Ten fathoms! Sixty feet! Why, at that depth Cappy should have known that her masts and funnel would be above water; that in all probability she carried war-risk insurance; that she was so far from anywhere the underwriters would have abandoned her, even had she not been a prize of war, since there are no appliances in Papeete for salving a vessel of her size; that she could be raised if one cared to spend a little money on doing it; that one projectile probably had not ruined her beyond repair; that she was a menace to navigation in Papeete Harbor and hence would have to be gotten out of the way, either by dynamite or auction; that--well, any number of thats should have occurred to Cappy Ricks to suggest the advisability of keeping track of the wreck of the _Valkyrie_. However, for some mysterious reasons--his resentment against the German cause, probably--the golden prospect never appealed to him, for when he had finished reading the article he merely said:
“Well, what do you know about that? Skinner, it's a mighty lucky thing for that German admiral that I'm not the Kaiser, for I'd certainly make him hard to catch. The idea of sinking that fine steamer--and a German steamer at that! Here was the little old French gunboat, about as invulnerable as a red-cedar shingle; and instead of moving into proper position and raking her with their light guns--instead of calling on her to surrender--these Germans had to go to work in a hurry and inaugurate a campaign of frightfulness. The minute they were off the harbor--Zowie! Blooey! Bam! It was all over but the cheering, and they'd chucked an eight-inch projectile through a ship that was worth four of the gunboat.
“Skinner, that's what I call spilling the beans. Why they didn't take their time, recapture that freighter and give her skipper a chance to hustle across to San Francisco or Honolulu and intern, is a mystery to me. The idea! Why, for that German fleet to waste ammunition on that Jim-Crow town and a hand-me-down gunboat was equivalent to John L. Sullivan whittling out a handle on a piece of two-by-four common fir in order to attack a cockroach!”
Cappy was so incensed that he growled about the Germans for an hour. Then he forgot the _Valkyrie_, notwithstanding the fact that the press jogged his memory again when the German fleet, deciding that prudence was the better part of valor, fled from the Pacific to escape the Japanese, only to be destroyed in the South Atlantic by the British fleet. A resume of the operations of the German squadron in the Pacific brought forth mention of the destruction of the _Zeile_ and the _Valkyrie_. However, Cappy's mind was not in Tahiti now, but off the Falkland Islands, for he was very much pro-Ally and devoted more thought to military and naval strategy than he did to the lumber and shipping business.