Chapter II: A Chase Into the Fog

It was a few minutes after two bells in the forenoon watch when the foretop spotter called down to the bridge through the voice tube: “Smoke broad off the port bow, sir!” The _Conklin_ was steaming north-northwest, gradually coming about on the western end of her cross-sea patrol. On the bridge the executive and a quartermaster captain snatched binoculars and swept the hazy horizon. The executive officer turned to the tube. “Where?” he asked. “Can’t see anything down here.”

“Just a mo, sir!” answered the spotter glibly, too interested to be formal. “Now she’s coming thicker, sir. Broad off the bow, or a point or so――”

“Why don’t you say what you mean?” growled the executive fearsomely, as he turned again toward the indicated quarter. He saw it then, a few trailing streaks against the misty gray of the morning sky. The QC had it too and silence reigned for a moment. Then:

“Better have a look,” muttered the lieutenant. Orders to wheel-house and engine room followed. The _Conklin_ swung her bow toward the distant smudge and from her own stacks the smoke poured faster and blacker. She “picked it up” to twenty-eight and went boiling into the southwest. Hatches, round coal-holes just big enough to emit a man if he wasn’t too fat, spouted gobs and the deck grew animated with conjecture and hope. Gradually the distant smoke took shape and then the ship stood up out of the sea and mist and glasses searched her from stem to stern. The Old Man, summoned from below, gestured disappointedly.

“She’s not our meat,” he sighed. “Four funnels. The _Neusatz_ has only three. I thought for a minute we’d found her.”

“Me, too,” grumbled the executive. “Wonder who she is?”

“Better ask her,” said the captain. “Looks Italian to me. But I don’t know what an Italian destroyer’d be doing up here. If it wasn’t for the four stacks I’d lay you ten to one she was the _Neusatz_.”

“She’s changing her course, sir,” called down the lookout. “Heading west’ard.”

“H’m, looks as though she didn’t want to play with us,” muttered the Old Man. “Run up your signals, please. Let’s find out about her.”

Presently the colored flags fluttered from the foremast. Several miles still separated the two destroyers, but when the bunting on the stranger broke out it was not difficult to read the signals through glasses. Nevertheless the lieutenant muttered and the signal men stared, and:

“Something wrong,” declared the executive.

“He’s crazy,” said the Old Man. “That doesn’t make sense. Tell him I want to see his papers.”

Again the _Conklin_ spoke. Across the water the stranger kept on her way, heading straight into the west and losing no time. The _Conklin_ roared and shook as she answered the challenge. Then tiny bits of bunting appeared in the distance and eager eyes read their message.

“Italian destroyer _Sondrio_, eh?” murmured the captain. “Why couldn’t he say so? I didn’t see any number there. What’s the _Sondrio’s_ number, Mr. Chapin?”

“Twenty-four, sir,” replied the lieutenant, referring to the register. “Seven hundred and fifty tons, length 290 feet, speed twenty-seven knots, two masts, four funnels.”

“Sounds all right, but――”

“There’s something wrong with one of those funnels,” interrupted the ensign. “It’s got a list to port, sir. Isn’t in line with the others.”

“You’re right,” agreed the Old Man, staring through his glasses. “Must have been hit there.”

“Unless it’s a fine bit of camouflage, sir,” replied the ensign.

“Eh? By Jove, that’s possible! Guess we’ll have a closer look. Tell him to stop his engines.”

But the _Sondrio_ was haughty. Three miles away, she answered that she was on special duty and in a hurry, and to prove the latter she straightway proceeded to leave that part of the world at the best speed she could manage. On the _Conklin_ the Old Man grew red of face and sprang to the engine room tube, and in another sixty seconds the American ship was doing every inch of her 33.60 and the foredeck was a wet place and the bridge scarcely better. But the stranger still had a fair three-mile lead, and beyond her a bank of fog was moving eastward and on the _Conklin’s_ bridge uneasiness prevailed. Once in that fog the _Sondrio_ might yet slip from them. Quarters was sounded and the gun crews, already hovering at stations, became busy. Ammunition boxes appeared as if by magic and were broken open, plugs swung back and bores were examined. The _Conklin’s_ boilers roared and the long, slender ship plowed through the water at a speed that sent the wind tearing along her decks and flattened down the great clouds of oily smoke that poured from the funnels. She was gaining fast on the other ship, but that fog bank was drawing momentarily nearer and nearer. Ten minutes passed and the three-mile lead was cut to two. At Number One gun the crew watched and waited eagerly, for they were to have the first word when the time came.

Ten minutes more and the exec. was giving the deflection and ranges: “Seven thousand, five hundred!... Seven thousand!...”

The moments dragged. At last: “Are you on?”

“On, sir!”

“Fire!”

Number One spoke sharply and a five-inch shrapnel shell sped on its mission of destruction. From the bridge they watched intensely. A column of water sprang up astern of the fleeing destroyer.

“Short!” muttered the Old Man. From the fire control came the correction. Number One’s plug closed behind a new charge. Again the sharp bark and another shell flew whining across the sea. But the other ship had all the luck that day, for the second shot was another miss, striking close alongside to starboard and drenching the deck but still missing. And then, as though by a miracle, the fleeing craft utterly vanished from sight, swallowed up by the onrolling bank of gray mist!

A third shell followed, while growls of disappointment arose from bridge and deck. “Good _night_!” exclaimed the ensign disgustedly. “Great Scott, what rotten luck! Down there, do you think you got her the last time?”

The gun captain turned a sorrowful countenance upward and shook his head. “No, sir, I don’t,” he answered.

Silence and suspense followed while the _Conklin_ plunged ahead toward the oncoming fog. A breath of cooler, damper air rushed across the bow and then they were in it and, from forward, the after half of the ship melted into nothingness. The second funnel disappeared and the first grew dim and spectral. “A regular North Sea particular,” growled the Old Man in disgust, walking the bridge from side to side. “It’ll last for days, or I miss my guess. We’ll take her north, gentlemen. It’s a bare chance that we may pick her up again when this lifts.” To the engine room went the order to slow down to twenty-seven, to the gun stations the order to secure. Half an hour later life aboard the _Conklin_ was back at its former routine flow. But there was plenty to talk about now, and they didn’t neglect it. Chagrin was deep for a while, and there were uncomplimentary remarks passed bearing on the sighting of Number One gun. But hope returned at length. What had happened might happen again. The morning had proved that the _Conklin’s_ mission was, after all, something else than merely slapping the waves, that life was capable of holding tense moments. In short, the incident, as disappointing as its outcome had been, had supplied a new zest, and when spirits once began to rise they rose high. By noon they were convinced that Fortune would lead them back to the _Neusatz_, for not a man aboard doubted now that the destroyer was in reality the craft they sought. Word of the suspicious funnel had traveled below and aft and one of the signal crew averred with every sign of truthfulness that he had himself seen that funnel flap in the wind!

Followed a chill afternoon and night, fog-wrapped, mysterious, in which the destroyer, with “kettles all lit off for twenty-seven,” plunged recklessly northward. Lookout duty was a grand farce, for one’s own hand was invisible at the length of one’s arm when night came. The sea was flat and oily and the _Conklin_ held herself as steady as an automobile on asphalt. But the fog seeped into every far corner of the ship and things grew clammy to the touch and the few lights along the lower deck shone dim and reddish in the haze. But all night the engines whirred and clanked and dripped oil and the big boilers sang a frenzied tune, and another day dawned two hundred and fifty miles nearer the Arctic. But one must take the dawn largely for granted, for the world was still a gray void, and if there was a sun it was well hidden. Somewhere east and north were the Faroe Islands, but for the rest there was only open sea. There was a new chill in the air to-day, and olive-drab sweaters showed above the V’s of overshirts. The _Conklin_ was no longer hurrying. Instead, like a man having an appointment for an hour he was not certain about, she lazed along in the gray emptiness and changed her course from time to time. Spirits showed reaction to-day. There was something peculiarly depressing in that fog. Optimism was no longer rampant. From ward room to aftermost storeroom you’d not have discovered a man who ever expected to see the _Neusatz_ again. Life was horribly drear and dull and monotonous, and a submarine slopping up alongside would have been a heaven-sent relief. But there was never a periscope built that could penetrate that gloom, and so even that blessing was denied them. There was much growling, and chow was poor and a man was a fool to join the Navy, anyway. At least a hundred normally even-tempered, high-spirited young men rued the day they had signed enlistments.

But nothing lasts forever, even fog around 60 north latitude, and Dave, on graveyard watch that night, saw stars peek dimly down through the murk before he tumbled into his bunk, and found sunlight and a cold, fresh breeze awaiting him in the morning. Spirits arose again. Even if they had missed the _Neusatz_, and it was a safe wager that such was the case, there were other ships afloat that needed attention, and life was not nearly so black――or gray――as they had painted it yesterday. Dave was swinging lazily from side to side in the canvas “bucket” of the foretop in the morning, viewing an empty sea with longing eyes. Looking down and back past the simmering funnels he could see the deck draped with damp garments drying in the sun. Nearer at hand The Pickle was earnestly wigwagging to an imaginary accomplice in the direction of Iceland, one of three of the signal crew who had yet to learn. On the bridge the QC was telling stories to the ensign. Everywhere ports and hatches were open to sun and wind, and the long four-inch gun on the fo’c’sle deck had been shorn of its canvas jacket and gleamed with an oily luster. The _Conklin_ was taking life easy, and even the gobs lolling about aft had a sort of “nothing to do till to-morrow” air. Dave yawned and started a new survey of the encircling rim of the world. There was nothing to expect, only blue water, sunshot and dazzling in spots, a pale blue sky, and a horizon as clearly defined as though drawn with a pen. Even birds were absent up here, and flotsam scarce. A floating deck swab was something to talk of for five minutes to-day. Northward, emptiness; eastward, emptiness; southward――

Dave’s eyes narrowed. He adjusted his glasses again. A moment passed. It might be a tiny cloud floating up above the ocean edge, but――

He ducked to the tube.

“On the bridge, sir. Smoke two points off the port bow.”