hour without
any particular effort."

"No effort?" muttered Torry. "And it feels as though she was shaking
herself to pieces!"

"She's faster than the _Colodia_," observed Whistler, somewhat as though
he felt pained by that fact. That any other craft should be a sweeter
sailer than his beloved destroyer seemed to him almost a crime.

"She most certainly is," agreed Ensign MacMasters. "She is some speed
boat!"

"Why!" Frenchy cried, "she must be faster than the admiral's hydroboat
we saw at Newport."

"No, no!" said the ensign. "Those hydroboats have got every other craft
in the Navy beaten to a standstill. And about all they use 'em for is
pleasure boats."

"They'll be dispatch carriers maybe?" suggested Whistler.

"What do they want of dispatch carriers in a day of wireless?" returned
the ensign, and went about his duty of conning the S. P. 888 as she shot
through the breach between the claw-like capes that defended the cove,
and so straight out to sea in a southeasterly direction.

The "bone in her teeth," as sailors call the white water under the
ship's bows, became a windrow of sea, foamed-streaked and agitated,
parted by the knife-sharp bows, and rolling away on either hand. The
S. P. 888 traveled so swiftly that at a distance "shark" really was
the name for her.

She was not camouflaged, as were the hull and upperworks of many Navy
vessels with which the four friends were familiar; but her dull coloring
made her well nigh unobservable at a few miles' distance when she lay at
rest. When she was in action no amount of deceiving paint would hide
her, because of the water she disturbed.

The motor boat Phil had suspected had more than an hour and half's
start. If she had kept straight ahead on the course she was going when
last observed by the boys, she must now be twenty miles or more off
shore.

The chaser, propelled by her powerful engines, could traverse that
distance, and the oil boat's additional miles, in less than two hours.
If the pursued vessel did not change her course she could be easily
overtaken before twilight.

Ensign MacMasters was too busy to talk further with the four chums;
indeed it would not be conducive to discipline for the commissioned
officer to give the apprentice seamen too much of his attention.

But Mr. MacMasters and the four Seacove boys had been through some warm
incidents together; and there is always a particular bond between those
who have been shoulder to shoulde