Then the destroyer
was headed into the north, there to meet a Mediterranean-bound steamship
that would take off the _Susanne’s_ castaways and leave the naval vessel
free again.

Of course the Navy Boys were vastly interested in the experiences of the
people from the sunken ship. Few of her crew, and no passengers, had
been lost. When the boilers had blown up two of the firemen were killed
and several wounded.

The courageous purser who had refused to tell the Germans the
combination of the safe in his office, was the only officer killed. In
that safe had been the wealth of several passengers. The raider wanted
gold more than anything else.

“Just like the pirates of old, I tell you,” Frenchy said to his chums.
“Those old fellows used to make their captives walk the plank. Now these
Huns line ’em up and shoot them. I only hope we catch and sink that _Sea
Pigeon_, and every German aboard of her!”

“Look out he doesn’t bite you, fellows,” advised Al. “He’s got
hydrophobia.”

But they all felt increased anger at the enemy when they had talked with
the survivors of the _Susanne_. Their experience was enough to stir the
blood of any listener.

“That _Sea Pigeon_ has got to be caught!” was the assurance of the boys
and men of the _Colodia’s_ crew.

The cruise, after this experience, was a much more serious matter to
them all than it had been before. As far as the Seacove boys and Belding
went, it had become pretty serious in any case. The prime reason for
this lay in the message of mystery that the radio men continued, at
times, to half catch out of the air.

George Belding confided to Sparks the name Phil Morgan had made out of
the uncertain letters which the chief had written down after hearing
them repeated in his ear while at the radio instrument. “Redbird”; that
seemed plain enough.

“And the _Redbird_ is the ship my folks and Whistler’s sisters are
sailing on to Bahia,” explained Belding. “Why, she might be right out
yonder, not so many miles away,” and he pointed into the west.

“You mean to say your sister can send Morse?”

“She used to be able to. She wasn’t quick or accurate, but she could get
a message over.”

“There is something altogether wrong with this sending,” said the radio
man thoughtfully.

“I know it, sir. She wouldn’t know any code. She would probably spell
out every letter and word. We only get a part of what is sent. That is,
if it is Lilian who is doing this.”

“It is mighty interesting, this ‘ghost talk’,” the chief said slowly. “I
can see you are putting altogether too much faith in the possibility
that the stuff is real. Why, we often get the most inexplicable sounds
out of the air! It is a very long chance that this is a real message, or
that it is from your sister, George.”

“It’s a message from somebody and from somewhere; and I’m awfully
interested, too,” declared Belding. “I wish you’d let me listen in
again.”

“Oh, I’ll do that little thing for you,” agreed Sparks. “If there is
nothing much doing in radio in the afternoon watch, come around again.”

With this promise George Belding contented himself. He told Whistler and
the other boys he was going to set down every letter of the mystery
message that he could comprehend, and see afterward just what could be
made out of them--sense or nonsense!




CHAPTER XXII--THE WIRELESS CALL FOR HELP


Having delivered the survivors of the _Susanne_ to the greater comforts
of an Italian liner bound eastward, the _Colodia’s_ own course was set
for the south and west. Her commander and crew hoped to pick up news of
the _Sea Pigeon_ once again. At any rate, the German raider had been
last seen making off toward the West Indies and the Caribbean.

The destroyer was below the Tropic of Cancer now, and the weather was
exceedingly hot. A dress of dungaree trousers and sleeveless undershirt
was the most popular uniform forward of the bridge, decided Donahue.

“The brass hats who have to fairly live in their uniforms are greatly to
be pitied.”

Drills were not pushed, and many duties became merely a matter of form.

Yet there was a very serious train of thought in the minds of the
Seacove boys and George Belding, as has been shown. There had been
uncertainty enough regarding the voyage of the _Redbird_ to Bahia; but
since the beginning of what the radio men called the “ghost talk” out of
the air, the five friends had all felt a greater measure of anxiety.

Of course, it was by no means certain that these letters in Morse that
suggested the name _Redbird_ had anything to do with Mr. Belding’s ship
and her company. Yet, not having heard in any form from the party bound
for Bahia since the ship left New York, it was not strange that George
Belding and Phil Morgan, at least, should be especially troubled in
their minds.

During the afternoon watch on this day in which George had gone to Mr.
Sparks again, the young fellow got relief and approached the radio room.
The chief was off duty and one of his assistants was at the instrument.
But the older man was lolling in the doorway and welcomed Belding with a
smile.

“Jim, here,” said Sparks, nodding to the student at the instrument, “was
just telling me ‘ghost talk’ is coming over again. He says he gets
‘Colodia’ as clear as can be.”

“My goodness! Then somebody is trying to call us, Mr. Sparks!” murmured
Belding.

“I don’t know. I’ve been keeping track, busy as we have been for a
couple of days. I really think there is some attempt to put a message
over; but whether it is for fun or serious, I would not dare state. Or
whether it is meant for us or not. It isn’t the same message each time.”

“But you do believe that somebody is trying--or something?”

“‘Something’ is good,” growled Sparks. “I’ve made out ‘Colodia’ more
than a few times myself. And I agree that the letters you caught the
last time you were listening in, and which I heard myself, may spell
‘Redbird’. Then, you know, you said you heard ‘help.’”

“Well, I did!” snorted Belding.

The radio chief pushed a square bit of paper into his hand. On it were
set down without spacing of any kind the following line of letters:

    “c,o,l,o,d,i,a,h,e,l,p,r,e,d,b,i,r,d,l,b.”

“I will be honest with you, George,” he said, watching closely the
flushing face of the youth. “I really got those letters not half an hour
ago. They were repeated in just that order several times. What do you
make out of them?”

Belding’s excitement was growing momentarily. He seized Sparks’ pencil
and wrote under the row of letters swiftly and surely:

    “Colodia--Help--Redbird--L.B.”

The chief nodded. “‘L. B.’ being your sister’s initials, eh?”

“Yes, sir,” cried George breathlessly. “Lilian Belding.”

“Get over there on the bench. Jim will give you the harness. Listen in
and see what you can make of it now,” said Sparks, himself excited.

George slid on to the bench and Jim handed him the receivers and strap.
The youth fitted the discs to his ears, settled himself on the seat, and
opened the key. As usual the static sputtered in the receivers for a
little. He tuned down to the short waves and the strange, grating sounds
began.

It was very bad Morse--clumsy and irregular; but that it was Morse,
Belding was confident. There was something wrong either with the sender
or with the instrument sending.

Belding seized the pad of scratch paper and poised his pencil. For a few
moments the “ghost talk” ceased. Was it all over for the time? He waited
impatiently, growing hot and cold with nervousness.

There were plenty of other wave-sounds in the air, had he cared to
listen to them. But he knew the monotonous and rasping letters--on a
lower plane, even, than the commercial waves--were carried only at the
level to which he had tuned the instrument.

Suddenly: “_Colodia! Colodia! Colodia!_”

The words were rapped out harshly but briskly--each letter plainly to be
read. Then Belding began to set down the unevenly sent letters as he
could make them out, with a dash where he failed to catch the letter
intended:

“c,o,l,o,d,i,a,h,e,l,p,g,e,t,--,a,n,--,s,--,i,z,--,d,r,e,d,b,i,r,d,
--,o,r,b,--,--,i,a,h,e,l,p,l,b,e,l,d,i,--,--.”

George could not stop then to see whether these letters made any sense
or not. He believed the main trouble with the message was that the
sender used no punctuation.

For a brief time the mystery ceased. Then again the sounds broke
out--the same clumsy, uncertain Morse; so bad, indeed, that at first the
listener could make out a letter only now and then:

“l,--,--,--,--,l,--,n,g,--,--,--,a,--,e,r,e,--,b,i,r,--,--,a,i,n,--,e,d,
--,--,t,m,--,--,t,i,n,--,g,e,r,--,--,n,s,s,e,i,z,e,d,s,--,i,--h,e,l,p.”

There was silence again as far as the “ghost talk” was concerned.
Belding waited with his pencil poised over the paper.

His eyes meanwhile scanned the first list of letters he had set down. At
first glance he believed he made out the first three words in the
message. They were, “Colodia,help,get.” After the break and several
disconnected letters the word “redbird” fairly leaped at him from the
page. Then, after a few misses and letters that made no sense, he got
“help” again. Then he saw as clear as day: “L.Belding”--his sister’s
signature!

“Colodia--help--get--Redbird--help--L.Belding.”

The young fellow shook all over as he sat there before the radio
instrument. This was a message from his sister, Lilian. Nothing could
thereafter shake his belief in this statement. And that she and the
_Redbird_ were in peril Belding was positive.

The second combination of letters offered fewer understandable words
than the first, or so it seemed to Belding at that moment. The beginning
of this second message was entirely indistinguishable, but toward the
end he got two words complete--“seized” and “help.”

Altogether he was assured that he had guessed the main trouble with the
sender of these strange messages. The words were all run together and
the awkward and uneven sending made the unpunctuated words very hard to
understand.

Sparks touched him on the shoulder. He had a paper in his hand that a
messenger had just brought. It was a radio that must be sent at once.

“Let me at it for a minute, son,” the radio chief said. “Here’s a report
for headquarters’ base. Did you get anything?”

“I--I don’t know,” murmured George, giving place to the man. He left the
room, taking with him the paper on which he had penciled the broken
messages.

Secretly he was confident that he had heard a call over the radio for
help and that his sister Lilian, on the _Redbird_, was sending it.

He wanted to see Philip Morgan about it--to show the leader of the
Seacove Navy Boys this paper with the two cryptograms he had picked out
of the air. Like Al Torrance, Ikey Rosenmeyer, and Frenchy Donahue,
George had come by this time to look upon Phil Morgan as a fellow of
parts. Phil would be able to help him make these messages out, if
anybody could!

But he could have no time with Whistler until second dog watch that
evening. Then he got the Seacove youth aside and showed him what he had
managed to set down in letters from the “ghost talk” he had listened in
on that afternoon.

Whistler did not know a thing about Morse, or much about radio, but he
had a sharp eye and a clear head. Belding had translated enough words of
both messages to suggest the general trend of them.

“How do you know where the letters ‘break’ if you can’t hear all the
dots and dashes?” Whistler first asked, scanning the paper seriously.
“That appears curious to me.”

“Not in this case. If it is Lil sending--or whoever it is--the sender is
so unfamiliar with the Morse American code that there is a hesitation
between the letters. Why, I thought at first the message was in
Continental code, which is, you know, entirely different from American.”

“It’s all news to me, old boy. Go on.”

“Why, there’s nothing more. If I could hear those words repeated several
times I reckon I’d get most of the letters--and get them straight.”

“I see,” murmured his friend. “And as it is, you have got a good many of
the words, only you haven’t noticed it.”

“What’s that?”

“Why, it is plain,” said Whistler, “that several of the same words are
used in both messages.”

“Yes. ‘Help’, ‘_Colodia_’, ‘_Redbird_’.”

“More than those,” said Whistler. “See! You have ‘seized’ plain as the
nose on your face in the second set of letters.”

“I see that.”

“And there it is in the first list,” and Whistler pointed as he spoke to
a combination of letters and blanks almost immediately following
“Colodia--Help--Get.” “There is ‘s-e-i-z-ed’, plain enough. And, yes, by
Jove! There is ‘redbird’ in the second message. Look here, old man! Let
me go through this.”

“That is what I want you to do,” responded Belding excitedly.

“In the beginning the message surely says: ‘Colodia! Help! Get!----No!
That should not be ‘getmans’ that ‘seized Redbird’. No, no! There is the
same combination in the lower message. It is ‘ger’ down there, not
‘get’,” muttered Whistler, vastly interested now.

With pencil and paper he set to work. In five minutes he offered Belding
the following paragraph as a translation in full of the first message:

“Colodia! Help! Germans seized Redbird for Bahia. Help!--L. Belding.”

“Oh, Whistler, you’ve got it! And it is as we have feared. Those papers
that Emil Eberhardt stole from me back in England have played the
dickens with the _Redbird_ and the folks. I am sure it is Lil trying to
call me--the splendid kid that she is!”

“Hold on! Hold on!” Whistler said, but encouragingly. “Let’s get the
other message, too.”

He set to work on that; but the first of it baffled him. He could only
begin to make it out where the word “Redbird” occurred. From that place
on, it was not so difficult: “Redbird painted out--mutiny--Germans
seized ship--Help.” This second message was not signed with Lilian
Belding’s name or her initials, but George knew the sending to have been
the same as that of the first call for help.

“But, Phil!” gasped the New York youth, “we don’t know a living thing
about where the _Redbird_ is, or what is happening to our folks.”

“You’d think she would have tried to tell their situation in the
message,” rejoined Whistler slowly.

“If she knew. She’s a girl, and wouldn’t be likely to interest herself
much in navigation.”

“Tut, tut, my boy! Everybody at sea takes an interest in the course of
the ship and her speed. Of course they do. Wait! Here is the
abbreviation for longitude right here--‘long.’ Two blanks for the
figures you did not catch, George, my boy!”

“Do you think so?” murmured his friend.

Whistler wrote it “Lat.--,--, long.--,--.” Then he had an inspiration
and put in “name” before “Redbird.”

“There we have it in full--except for the figures of the _Redbird’s_
position. Look out for them next time, George. They are important.”

“Next time, Morgan?” gasped George Belding, excitedly.

“Certainly. It stands to reason your sister is sending out messages for
help whenever she gets a chance at the radio instrument on the
_Redbird_. And take it from me, the most important thing she is trying
to put over is the position of the ship from day to day. They take the
sun at noon, and as soon afterward as she can, Lilian gets to the radio
and sends that information into the air.

“Believe me, George, you have some smart sister, and no mistake!” said
Whistler Morgan in much admiration.




CHAPTER XXIII--THE SEA PIGEON IN SIGHT


George Belding was for running right off to the radio chief, Mr. Sparks,
to ask another chance to listen in on the wireless for further messages
from the _Redbird_. The supposition that Germans in her crew had
mutinied and seized his father’s ship became at once a certainty in
George’s mind.

Whistler, however, with his usual cautiousness, steadied his friend.

“There is no use making such an application now, George,” he said.
“There will be none of this ‘ghost-talk’ in the air at this hour.”

“Oh!”

“You know, they only hear those messages in the afternoon watch. That is
the only time, in all probability, that your sister can get to the
radio. The rest of the time, perhaps, the regular radio man is on duty,
and he is probably in league with the mutineers.”

“My goodness, Phil!” ejaculated Belding, “that word ‘mutineers’ makes me
tremble.”

“It suggests the rough stuff, all right,” agreed the Seacove lad. “I
hope my sisters and your folks will not be treated too outrageously by
the gang that has got possession of your father’s ship.”

“If we could only find them! We’re tied here on this old iron pot--”

“Hold on! Don’t malign the _Colodia_. We may be glad for their sakes
that we are on this destroyer.”

“I don’t see it. I wish I was on the _Redbird_.”

“A fat chance! With those Germans committing acts of barratry like
painting out the _Redbird’s_ name! That shows they are desperate men.
And what could we do to them if we were in their power?”

“What help can we give the folks from this distance?” groaned Belding.

“This is a matter that will have to be brought to the attention of the
Old Man, George. I am going to speak to Mr. MacMasters and ask him to
get us a chance to interview Commander Lang.”

“Will he listen to us, do you think?”

“Of course he will,” said Whistler with confidence.

The two friends could scarcely sleep in their watch below, and in the
morning their anxiety was apparent to the other boys.

Whistler watched for his chance and spoke to Ensign MacMasters. The
ensign would do anything within reason for Whistler and his friends. He
considered the four Seacove lads about the finest boys aboard the
_Colodia_.

Upon hearing the story of the mystery message he became vastly
interested. He went to see Sparks first of all, and then hurried to
Commander Lang’s cabin. One reason why Mr. MacMasters was so eager to
see the commander was because Sparks had told him that during the
previous evening an operator at the Weather Bureau station at Arlington,
Virginia, had asked the _Colodia’s_ chief radio man:

“Have you caught message being put out for _Colodia_?”

While a radio man on the troopship _Kinkadia_ demanded:

“Anybody named Belding on _Colodia_? He appears to be wanted by a ham.”

Which was not a very respectful way of referring to George’s sister. It
showed, however, that Lilian’s uncertain sending was attracting
attention at several points.

It was mid-forenoon before the two friends were called into the presence
of Commander Lang. Belding was bashful and allowed Whistler to do most
of the talking. And he was impressed by the ease and coolness with which
his friend went about the matter.

Commander Lang met Phil Morgan as he would have met another man. There
was nothing “kiddish about Whistler,” Al had once said. The commander of
the _Colodia_ examined the messages as the boys believed they were
intended to read. He at once approved the application of George Belding
to be attached to the radio squad until further notice. He sent for
Sparks and heard his story of the mystery message. In every way he
showed an acute interest in the affair.

If the _Redbird_ was somewhere at sea in charge of mutineers--Germans at
that!--to find her would be a task for the _Colodia_. But as Whistler
had immediately seen, it was agreed that to discover the course of the
_Redbird_ and her daily position by the sun were the most important
points.

The boys were most impatient for the time to come when George would take
his “trick” at the radio instrument again. This would not be until the
afternoon watch, when the radio man then on duty had orders to give the
instrument over to George if the “ghost-talk” again was heard.

It had been decided that George should try to reply to the mysterious
call. By spelling out the name of his father’s ship, the _Redbird_, or
calling Lilian Belding by name, it might be possible to communicate with
the vessel and send a word of courage to the passengers. The desire was
to encourage the sender of the strange message to repeat again and again
the _Redbird’s_ situation.

It was only possible to guess at the course of the ship bound for Bahia,
as well as her present position. Lilian Belding had doubtless called for
the _Colodia_ because her brother and Whistler Morgan served on that
naval vessel, not because she had any idea as to where the destroyer
was.

The two vessels might be a desperately long distance apart. That fact
could not be overlooked. The boys were in a fever of expectation.

As it drew near eight bells of the forenoon watch there came a message
by wireless that was even more exciting for most of the crew than the
mystery of the “ghost-talk.”

“An S O S!” whispered the messenger to George Belding as he darted from
the radio station to the bridge.

Swiftly the watch officer read the message: “H. M. S. S. _Ferret_, from
Porto Rico for Liverpool, attacked by German cruiser _Sea Pigeon_, lat.
twenty-one, long. fifty-eight. S O S.”

The exciting information was instantly communicated two ways--to the
commander’s cabin and to the chief engineer. The _Colodia_ leaped
forward, conned on her new course at once. They were off in another race
to overtake the elusive German raider--and this time, perhaps, to find
her.

“But we may be going right away from the _Redbird_!” Belding complained
to the other boys.

“On the other hand, we don’t know but it may be taking us right toward
your father’s vessel,” Whistler said, trying to comfort his friend.

He felt worried himself about it. There would be no chance to try to
reach the _Redbird_ by radio during the afternoon watch. Whistler was
just as anxious as Belding; only he kept these feelings much more to
himself.

The radio sparked message after message to and from the British ship.
The _Colodia_ was the only naval craft within possible reach of the spot
from which the call came, although there were both British cruisers and
torpedo boats on the Bermuda and Bahama stations.

But they were heavy craft, and it would have taken days for a boat from
either station to reach the point indicated by the _Ferret_. Whereas,
with good fortune, the American destroyer’s engines would drive her to
the spot in three hours.

Could the British merchant vessel keep up the unequal fight for that
length of time? The German must have already engaged her, or the radio
message from the _Ferret_ as first transmitted would not have been so
exact.

From out of the air came messages from all directions urging the
_Colodia_ on. The _Ferret’s_ S O S and the destroyer’s answer had been
picked up by both ship and land stations. Ships long out of range, it
would seem, became interested in the attempt to “get” the raider which
had already cut such a swath among shipping in the Atlantic.

Remembering the fate of the _Susanne_, the crew of the _Colodia_ had
some reason for believing that this dash of the good destroyer was a
“long shot.” It seemed scarcely possible that she would arrive at the
scene of the fight in time to save the merchant ship from complete
disaster.

Yet the radio messages were encouraging. After an hour the _Ferret_
reported no serious damage done and that they had put two shells aboard
their pursuer from their well-manned deck guns.

“Well done, _Ferret_!” flashed the destroyer’s radio. “Keep up the good
work.”

Yet every moment it was expected aboard the _Colodia_ that either the
wireless on the steamship would be destroyed, or she would report
serious injury to her machinery. The raider would, of course, strive to
place her shells where they would utterly cripple her victim--either
under the stern and smash the propellers, or amidships and burst boilers
or wreck engines.

The _Colodia’s_ crew were ordered to stations, more for the sake of
keeping order on deck than for aught else. Every man who could be spared
from below was ranged along the decks. Gun covers were removed, breech
blocks looked to, and every man was keyed to a high pitch.

“Talk about efficiency!” growled Ensign MacMasters. “We’ve _got_ it.
Just because the Germans have been abusing the word is no reason why we
should not properly use it. They are often efficient to a useless end;
but we’ll show that sea-raider, if we get a chance, that the old
_Colodia_ is more efficient than a German ever dared be!”

The destroyer plowed on and on, while every minute that elapsed without
their hearing that the _Ferret_ was wrecked encouraged hope. Now and
again word came that the British ship, with dogged persistency, was
holding out. She had been hit now several times, and the _Sea Pigeon_
was reported as being almost on top of her. Still she was providentially
saved from disaster.

Through the heat of a tropical noontide the destroyer rushed on toward
the fight. The crew looked for no shelter now, they only desired to see
the smoke of the guns ahead.

And before six bells of the afternoon watch they had the desire of their
eyes! The lookouts began to yell the glad tidings to the bridge, and the
crew took up the news with a mighty shout.

The wind was against their hearing the guns at first, but finally the
thundering roll of the weapons reached the ears of the Americans. The
_Colodia_ seemed to increase her speed. The smoke rolled back from her
stacks and lay flat along the sea as though painted there with one
stroke of a giant brush.

Within a few minutes they could see balloons of smoke billowing up
ahead, but these were from no ship afire. They were the announcement of
gun discharges.

On the destroyer tore through the quiet sea. The lookouts hailed for the
upperworks of the _Ferret_. Another message came by radio that the
attacked steamship had seen and hailed with delight her rescuer.

The explosion of the guns ahead brought joy to the hearts of the
_Colodia’s_ crew. There was the prospect of a real fight! The smoke of
the raider was announced. The destroyer’s course was swerved ever so
slightly that she might pass the battered _Ferret_ and draw the fire of
the German from the merchant ship.

Then the order was given, and her own guns began to speak. It was at
long range, but the marksmanship of American gun crews had become really
wonderful. The high, shrieking shells sought out the German ship, and
within the first dozen sent over, the radio man on the _Ferret_ reported
a “strike.” One of the _Sea Pigeon’s_ smokestacks was carried away!

The fight was on. The Americans hoped to get near enough to the German
boat to bring her to terms within a very short time.




CHAPTER XXIV--THE BLIND CHASE


The excitement of the dash for the embattling ships left the _Colodia’s_
company no thought for anything else. Even dinner had been
half-neglected, although that came early in the race.

As for weather indications or the like, nobody thought of such things.
And here suddenly appeared a phenomenon that bade fair to help the
Germans and place the destroyer in a less confident position.

The American ship had arrived just in time to save the _Ferret_; her
upperworks were badly wrecked although providentially the wireless
outfit of the British ship was not crippled.

One of her guns was put out of commission and a shell under the stern
had knocked out the propeller just as the Colodia entered the fight. She
swung now to the slow current, and as the destroyer rushed past her the
British crew could only cheer her on. Their work was done--and done
well!

But here came a cloud rolling along the surface of the sea from the
south that offered shelter for the raider, the prow of which was already
turned in that direction. The German had no intention of remaining to
fight the battle out with the guns of the destroyer.

The raider was not, of course, any match for the American naval vessel.
It was the part of wisdom for her to run. Besides, she was already
crippled, and it would have been but a matter of a few minutes before
she would either have to capitulate or be sunk had she continued in the
fight. The _Colodia_ might even have kept out of range of the raider’s
guns, circled about the German, and destroyed her at pleasure. Or she
could have sent a torpedo against the pirate ship and blown her to bits.

Here, however, fortune helped the enemy. The cloud of fog laid along the
surface of the sea offered the _Sea Pigeon_ refuge. She proved again
that she was a “wary bird!”

Into the cloud she dashed, and where she went after that--although the
fog bank was low--the lookouts of the _Colodia_ could not tell.

“If we only had a hydroplane to send up!” said Whistler Morgan to his
chums. “The time will come when every destroyer will have its pair of
hydroplanes for observation. From a thousand feet up, that fog would
never shelter the raider. The hydroplane could signal us the raider’s
position and we’d follow her just as though it were clear weather.”

In this case, however, the commander of the destroyer did not wish to
desert the _Ferret_ until he had learned her condition. The _Colodia_
described a wide circle and steamed back within hailing distance of the
crippled British ship.

Fortunately there were no women or other passengers aboard this vessel.
Her wounded were few, too. The hull of the craft had not suffered.
Already her machinists were at work on the propeller. They had new
blades in the hold, and the end of the shaft was not injured. They
proposed to sweat on the new propeller, make such other repairs as were
necessary, and then attempt to limp into the Bermuda station under her
own steam.

“You can’t beat those fellows!” said Ensign MacMasters admiringly. “The
merchant sailors nowadays have more to face than we do, and with less
chance of getting safely out of a scrimmage. I wouldn’t want to be
hobbling along in that cripple to the Bermudas with that German pirate
in the vicinity.”

Just where the _Sea Pigeon_ had gone behind the fog they could only
surmise. But Commander Lang ordered a course south by west, hoping that
the raider would turn up again.

Phil Morgan and George Belding had time to think of the _Redbird_ and
her precious freight once more. It was little satisfaction for either to
know that Sparks and his assistants were on the lookout for messages
from the sailing ship.

Nothing came up that night to give the anxious boys any satisfaction.
Sparks reported nothing in the morning. But as the hour drew near when
the mysterious messages usually came over, both Belding and Whistler
Morgan hung about the door of the radio room.

The radio chief knew just how anxious they were and he did not scold
them. Soon after dinner he sent George to the bench to try to pick up
the uncertain sounds that he believed came from the _Redbird’s_
wireless.

George could only get a letter now and then. The sending--if it was
it--was weaker than before. In desperation the youth began to send
himself:

“I,I,I, (aye,aye,aye) Colodia!”

He repeated this over and over again. An hour passed before he got what
seemed to be a direct answer. Then:

“Colodia! Help! Redbird!”

Belding fairly shouted aloud in his excitement. But when he turned to
see Mr. Sparks and the others at the door watching him, he subsided and
began to send calmly:

“Give position! Give position! Redbird, give position!”

This went on for some time, and then he caught the grating and uncertain
sound of what he was confident was his sister’s sending. He tuned his
instrument up and down the scale before getting the best adjustment. Out
of the air he finally received letters which he wrote down falteringly
and passed to Mr. Sparks and Whistler. While the message was being
repeated the radio man and Phil Morgan made out the following paragraph:

“Ship Redbird for Bahia seized by German mutineers. Position, lat. 17,
long. 59. Help!--L. Belding.”

“It’s Lilian, all right! Hurray!” exclaimed Whistler, and Belding heard
him.

The latter was now repeating, again and again, the announcement that the
_Colodia_ heard the message and was coming. Sparks hurried away to seek
Commander Lang with the news. The position of the sailing ship was
within easy reach of the destroyer.

But the messages stopped suddenly. Not another word came from the
_Redbird_. Belding came away from the instrument at last, feeling
anything but hopeful.

“Something’s happened to her,” he whispered to Morgan. “I fear Lilian
has got into trouble by her work at the _Redbird’s_ wireless. What do
you think, Phil?”

“I am not going to lose hope. We will find the ship and rescue our folks
from the mutineers. Don’t doubt it, George!”

It was difficult to keep up their courage, however, when there was so
much uncertainty regarding the sailing ship’s condition. It might be,
too, that the latitude and longitude was several points off. A full
degree is sixty miles, and sixty miles is a long way across the ocean!

Just before dark they raised the smoke of a steamer ahead and sailing
athwart the destroyer’s course. This surely could not be the _Redbird_;
yet the destroyer could not allow the stranger to pass without
investigation.

Her radio could get no answer from the ship. It seemed as though the
stranger was running away from the _Colodia_. Naturally suspicion was
aroused in the minds of the commander that it was the _Sea Pigeon_.

But it became a blind chase as night fell upon them. They saw no lights,
and the tropical night comes so suddenly that to have overtaken the
steamship before dark was an utter impossibility. The destroyer swung
back into her direct course for the point from which the last radio
message of the _Redbird_ was supposed to have come.




CHAPTER XXV--A NEW CONVOY


At dawn, while a light fog still overspread the sea, the crash of
distant guns was brought to the ears of the watch on duty. From what
direction the reports came it was impossible for the _Colodia’s_
officers to determine.

It was still too dark for the lookouts to make out anything at a
distance, even had the morning been perfectly clear. But all hands were
aroused, the word running from deck to deck that the destroyer was
within sound of a naval action of some kind.

It was not a signal gun they heard, for several shots were fired
simultaneously. Then there was silence again. The _Colodia_ sped on her
course, the hope being expressed by all that “blind luck,” if nothing
else, might lead her to the scene.

Just before the sun rose above the sea line the lookouts began to shout
their discoveries. Out of the fog, but at a great distance, they saw the
upper spars and canvas of a great sailing ship. The _Colodia’s_
direction was changed to run closer to this vessel.

“It’s a chance we have found her,” murmured Whistler to George Belding.
“She is square rigged, and she is some ship in size, believe me!”

For, moment by moment, the fog was thinning and the outlines of the
spars and sails became clearer. From the deck of the destroyer these
became visible.

The excitement of the Seacove boys and George Belding was quite
overpowering. That their friends aboard the _Redbird_ were in the hands
of mutineers they were assured; and now the guns, which began to speak
again, forewarned of added peril!

As the sun came out they saw that the upper canvas of the ship they had
sighted was being furled. Sail after sail disappeared. It was as though
she was being stripped of her canvas.

“She’s under the guns of that raider, I’ll bet a cent!” declared Al
Torrance. “So she has had to stop her headway. Those guns were for the
purpose of making the ship--whoever she is--lie to.”

“But if it is the _Redbird_, the Germans already have command of her,”
cried Belding.

“We don’t know who she is yet,” said Whistler.

“Oi, oi!” gasped Ikey Rosenmeyer, “I’m so excited yet I can’t keep
still. Isn’t it _great_, Frenchy?”

“Sure, it’s the greatest experience we’ve had,” admitted the Irish lad.
“For we don’t know whether we are approaching friend or foe.”

Nor was the destroyer’s approach visible to those aboard the sailing
ship for some time. Her color and the gray fog that lingered on the
surface of the sea aided in this.

There were no more guns for a time, but it was quite evident that the
sailing vessel had lost much headway. It was then that the lookouts in
the tops of the _Colodia_ first glimpsed the ship that had fired the
guns. She was a steamer coming rapidly up on the course of the sailing
vessel.

Two more guns were fired, but the shells seemed not to have burst near
the victim of the outrage. They were meant merely as a threat. The
sailing craft which was nearer to the destroyer was observed to be
signaling with flags. The signals were in a code that the signalmen of
the _Colodia_ did not know, and they so reported to Commander Lang.

“The Huns aboard the _Redbird_ are signaling to the Huns on the _Sea
Pigeon_,” was the confident declaration of prophetic Al Torrance.

“If it is so, you can just believe that they are telling the raider of
our approach. They must see the _Colodia_ coming now,” Whistler
observed.

Suddenly, with the sun’s round face appearing above the sea line, the
last wisps of fog were whipped away. The tropical heat burned up the
moisture in a flash.

“Boats at the davits of the ship now being manned, sir!” came the hail
from one of the destroyer’s lookouts.

“They are abandoning ship!” was the word passed along the decks.

“If it is the _Redbird_!” murmured Belding to Phil Morgan, “what do you
suppose will happen to my father and mother and the girls?”

Whistler had no answer ready. He kept his lips shut grimly and stared
straight ahead.

The distance of the destroyer from the steamer believed to be the German
raider, was too great as yet for a shot to be tried. They were near
enough to the sailing ship to see two boats launched before it was
considered well to use the guns.

Then the _Colodia_ sent her first shells close to the boats that were
being rowed toward the steam craft.

“There are only men in those lifeboats,” declared Ensign MacMasters, who
had been examining the distant specks through powerful glasses. “It
looks as though the mutineers had abandoned ship and passengers and were
attempting to join their fellow countrymen aboard the _Sea Pigeon_.”

Immediately the commander ordered shells to be dropped between the small
boats and the steamer, and the long distance guns began to crack at the
raider over the heads of the escaping mutineers.

With her smoke trailing behind her and the guns barking in rapid
succession, the _Colodia_ raced toward the scene. She kept well away
from the sailing craft, but she drove on in a way to cut off the two
rowboats from the raider.

That it was the _Sea Pigeon_, nobody aboard the destroyer now doubted.

“We’re going to kill two birds with one stone, boys!” declared Ensign
MacMasters cheerfully to the Navy Boys. “I’ll bet that sailing ship is
the one your friends are aboard.”

His cheerfulness did not wholly overcome George Belding’s depression.
George was now worrying as to what had been done to the passengers of
the _Redbird_ before the mutineers left the sailing ship!

That she was his father’s vessel he was confident. Her rig was familiar
to him.

As the destroyer drew nearer, too, her crew saw certain figures on the
deck of the sailing vessel that seemed to be wildly signaling the naval
craft. Just then the _Colodia_ could not stop to investigate. Her work
was to settle first with the Germans.

The raider had finally started away from the vicinity, leaving the crews
of the two boats to shift for themselves. It was her only chance for
escape, for the destroyer could outsteam the _Sea Pigeon_, fast as she
was.

A fortunate shot knocked away the jury smokestack which had been put in
place of the one the destroyer had previously smashed. Interior damage
was done by this shell, too. This was immediately apprehended by the
raider’s movements.

“Hold fire!” commanded the executive officer of the _Colodia_. Signals
were sent up ordering the German to surrender. Almost at once a white
ensign was displayed, and at the sight of it the destroyer’s crew went
mad with excitement.

Better than merely sinking the _Sea Pigeon_--they had captured her!
Their work of five weeks at sea, away from their base, had ended
gloriously. The raider doubtless had a valuable cargo, and the fact that
she would be put out of commission was a heavy blow to the German arms.

Swiftly the destroyer approached and, at a certain distance, sent a boat
off to the _Sea Pigeon_ to bring her captain and a part of her force
aboard the American ship. But Commander Lang, understanding fully the
anxiety of Phil Morgan and George Belding, ordered another motor boat
launched and allowed them to be members of her crew. She was sent
directly to the sailing ship which now lay about two miles away.

Passing the two lifeboats, Ensign MacMasters, who was in command of the
launch, questioned briefly their frightened crews. At first they denied
that they were mutineers. They declared the raider had commanded them to
abandon their ship and row aboard the _Sea Pigeon_.

But when they were asked the name of the sailing ship, and other
pertinent queries, the sailors broke down. All but their leader.

Suddenly George Belding uttered an exclamation of surprise.

“Phil! Phil Morgan!” he shouted, forgetting in his excitement to address
their commanding officer. “Don’t you know that fellow steering the
second boat?”

“I see him,” returned Whistler. “I--I _do_ know him! Mr. MacMasters!
That is the spy from the Zeppelin we told you about!”

“Emil Eberhardt, I do believe,” murmured Belding. “It’s no wonder things
went wrong aboard the _Redbird_ when that scoundrel was able to cross
the ocean and join her crew.”

No further information could be obtained from the mutineers at that
time. They were quite helpless, and could only row on to the destroyer
and give themselves up as commanded.

Meanwhile the motor launch ran alongside the big, square-rigged ship.
Three girls at the rail shrieked their delight at sight of Whistler and
George Belding. The latter’s father and mother likewise appeared as the
boys, following Mr. MacMasters, went up the ladder which had been left
hanging over the side when the mutineers abandoned the ship.

The Germans had carried away Mr. Belding’s money--and it was a great
sum--in the lifeboats; but they dared not throw it overboard and so,
later, it was recovered. Otherwise the mutineers had done little damage,
nor had they treated the Americans on the ship badly.

After the greetings were over the story of how the radio messages were
sent was told in full. The radio man aboard the _Redbird_ was a German
sympathizer. He usually slept through the afternoon watch, however, and
it was then the girls had been able to get regularly at the instrument.
The rest of the crew thought Lilian was only playing with the radio. She
told them she could receive a little, but she sent in so clumsy a way
that the Germans paid little attention to her.

“And, of course, I never was a Morse expert,” the girl said, laughing.
“You used to make fun of me, George, when we had the radio plant at
home; but I guess I could be an operator, if I put my mind to it, as
well as you.”

“You’re all right, Lil,” declared her brother. Then with a grin, he
added: “I know Phil thinks you are. He can’t keep his eyes off you.”

There was a great deal to say, of course; but there was more to do. The
boys were left aboard while Mr. MacMasters returned to the _Colodia_
with Captain Lawdor of the _Redbird_, who had been locked into his cabin
by the mutineers. He wished to confer with Commander Lang regarding the
make-up of a crew to work his ship into some port. She could not go all
the way to Bahia with only the handful of men who had remained faithful.

This was overcome very easily, however. The captured raider was repaired
and was sent north with a prize crew. Then the commander of the
destroyer sent help aboard the _Redbird_ and agreed to convoy the
sailing ship into a safe zone.

Farther south the Brazilian warships were patroling the coast of South
America, and they would accompany the big sailing vessel into Bahia.
For, of course, Mr. Belding had no intention of changing his plans,
having already come so far from New York.

The girls were too courageous to lose spirit. Phoebe, who had been so
ill when last her brother had seen her, was getting plump again. She had
marvelously improved during the brief weeks of her sojourn at sea.

Altogether, both Philip Morgan and George Belding had become quite happy
and content when the _Colodia_ finally signaled the _Redbird_ good-bye
and turned her prow north once more. She had been ordered to follow the
captured raider into Hampton Roads, there to refit.

Nevertheless, as America’s activities in the war--especially her naval
activities--were increasing rather than diminishing, the Navy Boys did
not expect to be idle, even if the _Colodia_ was laid up for a while.

“No rest for the wicked,” quoted Al Torrance, wagging his head.

“Oi, oi!” cried Ikey. “You know you are not looking for a rest, Torry.”

“Seems to me,” Belding said, “that it will be rather nice to walk on the
streets once more.”

“Bet we’ll all be land-sick when we get ashore,” grinned Frenchy
Donahue. “How ’bout it, Whistler?”

Whistler said, thoughtfully: “But wouldn’t it be nice if we could have
had our leave ashore at Bahia, with the girls?”

“Wow, wow!” shouted the Irish lad.

“He’s hopeless,” groaned Ikey Rosenmeyer. “He is even worse than Frenchy
ever was. Why, he can’t keep his mind off those girls at all!”

But the older lad only grinned. It was small matter to Whistler Morgan
whether they tried to worry him or not. Lilian Belding was certainly a
pretty girl!

THE END




Navy Boys Series

By HALSEY DAVIDSON

12mo, cloth, illustrated and with colored jacket

The true story of the American Jackies of to-day--clean-cut, brave and
always on the alert. The boys join the navy, do a lot of training, and
are then assigned to regular service. They aid in sinking a number of
submarines, help to capture a notorious German sea raider, and do their
share during the taking over of the enemy’s navy. A splendid picture of
the American navy of to-day.

NAVY BOYS AFTER A SUBMARINE
    Or Protecting the Giant Convoy

NAVY BOYS CHASING A SEA RAIDER
    Or Landing a Million Dollar Prize

NAVY BOYS BEHIND THE BIG GUNS
    Or Sinking the German U-Boats

NAVY BOYS TO THE RESCUE
    Or Answering the Wireless Call for Help

NAVY BOYS AT THE BIG SURRENDER
    Or Rounding Up the German Fleet

GEORGE SULLY & COMPANY
Publishers     New York




Army Boys Series

By HOMER RANDALL

12mo, cloth, illustrated and with colored jacket

Here we have true-to-life pictures of what our brave soldier boys did,
in the training camps, aboard the transport, and on the battlefields of
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encounters with the Huns, is told in a manner to interest all. Many
side lights are given of how the soldiers enjoyed themselves during the
off hours. A series which ought to be on every bookshelf in the land.

ARMY BOYS IN FRANCE
    Or From Training Camp to Trenches

ARMY BOYS IN THE FRENCH TRENCHES
    Or Hand to Hand Fights With the Enemy

ARMY BOYS ON THE FIRING LINE
    Or Holding Back the German Drive

ARMY BOYS IN THE BIG DRIVE
    Or Smashing Forward to Victory

ARMY BOYS MARCHING INTO GERMANY
    Or Over the Rhine with the Stars and Stripes

GEORGE SULLY & COMPANY
Publishers--New York




Air Service Boys Series

By CHARLES AMORY BEACH

12mo, cloth, illustrated and with colored jacket

Two chums join the air service in this country and then go to France and
enter the Lafayette Escadrille. After doing their duty to our sister
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cannon which is doing terrific damage, and are present at the bombing
of the last Hun stronghold. A series by one who knows all about army
aviation.

AIR SERVICE BOYS FLYING FOR FRANCE
    Or The Young Heroes of the Lafayette Escadrille

AIR SERVICE BOYS OVER THE ENEMY’S LINES
    Or The German Spy’s Secret

AIR SERVICE BOYS OVER THE RHINE
    Or Fighting Above the Clouds

AIR SERVICE BOYS IN THE BIG BATTLE
    Or Silencing the Big Guns

AIR SERVICE BOYS FLYING FOR VICTORY
    Or Bombing the Last German Stronghold

GEORGE SULLY & COMPANY
Publishers--New York




Joe Strong Series

12mo, cloth, colored jacket and illustrated

Vance Barnum is a real treasure when it comes to telling about how
magicians do their weird tricks, how the circus acrobats pull off their
various stunts, how the “fishman” remains under water so long, how the
mid-air performers loop the loop and how the slack-wire fellow keeps
from tumbling. He has been through it all and he writes freely for the
boys from his vast experience. They are real stories bound to hold
their audiences breathlessly.

JOE STRONG, THE BOY WIZARD
    Or Mysteries of Magic Exposed

JOE STRONG ON THE TRAPEZE
    Or The Daring Feats of a Young Circus Performer

JOE STRONG, THE BOY FISH
    Or Marvellous Doings in a Big Tank

JOE STRONG ON THE HIGH WIRE
    Or A Motorcycle of the Air

JOE STRONG AND HIS WINGS OF STEEL
    Or A Young Acrobat in the Clouds

JOE STRONG AND HIS BOX OF MYSTERY
    Or The Ten Thousand Dollar Prize Trick

JOE STRONG, THE BOY FIRE-EATER
    Or The Most Dangerous Performance on Record

GEORGE SULLY & COMPANY
Publishers--New York




        
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