Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns Part 4

"Oh, my!" groaned his son. "No dill pickles."

He joined Frenchy in a few minutes with a basket crammed with things to eat, as well as his fis.h.i.+ng tackle. It was not far to Bridger's float, off which the twenty-four-foot catboat, _Sue Bridger_, was moored.

Ikey remarked: "Sometimes I almost faint when I see the change in papa.

He never wanted me to have a bit of fun before. He didn't have no fun when he was a boy. He always worked. That is the German way, he says.

"But he don't have any use for _any_thing German now--not even the way they bring up children."

"Ain't it a fact?" chuckled Frenchy. "Me mother makes the kids git up and give me the best chair when I come into the sitting room.

'Git up out o' that, Ye impident brat!

An' let Mr. M'Ginnis sit down.'

That's the way she treats me. Me head's gettin' that swelled I couldn't draw a watch cap down over me ears."

The exhaust of the auxiliary engine of the catboat was spitting when Frenchy hailed their mates. Whistler was loosening the points of the big sail while Torry worked at the engine.

"How'll we get over there?" demanded Ikey. "There's no boat here."

Whistler Morgan, barefooted and with his sleeves rolled up, came aft and tossed Ikey the end of a coil of line.

"Draw her in to the float. I'll pay out the mooring cable. What have you in that basket?"

"A litter of pups a neighbor wants him to drown," answered Frenchy solemnly. "You fellows brought lunch enough for all, didn't you?"

"Couldn't get any at my house," Al confessed. "The girl's on a strike."

There was no mother at the Torrance house, and sometimes the housekeeping there was "at sixes and sevens."

"I was going to get some crackers and sardines," confessed Whistler.

"I had no idea we could get this boat when I left the house. But I can run up and get Alice to put us up a snack."

Frenchy was carrying Ikey's basket very carefully--indeed, lovingly. He allowed his mate to catch the line and draw the _Sue Bridger_ in to the float alone.

They stepped aboard, and Al made a grab for the basket handle with his greasy hands. "Let's see the pups," he demanded suspiciously.

"Have a care! Have a care!" cried Whistler as the two struggled for possession of the basket. "What is in it, Ikey?"

"Oi, oi! Oi, oi!" moaned Ikey. "They will the basket haf overboard yet!

Stop it! Stop it!"

It was Whistler who rescued the lunch basket with a firm hand. In the struggle Frenchy came near going overboard, but he fell into the bilge in the bottom of the boat instead.

"Wow!" he yelled. "Me clean pants! This old tub is leaking like a sieve, Whistler!"

Whistler and Al were peeping into the basket. Their delight was acclaimed at once.

"Good boy, Ikey!" declared Torry, smacking his lips. "You must have robbed the whole delicatessen shop."

"You don't know my papa," declared Ikey with pride. "He would like to feed the whole American Navy--that's the way he feels about it."

"He's all right," agreed Torry. "Come on, now, fellows, let's stir around. The best of the day will be gone soon. Don't worry about your wet pants, Frenchy. Get up and pump out the bilge. She hasn't been used for a fortnight, and of course some moisture has gathered."

"'Moisture?' Good-night!" growled the Irish lad, setting to work as he was told with the tin pump. "I bet I have to sit and do this all day while you fellows fish."

The engine was only for an emergency. Captain Bridger had told them that. Gasoline was expensive. So Whistler and Ikey got up the sail, it filled, and they cast off the moorings. The catboat began to edge her way out into the cove. There was no rain falling; but fog wreaths rolled in from the sea.

"Get your scare!" shouted Whistler as he ran back to take the tiller.

"Toot away once in a while. We don't want to stub our toe against some other craft, and that before we get out of the cove."

"A submarine, for instance?" chuckled Frenchy, soon becoming pacified.

"Ikey's father thinks maybe he might bag one while we're out here."

"I'd like to get a close-up view of one of those submarine chasers,"

remarked Torry, finding the horn in the forward locker. He tooted it raucously, and then continued: "They say some of 'em can go like the wind."

"Go right through a tub like this, if once we got in the way," commented Whistler. "Mind you! faster than the _Colodia_--and that's some speed."

"Wow!" cried Frenchy. "Don't believe anything on water ever does go faster than a torpedo boat destroyer."

"Oh, yes, there are faster boats. How about a hydro?" Phil said, when Ikey broke in with an inquiry:

"Say! lemme ask you: Why do they call the _Colodia_ and her sister s.h.i.+ps 'torpedo boat destroyers'? We don't see many torpedo boats anyway. They are all old stuff."

"That's right," Torry said. "What is the why-for? All naval craft are supposed to be destroyers anyway--I mean service craft."

Morgan was the oracle on this occasion.

"Ikey is right. I've read that torpedo boats antedate the Spanish War.

Their exclusive business was to run up close to an enemy battles.h.i.+p and deliver against it an automobile torpedo. These boats were great stuff in the beginning.

"Then they invented a craft as an antidote for the torpedo boat--the torpedo boat destroyer. Our Admiral Sims called this new vessel 'a tin box built around a mighty big engine.'"

"Wow! And he is right," cried Frenchy Donahue. "That's just what our _Colodia_ is."

"And these subchasers are still faster," Torry observed. "They tell me they can make thirty-five, and better, an hour."

"Oi, oi!" cried Ikey Rosenmeyer at this juncture. "Speak of the Old Harry and hear his wings, yet! What's that off yonder?"

The _Sue Bridger_ was now skimming out of the cove, and the fog was lifting. They got a sight of a patch of open sea across which a low, gray vessel was shooting like a shark after its prey.

"What a beaut!" shouted Torry.

"That's one of the new chasers all right," Whistler agreed. "Their base is at New London where the submarine base is."

At that moment the sun broke through the murk overhead. Its rays shone brilliantly upon the patch of blue sea on which the submarine patrol boat steamed at such a rapid pace.

The sunbeams p.r.i.c.ked out the letters and figures painted so big upon the side of the craft and the Navy boys repeated in chorus: