He smiled with a grim superiority as he listened.
“What?--You say there’s no doubt of the identity?”
His brows puckered suddenly in the frown with which he prepared the annihilation of a stupid and stubbornly insistent witness.
“Now, pay attention, my friend!--When did this event occur?” He asked the question in the tone of one confident of establishing an impossibility by a counter fact. There was a moment of pause--and then his expression changed. “To-night?--_At eleven o’clock?_”
The clock in the study struck, discreetly, twelve.
The S. S. _Upsal_, 2,000 tons, the Swedish ensign at her taffrail, her one black-spouting funnel still daubed with remains of war-time camouflage, lifted and plunged doggedly into the teeth of the September south-west gale that lashed her with cold rain from the streaming gray clouds which curtained close the foam-topped gray-green waves into which she crashed with recurrent walls of spray high above her forecastle, and which mingled in an indistinguishable whelm with the dirty murk of beaten-down smoke low upon the track of her bared and racing propeller. The men upon her bridge crouched, oilskins to their ears, behind the soaked canvas of the “dodger” which protected them, peering into the mist from which at any moment might emerge the towering bulk of a liner hurrying up-channel to the hungry ports of Europe. They were silent. Conversation was a futile effort in the buffeting blasts that stopped the words in their mouths. The only sounds were the crash and thud of green water that slid off in foaming cascades from the forecastle to the well, the harp-like moaning of the wind-tautened stays, and, in brief lulls, the sizzling of rain and spray upon the heated funnel and the creaking of boat-gear whose serviceable character in such a humble “tramp” was a phenomenon reminiscent of unwonted marine perils that had but recently ceased. No longer did her look-out scrutinize every flitting patch of foam in apprehension of the dreaded periscope. The violences of sea and sky were dangers as of yore. From the depths came now no menace.
The group upon her bridge was more numerous than is customary on a cheaply run little freighter of her class. In addition to the second officer whose watch it was, and the look-out man on the opposite corner of the bridge were three others. Two of them, young men oilskin-clad like their companions, stood close together in an attitude which indicated a personal acquaintanceship independent of the working of the vessel. The third man held himself aloof, his back to them, staring over the troubled sea to a point on the starboard quarter. Somewhere in that direction, wrapped in the mists of rain and trailing cloud the last rocky outposts of England whitened the waves which surged and fell back about them in ceaseless and ever-baffled attack.