At the first, I had some difficulty to find my way to the companion ladder at all. The long corridor, into which my cabin opened, appeared to lead to the depths where the engines lay, and I was at a standstill, when Osbart suddenly called to me from a little door upon my right hand. I followed him to a circular iron stairway which carried us immediately to the open. We were now upon the platform of the Zero (for such was the name of Guichard's vessel), and the sea washed up almost to our feet.
Imagine a long fish-shaped craft, not unlike a monster torpedo; scale it with solid silver plates, gleaming in the sunshine; flatten its back so that twenty men might lie thereon, and you have my first impression of the Zero. When I had looked a little longer, I perceived that there was a kind of conning-tower forward, and that this had wide glass windows which could be sheathed with steel. Immediately aft of us, in a dome of steel with a heavy glass port,there glistened the barrel of a gun. The latter was the only evidence of armament anywhere upon the ship, which might have been the counterpart of the submarines I had seen at Portsmouth, saving only that she was very much longer, and that her upper plates were of this bright metal which shone like silver in the sunshine.
All this I perceived almost at a glance. The strange craft had that simplicity of design which a landsman associates with a submarine. Her secrets lay below, in the dark places of her engine-room, and could not even be guessed at by the inexpert; if, indeed (as I came to know afterward), the cleverest of engineers could have made anything of them. As to the men who lay about the platform, breathing the air as though it were life, I recognized four of them immediately, and they were the four who had come ashore to us at Ice Haven. A fifth wore better clothes, with fine brass buttons and was by all appearances a superior man, with a dark, cunning face and a black curl upon his forehead. I judged him to be about thirty years old, and could have said that he had spent some years in India. He was right forward, by the conning-tower, when we came up; and he turned and nodded to the Doctor in an affable way.
"Captain still in the arms of Morpheus, Doctor?" he asked. Osbart replied that he did not know.
"Well," the fellow ran on, "we ought to have an observation this morning if we're to pick up Number One to-night. But that's Black all over nowadays— he don't stir before the world is aired, and who's to blame him? I'd lie abed myself if you were making a wager about it, and win every time."
He laughed at his own humour as though so poor a thing pleased him mightily; and then, passing across his glass, he asked:
"Do your eyes make out anything on yonder sky-line, or do they not? I've been telling myself for the
last ten minutes that there's a pair of funnels there. Am I dreaming it or is the glass crooked? Perhaps Mr. Strong will say? His eyes are young, and I don't suppose the whiskey has spoiled them."
He offered me the glasses, and merely pausing to tell myself that he had my name, I looked where he pointed. Sure enough, I could espy the shapes of two black funnels on the distant sky-line, and I told him so—at which he spat into the sea and then looked again for himself.
"If it's Riotti out of Spezzia," he said, "God keep him on the other tack. He's the man the Captain took out of the gutter to help him build the great ship. I heard at Genoa in the winter that he was after getting his Government to fit up a cruiser for this job. I shouldn't wonder if it's true. Well, he'll get treasure enough if the skipper runs across him. I guess he'll be able to take a first floor in hell, sure and certain."
He looked toward us as though we would applaud, and the great brute, Red Roger, who had come up to ask a question, bellowed like a bull at the sally. Presently, the three went aft together, and I was left at the gunwale, with the green waters of the Atlantic at my feet. The submarine herself hardly stirred to the lazy swell; the crew seemed to sleep in the sunshine; the wash of the sea was as a lullaby.
I have tried to describe this scene with what fidelity I can that you may understand the meaning of what came after. For myself, I was still as one who dreams, yet knows that he is dreaming. The ship, the sea, the sleeping men, were all unreal to me. Osbart's story I flatly disbelieved. It seemed incredible that Black lived to command such a ship as this, and to begin again that career of lust and murder and robbery which the great tragedy of the Nameless Ship had ended. I could not realize where I stood. The distant funnels of the doomed gunboat seemed to mock me—the dark huddled figures were as shapes of my dreams.
I say that this was the truth, and yet, when awakening came it was swift enough. A soft foot-fall upon the platform caused me to turn about quickly. I saw a giant figure clad in a suit of blue overalls; I was conscious that a man stood beside me and looked out to sea. And then I knew; and as though the dead had risen suddenly from the heart of the sea, I cried out aloud that this was the great Captain; and I held my hand out to him.
Remember how this man and I had parted; recall the long hours I had spent with him, after the Nameless Ship went down, in an open boat on the broad Atlantic. Think of the days of terror through which I had lived with him, ashore and afloat; his piracies, robbery of great steamers, conquest of the sea as the pirate of old time never dreamed of conquest. Think of this and of the stupefaction which his deeds had caused in the maritime world, the panic among the seamen, the swift ordering of navies to take him; his flight from sea to sea; his defeat; his bruited death.
And now I stood beside him on the deck of the Zero, and could look upon a face stern set in anger, and understand that this was not the Captain Black who had saved me from the sea, but another whom I knew and feared exceedingly.
In truth, his greeting to me was little more than a nod. Tidings of the distant ship had come to him and held him engrossed. The dozing men, waked from their rest, watched him with covert glances. I saw the fellow in the smart clothes (he was engineer officer of the Zero, and the men called him Dingo) draw near and stand by expectantly. Osbart had come up, and his eyes were red and aflame. And then I heard the Captain's question:
"What do you make of her, Dingo?"
"Mighty little at present, sir—but I think she's Government."
"There was a German expedition to sail the third day of April. Would yon be a German ship?"
"I think not, sir. Dr. Schwartz, who sailed from Bremer Haven, took the old American liner Breslau. That's not the shape of it——"
"And the syndicate that was formed at Lisbon?"
"I believe that their ship has not yet sailed, sir."
"It would be Riotti out of Spezzia!"
"I was thinking as much, sir——"
"Then the Lord help him. The swine—that I lifted from the gutter! Him to hunt me! I'll tear his heart out of his body."
The man had always been terrible in anger, and was not less terrible now. Even his own crew shrank back from him when he turned about and cried,' "Hands, stand by." The lust of blood and crime was upon them all; a silence as of death fell upon the ship while she began to forge slowly ahead and to approach the steamer, now shaping more clearly upon the horizon. Had I been asked to find a simile, I would have said that these men were as wolves who had nosed their quarry, their eyes shining red, their lips rolled back to show their shining fangs. For a word they would have struck me dead where I stood. I knew it, and for very life I held my tongue.
Thus it stood for the third part of an hour, perhaps. The doomed steamer showed clearly by this time, and was to be described as a smaller type of Italian gunboat. I heard afterward that she was named the Vespa (or the Wasp), and had been fitted out by the Italian Government nominally to cruise in northern waters; but in effect to follow the others to Ice Haven and there get the treasure if she could. As we saw her, she had two black funnels of the smoke-stack order, long and fretted at the tops, and a stumpy mast forward with a maintop for the quick-firing guns. Her capacity would have been five thousand tons, I suppose, and she carried some hundred