Next morning early, Harman, standing on the bridge by the Captain, pointed to a smudge on the eastern horizon. The smoke of a steamer.

The Captain glanced at the spot indicated, shading his eyes with his hand; then he took the glass from its sling.

“I can’t make her clearly out,” said he. “The wind is covering her with her own smoke.”

“She’s maybe the mail boat that runs to Samoa,” said Harman, “or maybe she’s just a tramp. What are you goin’ to do?”

“How d’you mean?”

“Well, I mean just that. Are we goin’ to let her slip through our hands?”

“Harman,” said the Captain, “when I signed on for this cruise I knew I was going in for a shady job; still, there didn’t seem much to it, anyway. I knew Shiner was going to tinker up a cable, and I judged he was clever enough to pull the business through safely and give us all a big profit. Well, that scheme is all gone, and now I’m a bloody pirate, it seems. The war with Germany started me on the road, and there’s no use in crying out and saying, or pretending, we’re privateers. We aren’t; we’re pirates. That’s the long and the short of it. We aren’t making war on Germany; we are just collecting dibbs for ourselves. I’m not proud of it, not by a long way; but we’re in for it now and may as well make the most of it. You ask me what I am going to do with this vessel? Well, I’m going to go through her.”

“Good!” said Harman. “I’m not one for runnin’ extra risks, but we’ve risked so much already it’s a pity not to risk a bit more when we have the chance. For it’s not once in a lifetime a chance comes to sailormen like this.”

“I don’t suppose it is,” said Blood. “It’s not every day that chaps like Shiner and Wolff fit out a cable-cutting party and get information of war right first thing through the cut cable. Ah, the smoke’s clearing and her hull’s coming out; let’s see what she’s like.”

He put the glass to his eye and examined the distant ship; then as he looked he began to whistle.

“Well,” said he, taking the glass from his eye, “I reckon we won’t go through her—she’s a man-o’-war.”

“Whatcha say!” cried Harman, seizing the glass. He looked. Then he said:

“I reckon you’re right; she’s a fightin’ ship sure enough. I guess we’ll let her go this time, our armaments bein’ so unequal; she’s headin’ right for us, and if you ask for my advice I’d advise a shift of helm.”

“Yes,” said Blood, “and don’t you know that the first thing she’d do if we shifted our helm without a reason would be to come smelling round us? Don’t you know that a man-o’-war has no business to do at all but to look after other folk’s businesses? She’s not due to time anywhere; she’s got no cargo to deliver, no owners to grumble at her if she’s a day late. No, her business is to keep her eye out on the watch for shady people like you and me, and of course for the enemy if it’s war time. No, I reckon we’ll keep straight on, but there’s one thing we’ll do, and that is dismantle the spar gun. I reckon a dummy gun would be a difficult thing to explain away, and that, backed by the faces of our chaps and the fact that we haven’t a yard of cable in our tanks and no log except the one I faked up and forgot to keep to date more’n a week ago. Might get us into very serious trouble.”

“Is she a Britisher, do you think?” asked Harman, still ogling the approaching vessel through the glass.

“We’ll soon see,” replied the Captain.

He came down from the bridge, and hustled the fellows round, making them remove the dummy gun and place it down below on the cable deck.

Then he came back on to the bridge.

The stranger had ceased firing up, and had cleared herself of smoke. She was a cruiser right enough, one of the modern, swift, small-tonnage cruisers that can yet sink you with a broadside or cripple you most effectually with a bow chaser and from the distance of four miles.

Blood laughed as he looked at her.

“I expect she can do her twenty-five knots,” said he. “Piracy! Who could do anything with piracy these days between wireless and things like that. Harman, I guess I’m sick of this business and the uncertainty of it. I guess if this chap passes us and leaves us alone I’ll make tracks for home—which means Frisco. We can get rid of the Penguin somehow or ’nother and crawl up home through Central America. Crawl up home, those are my sentiments now, for I’ve got a feeling down my spine that this chap is going to stop and speak to us.”

“Why should she do that?” said Harman. “Wish you wouldn’t be drawin’ bad luck by prophesying it. Why in the nation should she stop a harmless cable ship?”

“Well, if she’s a German she’d stop us to see if we are English, and then sink us, and if she’s a Britisher she’d stop us to see if we were German. I wouldn’t mind in either case only for the Spreewald and Christobal Island and Wolff and Shiner. If the Germans were to take us, and Wolff and Shiner were to get news of our capture they’d make things pretty warm for us.”

“Let’s hope she’s a Britisher,” said Harman.

A mile off the stranger, who had obviously slackened speed, ported her helm slightly to give the Penguin a view of what she was saying.

She was saying, in the language of coloured flags:

“Lay to till I board you——”

“She doesn’t ask to be invited,” said Blood. “Run up the Stars and Stripes—thank God she’s English!—but then we’re German; at least we’re owned by Wolff and Shiner, and they’re German as sausages. Of course, they may have become naturalised Americans, but a British ship is not likely to go into the family history of Shiner or Wolff. Down with you, Harman, anyway, and get the ship’s papers together and have a box of cigars on the table for the chap that is sure to come aboard. And mind, you know nothing; pretend to be a bit silly, though that doesn’t need much pretence. Keep your mouth closed and refer everything to me. I guess this situation will require some fancy work in the way of lying.”

“I’ll be mum,” said Harman.

He slid down the bridge steps, and scuttered along the deck to the saloon companionway, while Blood, alone in his glory on the bridge, and trying to assume the dignity that he did not feel, gave his orders to the crew.

He rang the engines to half speed, and then to dead slow; then he rang them off, and the Penguin, whose heart had stopped beating, one might have fancied through fright, lay moving slightly to the swell and waiting for the attentions of the Minerva, for that was the stranger’s name.

She formed a pretty picture across the blue water despite her ugly colouring and her singular lines. One knows it to be bad taste to praise enthusiastically the new engines of warfare on land or sea. All the same, a twenty-five-knot cruiser, with her teeth showing, gives one a picture of power and speed combined hard to beat in the present, and perfectly unbeaten by the past.

Blood was not thinking things like this. He was taking the measure of the six-inch guns that seemed straining their long necks to get at him; also of the little guns that showed their fangs at all sorts of loopholes and unexpected places. He had never been so close up to the business side of a warship in all his sea experience, and he noticed everything with the freshness and the vividness and the deep, deep interest that objects assume for us when they suddenly become bound up with our most vital interests and our lives.

I can fancy Charles the First quite disregarding Bishop Juxon, the crowd, and all the great considerations that must have crowded about the scaffold erected in Whitehall; disregarding all these while he fixed his eyes on the axe with its handle of good English beachwood and its blade of British iron. That axe spoke to him if anything ever spoke to him, and it said, in words as well as deed: I am the symbol of the British people.

To Blood the Minerva was saying the same thing.

Blood was a Nationalist—when he had any politics at all—and maintained a sentimental dislike for Britannia. He really did not dislike her, but he fancied he did. In reality, he admired her. He admired her as a lady whom, to use his own language, you may belt about the head as much as you like, but who is sure to give you the knock-out blow in the long, long end.

The Minerva was one of the things she hit people with, and the weapon impressed him. The incongruity of the fact that he had been robbing Germans in the name of England did not strike him at all.

There are all sorts of subtleties in the Irish character that no foreigner, be he Englishman or German or Frenchman or Scot or Welshman, can understand.

Blood, then, though he had been out of Ireland long enough to lose his brogue almost entirely, though England had “betrayed his country in the past,” and had never done much for him in the present would, had he seen an English and a German ship in action, have joined in on the side of England. He had often abused England, yet at a pinch he would have fought for her.

That is the Irish attitude, and it is unalterable. Ireland is, as a matter of fact, bound to England in wedlock. John Bull married her forcibly a great many years ago, and treated her cruelly bad after the marriage. She is always flinging the fact at his head, and she will go on doing so till doomsday, but she is his wife, and no matter what she says she is always ready, at a pinch, to go for any stranger that interferes with him.

When Blood declared war against the Germans he did so in all good faith as an ally of England. Cold reflection, however, told him that England would certainly not recognise that alliance, nor would she recognise the Penguin as one of her fighting ships, official or unofficial, that with her peculiar ideas as to the rights of belligerents and nonbelligerents she might be as bad a party to be captured by as Germany.

He knew quite well now that between the Spreewald affair and the Sprengel business, to say nothing of the original cable-cutting adventure, he would have an exceedingly bad time were this cruiser to clap the shackles on him.

He watched her now as she dropped a boat; then he leaned over and shouted to Harman, who had come on deck again, to have the companionway lowered.

Then, as the boat came alongside, he came down from the bridge to meet his fate.

A young, fresh-looking individual came up the steps—a full lieutenant by his stripes—saluted the quarter-deck in a perfunctory manner, recognised Blood at once as the skipper, and addressed him without ceremony.

“What’s the name of your ship?” asked the lieutenant.

“The Penguin,” replied Blood.

“The deuce it is! Are you sure it’s not the Sea Horse?”

“The which horse?” inquired Blood, whose temper was beginning to rise.

It was his first experience of British navy ways with merchantmen, ways which are usually decided and heralded by language which is usually abrupt.

“Sea Horse—Sea Horse—ah!” His eye had fallen on a life buoy stamped with the word “Penguin.” “You are the Penguin. You will excuse me, but we were looking after something like you—a fifteen-hundred-ton grey-painted boat. The Sea Horse. Tramp steamer gone off her head and turned pirate, looted a German vessel under pretence that war had broken out between England and Germany.”

“Well, it wasn’t us,” laughed the Captain. “Couldn’t you see we were a cable ship by the gear on deck?”

“Yes, but the message came to us by wireless with bare details. What was your last port?”

“Christobal Island, quite close here—we have only left it a few hours, and by the same token there was news there that war had broken out between Germany and England.”

“How did they get it?”

“Well, the fellow there—Sprengel is his name—has a wireless installation, and he picked up a message some days ago.”

“He picked up a lie. It has been all over the Pacific, seems to me. There’s been a sort of dust-up over a place called Agadir, but there’s no small chance of war, worse luck. The business has been settled. We had the news only yesterday.”

No news could have been more dumfounding to the unfortunate Blood than this. The cable message that had so upset Shiner and Wolff had been some lying news-agency rumour. On the strength of it he had done all he had done. More than that was the mystery of the Sea Horse. What on earth did it mean? Had another ship gone pirating on the same rumour?

He managed, however, to keep a cheerful countenance and even to speak.

“Well,” said he, “I’m right glad to hear that. War may be all right for you, but it’s no good to our business.”

“No, I don’t suppose it is,” said the lieutenant. “Well, I suppose you are all right, but just as a matter of form I’ll have a glance at your log.”

“Of course,” said Blood, with death in his heart. “If you’ll come down to the saloon I’ll have the greatest pleasure in showing it to you.”

The lieutenant followed him below.

Harman had put out the log and the cigar box on the saloon table. The lieutenant refused a cigar, but showed interest at the sight of the log. He sat down and opened it.

“Why, good heavens,” said he, “you haven’t been writing it up for days and weeks! Where’s your first officer’s log?”

“Harman doesn’t keep one,” said Blood, whose anger was beginning to rise against the situation and his visitor.

“Who’s Harman?” inquired the other, his eyes running over the entries.

“My first officer.”

“Oh, doesn’t he? H’m—h’m! Most extraordinary—what’s this? ‘Reached the Spot.’ What spot?”

“The spot on the cable we were due to work on.”

“What cable?”

“You must ask the owners that. It’s private business.”

“Who are the owners?”

“Shiner & Wolff.”

“Where are they?”

Blood did not know where the precious pair might be at that moment, but he answered:

“Frisco.”

“Are they a cable company or simple cable repairers?”

“Repairers, I think.”

“Where are the rest of the ship’s papers?”

Blood tramped off to his cabin, and returned with a bundle of all sorts of documents.

“Well,” said the lieutenant, “I can’t go through them now. I must get back and report. I’ll take these with me for reference.” He bundled log and papers together and put them under his arm.

“Look here!” said Blood. “Are you taking those off the ship?”

“Only for reference,” replied the other. “They will be quite safe, and you can have them back when I have reported.”

“Very well,” said Blood.

“And now I’d just like to have a look round. Follow me, please.”

This was a new departure. A command. Blood followed, sick at heart, but cigar still in mouth.

The lieutenant evidently knew all about cable ships.

He stopped at the after-cable tank.

“Cable tank—how much have you on board?”

“Not an inch,” replied Blood.

“H’m! But you want some spare cable for mending purposes.”

“We used it all.”

The officer passed on through the square where the forward cable tank was situated, then down to the cable deck.

Here the first thing he spotted was the infernal spar gun.

He smelled round it, and inquired its use.

“I don’t know,” said Blood. “It was on the ship when I joined—some truck left over from the last voyage, I believe.”

This suddenly recalled the inquisitor to something he had forgotten—Blood’s Board of Trade certificates.

Blood produced them, having to go back to his own cabin for them. They told their tale of long unemployment.

The lieutenant was a gentleman, and having glanced them over returned them without comment. Then he left the ship with the log and the papers under his arm, and was rowed back to the Minerva.

“What’s up?” asked Harman.

“We are,” said Blood. “There’s no war; the whole thing was a lying rumour those two guys sucked in over the cable. There was a good chance of war, but it was patched up, and it’s now peace, perfect peace, with us perched on top of it like a pair of blame fools.” He told the whole tale that we know. Then suddenly light broke upon him.

“The Sea Horse,” said he. “I see the whole thing now—when we fired those two blighters off the ship and shoved them on the Spreewald it was their interest not to give the show away. We were nose on to the Spreewald, so she couldn’t see our name. Shiner and Wolff would be the last men to give their own names, considering what they’d been doing and the latitude they were found in. They’d be sure to pose as innocents taken off some other ship by us. They’d fake up a yarn, and they’d fake up a new name for the old Penguin.”

They had gone on to the bridge again and they were talking like this with an eye always upon the Minerva, that arbiter of their destinies.

“That’s easy enough to understand,” said Harman. “What gets me is how to understand our position. What the deuce did that scuffy want, cartin’ off the log and the ship’s papers for? Ain’t there no law to protect an innocent vessel bein’ manhandled by a durned British cruiser in times of peace? What’s to become of peaceful tradin’ if such things is allowed? Where’s the rights of neutrals if a monkey on a stick like that blue-an’-gold outrage on the name of a sailor can walk on board you an’ walk off with the log book in his pocket? That’s what I want to know. I’m not a man that wants much in this here world. I only wants justice.”

“Faith, and I think you are going to get it,” said the Captain. “Bare justice, as the little boy’s mother said when she let down his pants. I’m not saying I didn’t do most of the inciting to the piracy and plundering, but whether or no we are all in the soup, and the chap with the ladle is fishing for us, and there’s no use in bothering or laying blame—we’d have shared equally in the profits.”

“Oh, I’m makin’ no remarks,” said Harman. “I’m not the man to fling back at a pal, and I guess I can take the kicks just the same as the ha’pence, but you’ve a better headpiece than me, and what I say is, be on the lookout to get the weather gauge of these jokers so be it’s possible. You can do it if any man can—get out of the soup and be a pineapple.”

“Give us a chance,” said the Captain. “I’m not going to haul my colours down without a fight for it.”

They stood watching the Minerva. Men were cleaning brasswork on board of her, a squad of sailors were doing Swedish exercises; the ship’s work was going on as unconcernedly as though she were lying in harbour, and this vision of cold method and absolute indifference to all things but duty and routine did not uplift the hearts of the gazers.

“They’re stuffed with pride, those chaps,” said the single-minded Harman. “They potter about and potter about the seas with their noses in the air, lookin’ down at the likes of us who do all the work’s to be done in the world. And what do they do? Nothin’! They never carry an ounce of grain or a hoof or hide, or mend a cable or fetch a letter, and they looks down on us that do as dirt. You saw that josser in the brass-bound coat and the way he come aboard—they’re all alike.”

“She’s moving up to us,” said the Captain, suddenly changing his position. “She’s going to speak us.”

The Minerva, with a few languid flaps of her propeller, was indeed moving up to them. When she came ranging alongside, within megaphone distance, a thing—a midshipman, Blood said—speaking through a megaphone nearly as big as itself addressed the Penguin.

“Ship ahoy! You are to follow us down to Christobal Island.”

“Good Lord!” said Harman. The Captain said nothing, merely raising his hand to signify that he had understood.

“What’s your speed?” came again the voice through the megaphone.

The Captain seized the bridge megaphone.

“Ten knots,” he answered.

“Right!” came the reply. “Follow us at full speed.”

The blue water creamed at the Minerva’s forefoot as her speed developed. She drew away rapidly, and the Penguin slowly and sulkily began to move, making a huge circle to starboard.

When she got into line the Minerva was a good two miles ahead.

Said Harman, for the Captain was speechless:

“I call this playing it pretty low down. Jumping Jeehoshophat, but we’ll be had before Sprengel! He won’t rub his hands—oh, no! I guess he won’t rub his hands! And the old Penguin is going as if she liked it. Ain’t there no gunpowder aboard to blow a hole in her skin an’ sink her? And that durned British cruiser as tight fixed to us as though she was towing us with a forty-foot hawser. I reckon if I had some poison I’d pour it out and drink it. I would that! I feel that way low down I’d pour it out and drink it.”

“Oh, shut your head!” said the Captain. “You carry on like an old woman with the stomach ache. We’re caught and we’re being lugged along by the police officer, and there’s no use in clutching at the railings or making a disturbance. The one good thing is that we haven’t any of those chaps on board us, sitting with fixed bayonets on the saloon hatch and we in the saloon. The first thing to be done is to steal as much distance out of her as we can without her kicking.”

He went to the engine-room speaking tube:

“Below there, heave any muck you think likely to make smoke in the furnaces; there’s a lot of old rubber and canvas waste on the cable deck. I’ll tell Mr. Harman to have it sent down to you. I want to ’pear as if we were doin’ more than our best—yes, we’re caught and bein’ led to port, and we mean to have a try to get loose; keep a good head of steam, and keep your eye on the engine-room telegraph. I’ll be altering the speed now and then.”

He sent Harman to do what he said; then he stood watching the distant Minerva. She was now about two and a quarter miles ahead. The two vessels were going at about equal speed, with the balance perhaps in favour of the Minerva. He ordered the engines to half speed, and kept them so for a couple of minutes, then put them on to full speed again. The result of this proceeding was an almost imperceptible gain on the part of the cruiser.

In the next two hours, by the skilful use of this device, the distance between the two ships was increased to at least three and a half miles. Blood was content with that; so gradually had the increase been made that the Minerva, suspecting nothing, stood it, but Blood instinctively felt that she would not stand any more. The man had a keen psychological sense.

He was reckoning on a change of weather.

The wind had fallen absolutely dead, and the heat was terrific, simply because the air was charged with moisture. The captain knew these latitudes.

“I don’t see what you’re after,” said Harman, coming up on the bridge. “What’s the good of stealin’ a few cable len’ths out of her? We can’t get rid of her by day, for her guns can hit us at six miles, and if we made a show to bolt she’d turn and be on us like a cat pouncin’. She can do twenty-five knots to our twelve. Then at sundown she’s sure to close with us and keep us tied tight to her tail.”

“Maybe,” said the Captain.

He said nothing more.

An hour later he had his reward.

The horizon to westward and beyond the Minerva had become slightly indistinct; the horizon to eastward and behind them was still brilliant and hard.

He knew what was happening. A slight change of temperature was stealing from the west, precipitating the moisture as it came in the form of haze.

He put his hand on the lever of the telegraph and rang the engines off.

Harman said nothing. He went to the side and spat into the sea. Then he came back and stood watching.

“There’s nothing like haze to knock gun firing on the head,” said the Captain.

Harman said nothing, but moistened his lips. A minute passed, and then the Minerva, all at once, like a person showing the faintest sign of indecision, showed the faintest change in definition. The faint haze had touched her.

At the same moment the Captain rang up the engines, and ordered the helm to be put hard astarboard. The Penguin forged ahead, and began to turn.

“They’re so busy cleaning brasswork and saluting each other that they haven’t noticed Mr. Haze,” said the Captain. “They’re new to this station and don’t know that Mr. Fog is sure coming on her heels. Ah, she’s seen us, and she’s turning.”

The Minerva, in fact, had also put her helm hard astarboard.

She was making a half circle, and as small a half circle as she possibly could, but the Penguin had got a quarter circle start on her, and while the Minerva was still going about the Penguin was off.

If hares ever chased ducks this business might be compared to a lame duck being chased by a hare. The Minerva could steam ten miles to the Penguin’s five and over; her guns even now could have sunk the Penguin with ease, though they might not have made very good shooting, owing to the haze; that elusive, delusive haze.

“Below there,” cried the Captain through the engine-room speaking tube. “Shake yourself up, MacBean! Whack the engines up—give us fifteen or burst! What’s the matter? We’re being chased by that British cruiser, and it’s the penitentiary for the lot of us if we’re caught—that’s all.”

He turned, and at that moment the Minerva spoke.

A plume of smoke showed at her bow, there came a shrill, long-drawn “whoo-oooo” like a hysterical woman “going off” somewhere in the sky, then a jet of spume and a lather of foam in the sea two cable lengths to port.

It was a practice shell, and it left the water and made another plume a mile and a half ahead and yet another a mile beyond that.

It was her first and last useful word, for now the haze had her, destroying her for war purposes as efficiently as a bursting shell in her magazine.

The haze had also taken the Penguin; everything seemed clear all around, but all distant things had nearly vanished.

Another shell came whooing and whining from the spectred Minerva before the white Pacific fog blotted her out.

A faint wind was bringing it, less a wind than a travelling chillness, a fall of temperature, moving from east to west.

The Captain, having given his instructions to the helmsman, left the bridge, and went down below.