wift-skimming wavelet that swept irresistibly
across the bigger surges and lapped the ship's side, as for a message
that the work was done.

Here and there in the sea a glint of silver, a patch of purple, or dull
red, or a glistening apparition of black showed where the unintended
victims of the explosion, the gay-hued open-sea fish of the warm waters,
had succumbed to the force of the shock. Of the intended victim there was
no sign save a few fragments of wood bobbing in a swirl of water.

When Barnett, the ordnance officer in charge of the destruction, returned
to the ship, Carter complimented him.

"Good clean job, Barnett. She was a tough customer, too."

"What was she?" asked Ives.

"The _Caroline Lemp_, three-masted schooner. Anyone know about her?"

Ives turned to the ship's surgeon, Trendon, a grizzled and brief-spoken
veteran, who had at his finger's tips all the lore of all the waters
under the reign of the moon.

"What does the information bureau of the Seven Seas know about it?"

"Lost three years ago--spring of 1901--got into ice field off the tip of
the Aleutians. Some of the crew froze. Others got ashore. Part of
survivors accounted for. Others not. Say they've turned native. Don't
know myself."

"The Aleutians!" exclaimed Billy Edwards. "Great Cats! What a drift! How
many thousand miles would that be?"

"Not as far as many another derelict has wandered in her time, son," said
Barnett.

The talk washed back and forth across the hulks of classic sea mysteries,
new and old; of the _City of Boston_, which went down with all
hands, leaving for record only a melancholy scrawl on a bit of board to
meet the wondering eyes of a fisherman on the far Cornish coast; of the
_Great Queensland_, which set out with five hundred and sixty-nine
souls aboard, bound by a route unknown to a tragic end; of the
_Naronic_, with her silent and empty lifeboats alone left, drifting
about the open sea, to hint at the story of her fate; of the
_Huronian_, which, ten years later, on the same day and date, and
hailing from the same port as the _Naronic_, went out into the void,
leaving no trace; of Newfoundland captains who sailed, roaring with
drink, under the arches of cathedral bergs, only to be prisoned, buried,
and embalmed in the one icy embrace; of craft assailed by the terrible
one-stroke lightning clouds of the Indian Ocean, found days after, stone
blind, with their crews madly hauling at useless sheets, while th