Prince or Chauffeur? Part 26

"About that," smiled Armitage.

"But what a risk! You must steam through a perfect hail of bullets, with chances of striking with your torpedo largely against you. And even if you do strike you are liable to pay the price with your lives.

Am I not right?"

"These pirates of the flotilla," laughed Jack, "do not think of the price. They 're in the Navy to think of other things."

"And is that the spirit of the American Navy?"

"Of course," Armitage looked at her curiously. "Why not?"

Anne laughed and shrugged her shoulders.

"Oh, I don't know. I know something of the British and French Navies, but patriotism--the sort of spirit you speak of--has always appeared to me such an abstract thing as regards America. It's because, I suppose, I have never known anything about it, because I have been more or less of an expatriate all my life."

Jack had been watching a display of Ardois lights from the _Jefferson's_ mast. He turned away, but spoke over his shoulder.

"Don't be that, Miss Wellington, for you have proved to me that a girl or a child, reared as you have been, can be American in every instinct and action. I had never believed that."

He hurried away to the bridge rail and Anne's arm turned red under the impress of Sara's fingers.

In compliance with the _Jefferson's_ signals, the engines of the flotilla began to throb and the boats turned to the eastward.

A cry came from the _D'Estang's_ lookout. Anne and Sara leaned forward and saw that a blundering sailing vessel--her dark sails a blotch against the sky, her hull invisible--was careening just ahead. She had no lights, and curses on the heads of coastwise skippers who take risks and place other vessels in jeopardy merely to save oil, swept through the flotilla like ether waves.

Armitage let a good Anglo-Saxon objurgation slip from his tongue as he turned toward the yeoman.

"Half speed!"

"Half speed, sir," answered the yeoman as he tugged at the engine room telegraph.

All eyes were now on the schooner. How was she heading? A group of seamen stood beside Armitage and Johnson on the bridge, trying to ascertain that important point. A flash of lightning gave a momentary glance of greasy sails bulged to port.

"She 's on the starboard tack, crossing the flotilla!"

"All right." There was relief in Jack's voice as he called for full speed ahead.

"It's no fun to ram a merchantman, with all the law you get into," said the signal quartermaster, standing near the young women. "And if they hit you, good-bye."

But the schooner had a knowing captain. He had no intention of trying to cross all those sharp bows. He quickly tacked between the _D'Estang_ and _Barclay_ and pa.s.sed the rest of the boats astern.

Slowly the boats were loafing along now.

At ten-thirty the Jefferson winked her signals at the rest of the flotilla.

"Put out all lights."

As the young women glanced over the sea the truck lights died responsively. Then the green and red starboard and port lamps and lights in wardroom and galley went out and men hurried along the deck placing tarpaulins over the engine room gratings. Only the binnacle lights remained and these were m.u.f.fled with just a crack for the helmsman to peer through.

A great blackness settled over the waters. To Anne, always an impressionable girl, it was as though all life had suddenly been obliterated from the face of them. Her hand tightened its grasp on Sara's fingers, for as the vessel plunged along there was a palpable impression that the flotilla, now hurrying forward in viewless haste, was pitched for the supreme test. Off to the seaward signal lights from the parent ship _Racine_, having on board the officer in charge of the Navy's mobile defences--which is to say, torpedo boats--had flared and died. The battleships were approaching.

Anne, quivering with excitement, peered out through the night; nothing but darkness. Below, lined along the rails, she caught dull outlines of the white caps of the seamen, all as eager to defeat the battleships as their officers. She saw the phosph.o.r.escent gleam from a shattered wave. But she heard nothing, not even the swish of water.

Johnson approached diffidently, and leaned over the rail at their side, straining his eyes into the night.

"The chances of making a successful attack," he said, "are best if we approach from almost ahead, a little on the bow. Then we are lessening the distance between us at the sum of the speeds of the flotilla and the battleships. We 'll hit up about twenty-five knots when we see them. Of--"

A low incisive voice sounded forward, a blotch of a hand and arm pointing. There was a movement on the bridge as a dark object came close. It was the _Jefferson_. A dull figure leaned over her bridge with a megaphone.

"We 've blown out some boiler tubes and scalded a couple of men, _D'Estang_. Go in ahead."

"All right," Jack's voice was m.u.f.fled.

Again came the voice of the lookout and the arm pointed ahead.

"Oh!" Anne pinched Sara's arm. "I see them. See those great black shadows over there?" She stepped forward. "Shall I tell them?"

But Armitage had seen. He turned to the yeoman.

"Full speed, ahead!"

"Full speed, ahead, sir."

The slender hull throbbed with the giant pulsings of the two sets of engines. There was not another sound. It was as though the vessel were plunging through an endless void. In the darkness astern arose a spear-like puff of crimson flame. Again it appeared and again, quivering, sinister.

"d.a.m.n the _Barclay_; she's torching!" There came a shout from out of the dark and in an instant two great beams of lambent light cut wide swaths through the pall. They were too high; they missed the _D'Estang_ altogether and rested on the _Barclay's_ smoke, which rose and tumbled and billowed and writhed like a heavy shroud in the ghastly shafts.

"They 've missed us and are trying to get the _Barclay_. Come on!"

Jack's voice was vibrant with the joy of the test. He was kneeling on the bridge, a megaphone in his hand. He turned it toward the women.

"Crouch down beside that gun and stay down, please, until this is over."

As he spoke, the leading battleship, the dreadnaught _Arizona_, was getting her searchlight beams down, and all unseen, the _D'Estang_ and she were approaching each other at a total speed of thirty-seven knots.

Nearer they came and the destroyer was almost to the great dark blur, with the shining arms radiating from her like living tails from a dead comet, when, with terrible suddenness and intensity almost burning, the _Arizona_ flashed a sixty-inch searchlight directly down on the destroyer's bridge. Sara stifled a scream and Anne bowed her head to the deck to shut out the fearful blaze. Armitage, standing upright now and rubbing open his eyes, saw that the time had come to turn, and quickly. The _D'Estang_ was approaching the battleship, pointing toward her port bow. The idea of the manoeuvre was to turn in a semicircle, pa.s.sing the _Arizona_ at a distance of about two hundred yards. He shouted the order.

"Hard--a--port."

There was an instant's silence and the face of the quartermaster was seen to turn pale in the glare of the relentless searchlight.

"Wheel rope carried away, sir."

Armitage fairly threw himself across the bridge, but Johnson was there first. Quiet, unemotional Johnson, his hat off now, his hair dishevelled, and his eyes blazing.

"The helm is jambed hard a-starboard!" he cried.

In an instant the situation crystallized itself into a flashing picture upon Anne's mind. She had held the wheel on her father's yacht; but it was not that which made her see. It was divination, which fear or danger sometimes brings to highly sensitized minds--just as it brought the same picture to Sara's mind. With helm thus jambed, it meant that the _D'Estang_ would have to turn in the same direction in which the _Arizona_ was ploughing along at a twelve-knot speed. In making this turn she could not possibly clear, but must strike the battleship. On the other hand she was too near to be stopped in time to avoid going across the bows of that great plunging ma.s.s of drab steel, and being cut in two.

Anne, crouching immovable, her eyes fixed on Armitage, saw his head half turn in her direction, then with the automatic movement of a machine, he reached for the port engine room telegraph and with a jerk threw the port engine full speed astern. The bridge quivered as though it were being torn from its place; throughout the hull sounded a great metallic clanking. There came a new motion. The destroyer was spinning like a top, the bow almost at a standstill, the stem swinging in a great arc.