a strangled cry the sailor cast the shirt from him

"Sorry not to have met you at the door," he said courteously

PART ONE

THE SEA RIDDLE

I

DESERT SEAS

The late afternoon sky flaunted its splendour of blue and gold like a
banner over the Pacific, across whose depths the trade wind droned in
measured cadence. On the ocean's wide expanse a hulk wallowed sluggishly,
the forgotten relict of a once brave and sightly ship, possibly the
Sphinx of some untold ocean tragedy, she lay black and forbidding in the
ordered procession of waves. Half a mile to the east of the derelict
hovered a ship's cutter, the turn of her crew's heads speaking
expectancy. As far again beyond, the United States cruiser
_Wolverine_ outlined her severe and trim silhouette against the
horizon. In all the spread of wave and sky no other thing was visible.
For this was one of the desert parts of the Pacific, three hundred miles
north of the steamship route from Yokohama to Honolulu, five hundred
miles from the nearest land, Gardner Island, and more than seven hundred
northwest of the Hawaiian group.

On the cruiser's quarter-deck the officers lined the starboard rail.
Their interest was focussed on the derelict.

"Looks like a heavy job," said Ives, one of the junior lieutenants.
"These floaters that lie with deck almost awash will stand more hammering
than a mud fort."

"Wish they'd let us put some six-inch shells into her," said Billy
Edwards, the ensign, a wistful expression on his big round cheerful face.
"I'd like to see what they would do."

"Nothing but waste a few hundred dollars of your Uncle Sam's money,"
observed Carter, the officer of the deck. "It takes placed charges inside
and out for that kind of work."

"Barnett's the man for her then," said Ives. "He's no economist when it
comes to getting results. There she goes!"

Without any particular haste, as it seemed to the watchers, the hulk was
shouldered out of the water, as by some hidden leviathan. Its outlines
melted into a black, outshowering mist, and from that mist leaped a
giant. Up, up, he towered, tossed whirling arms a hundred feet abranch,
shivered, and dissolved into a widespread cataract. The water below was
lashed into fury, in the midst of which a mighty death agony beat back
the troubled waves of the trade wind. Only then did the muffled double
boom of the explosion reach the ears of the spectators, presently to be
followed by a whispering, s