South of Chiloe Island, on the Chile coast, there lies a little harbour which shall be nameless.

Here, six days later, the Penguin was hurriedly coaling—on the Spreewald’s dollars.

It was at eight o’clock on a glorious and summerlike morning that she put out of this place with her bunkers only half full, her stores just rushed aboard cumbering the deck, and a man swung over the stern on a board, painting her name out above the thunder and pow-wow of the screw.

Blood would never have wasted paint and time in the attempt to alter the name of his ship had it been the English he dreaded now. As a matter of fact, word had come to the chief official at the little nameless port above indicated that the Germans were out looking for a fifteen-hundred-ton cable boat named the Penguin, grey-painted and captained by a master mariner named Michael Blood.

The bleating of the infernal Spreewald had been heard all over the Pacific. Sprengel’s bad language was following it. The Minerva had communicated by wireless with the German gunboat Blitz, lying at the German island of Savaii, in the Navigators. The Blitz had spoken to the cruiser Homburg, lying at Tongatabu; from Tongatabu it had been flashed to Fiji, and from there to Sydney. From Sydney it went to San Francisco, reaching the City of the Golden Gate in time for the morning newspapers; from there it passed in dots and dashes down the west American seaboard to Valparaiso and Valdivia.

Added to all the turmoil, the cable company whose cable had been broken smelled the truth and were howling for the Penguin’s blood.

Marconi waves from Valparaiso had found the German cruiser squadron far at sea, and they had started on the hunt.

This was the news that had come to the chief official at the little Chilean port, and which, being friendly toward Blood and unfriendly toward Germany, he communicated to the former. There was also the matter of a tip, which left the coffers of the Penguin completely empty after the account for coal, provisions, and harbour dues had also been settled.

“What’s the course?” asked Harman as the coast line faded behind them.

“Straight out to sea,” replied Blood. “Due west till we cut the track from Taliti to the Horn; then southeast for the Straits of Magellan. Ramirez is going to fake them with the news that we have gone north.”

“Why not go straight for the Straits down the coast instead of puttin’ out like this?”

“They’ll be hunting the coast; sure to send a ship south. They’ll never think of us going west; the last thing they’d think of.”

“Are you sure Ramirez is safe?”

“Oh, he’s safe enough. He hates the Germans, and he has taken my money. He’ll stick to his bargain. I wish we were as safe. Good Lord, every cent gone and nothing to show for it but this old hooker which we can’t sell, and the sure and certain prospect of the penitentiary if we don’t work a miracle—and even then we are lost dogs. Frisco is closed to us. We never can show our noses in Frisco again.”

“I wouldn’t have come on this cruise if I’d known things was goin’ to pan out like this,” said the ingenuous Harman. “No, indeedy! I’d have stuck to somethin’ more honest. What I want to know is this: What’s the use of war, anyway? When it has a chance of doin’ a man a good turn the blighted thing holds off, whereas if you and me had been runnin’ a peace concern it’s chances that it’d have come on. No, blamed if I don’t turn a Methodis’ passon if I ever get out o’ this benighted job. It’s crool hard to be choused like this by a cus’t underhand trick served on one just as a chance turns up to make a bit. Why couldn’t they have fought and been done with it? What’s the good of all them guns and cannons, and all them ships? What in the nation’s the good of them ships? Seems to me the only good of them is to go snuffin’ and smellin’ round the seas, pokin’ their guns into other folk’s affairs and spoilin’ their jobs. Well, there’s an end of it. I’m a peace party man now and forever more. Blest if it ain’t enough to make a man turn a Bible Christian!”

“You’d better go and see to the stowing of the stores,” said the Captain. “There’s no use in carrying on like that. I didn’t make war, or else I guess I’d have made it more limber on its legs. Come! Hurry up!”

They stood two days to the west, and then they turned to the south coast and made their dash for the Straits.

The weather had changed. It was steadily blowing up from the westward. The sea, under a dull sky, had turned to the colour of lead, and the heavy swell told of what was coming.

They had not sighted a ship since leaving the Chilean coast, but three days after altering their course the smoke of a steamer appeared, blown high by the wind and far to westward. The wind had scarcely increased in force, but the sea was tremendous and spoke of what was coming.

The Captain, on the bridge, stood with a glass to his eye, trying to make out the stranger. He succeeded, and then, without comment, handed the glass to Harman.

Harman, steadying himself against the rolling and pitching of the ship, looked.

A waste of tempestuous water leaped at him through the glass, and then, bursting a wave top to foam with her bows, grey as the seas she rode came a ship of war.

A cruiser, with guns nosing at the sky as if sniffing after the traces of the Penguin. She was coming bow on, and now, falling a point or two, her fore funnel seemed to broaden out and break up. It was the three funnels showing, now en masse and now individually. Then, as she came to again, the three funnels became one.

“She’s a three-funnel German,” said Harman, “and she has spotted us.”

Even as he spoke the wind suddenly increased in violence.

“I’m not bothering about her much,” said the Captain. “I’m bothering about what’s in front of us.”

“Whacher mean?”

“Mean! Look at the sea and the stuff that’s coming. Could we put the ship about in this sea? No, we couldn’t. You know very well the old rolling log would turn turtle. Well, what’s before us? A lee shore. If we don’t reach the opening of the Straits of Magellan before sundown we’re dead men all. Germans! I wish I were safe in the hold of a good German ship.”

The truth of his words burst upon Harman. There are no lights at the entrance of the Magellan Straits; the entrance is not broad; to hit it in the darkness would be next door to impossible, and not to hit it would be certain death.

It was impossible to put the ship about. Harman’s extraordinary mind did not seem much upset at the discovery.

“D’ye think we’ll do it?” asked he.

“I don’t know,” said the Captain. “We may and we mayn’t. You see, we haven’t a patent log. I haven’t had a sight of the sun for two days. I can’t figure things to a nicety. But if I had ten patent logs I wouldn’t use them now. I’d be afraid to—what would be the good? Mac is whacking up the engines for all they’re worth.”

“Well, maybe we’ll do it,” said Harman, applying his eye again to the glass. Then: “She’s going about.”

The Captain took the glass.

The cruiser was turning from her prey before it was too late. It was a terrific spectacle, and once the Captain thought she was gone. The foam was bursting as high as her fighting tops and the grey water pouring in tons over her decks.

Yet she did it, and the last Blood saw of her was the kick of her propellers through sheets of foam.

At four o’clock that day they knew that they could not do it. There was no grog on board, so they were having a cup of tea in the saloon. The Captain sat at the head of the table, before the tin teapot and a plate of fancy biscuits.

The Captain and Harman were the only two men on board with a knowledge of what was coming.

“Another lump of sugar in mine,” said Harman. “I don’t hold with tea; I never did hold with tea. The only thing that can be said for it is it’s a drink. And how some of them blighters ashore lives suckin’ it day and night gets me.”

He was drinking out of his saucer.

“Oh, tea’s all right. I reckon tea’s all right,” said the Captain in an absent-minded manner.

“Maybe it is, but give me a hot whisky and you may take your tea to them that like it,” replied Harman.

He lit his pipe and went on deck. The Captain followed. They could not keep away from the fascination up above.

The bos’n was on the bridge, and they relieved him.

Not a sign of land was in sight, and the sea was running higher than ever.

“You see,” said the Captain, “we can’t make it. It’ll be sundown in an hour. We’ll strike the coast some time after dark, and God have mercy on our souls.”

“You ain’t tellin’ the hands?” said Harman.

“No use tellin’ them. I told Mac, so that he might get the best out of the engines.”

“And there’s no bit of use gettin’ out life belts,” said Harman. “I know this coast; rocks as big as churches an’ cliffs that nuthin’ but flies could crawl up; and b’sides which if a chap found himself ashore he’d either starve or be et by niggers. They’re the curiosest chaps, those blighters down here. I guess the A’mighty spoiled them in the bakin’ and shoved them down here by the Horn to hide them from sight. Wonder what Wolff and Shiner is doin’ by this?”

“God knows!” said the Captain.

The darkness fell without a sight of the land, and, leaving the bos’n on the bridge, they came down for a while to the engineroom for a warm. Mac just inquired if there was any sight of land, and said nothing more.

The engines were no longer being pressed, and they smoked and watched the projection and retraction of the piston rods, the revolution of the cranks, and all the labours of this mighty organism so soon to be pounded and ground to death on the hard rocks ahead.

It was toward midnight that the coast spoke, so that all men could hear on board the Penguin.

Its voice came through the yelling blackness of the night like the roar of a railway train in the distance.

The crew were gathered aft and in the alleyways, for all forward of the bridge the decks were swept. Harman and the Captain were on the bridge.

Mac had the word to give her every ounce of steam he could get out of the boilers, in the desperate idea that the harder she was pressed the higher she might be driven on the rocks, and the tighter she might stick.

The roaring of the breakers seemed now all around them, and the Captain and Harman were clinging to the bridge rails, bracing themselves for the coming shock, when—just as a curtain is drawn aside in a theatre—the rushing clouds drew away from the moon.

The white, placid full moon whose light showed the foam-dashed coast to either side of them, and right ahead clear water.

They had struck the Magellan Straits by some miracle, just as the bullet strikes the bull’s-eye of a target, and right to port they saw a great white ghost rising in the moonlight and falling again to the sea.

It was the foam breaking on the Westminster Hall.

It was breaking three hundred feet high, and Harman, as he was hurled along to the safety of the Straits, caught a glimpse of the great rock itself after a wave had fallen from it, glistening in the moonlight desolately, as slated roofs glisten after rain.

That was a sight which no man, having once seen, could ever forget.

I met Blood last year. He was exceedingly prosperous, or seemed so. He told me this story, and I have so mixed names and places that he himself would scarcely recognise the chief actor, much less his enemies. As to the fate of the Penguin, I could only get him to say that she “went down” somewhere south of Rio, but that all hands were saved. Harman, he said, had turned religious.

PART II
THE “HEART OF IRELAND”

THE “HEART OF IRELAND”