The Mystery | Page 2

by a whispering, swift-skimming wavelet that swept
irresistibly across the bigger surges and lapped the ship's side, as for a
message that the work was done.
Here and there in the sea a glint of silver, a patch of purple, or dull red,
or a glistening apparition of black showed where the unintended
victims of the explosion, the gay-hued open-sea fish of the warm
waters, had succumbed to the force of the shock. Of the intended victim
there was no sign save a few fragments of wood bobbing in a swirl of
water.
When Barnett, the ordnance officer in charge of the destruction,
returned to the ship, Carter complimented him.
"Good clean job, Barnett. She was a tough customer, too."
"What was she?" asked Ives.
"The Caroline Lemp, three-masted schooner. Anyone know about her?"
Ives turned to the ship's surgeon, Trendon, a grizzled and brief-spoken
veteran, who had at his finger's tips all the lore of all the waters under
the reign of the moon.

"What does the information bureau of the Seven Seas know about it?"
"Lost three years ago--spring of 1901--got into ice field off the tip of
the Aleutians. Some of the crew froze. Others got ashore. Part of
survivors accounted for. Others not. Say they've turned native. Don't
know myself."
"The Aleutians!" exclaimed Billy Edwards. "Great Cats! What a drift!
How many thousand miles would that be?"
"Not as far as many another derelict has wandered in her time, son,"
said Barnett.
The talk washed back and forth across the hulks of classic sea
mysteries, new and old; of the City of Boston, which went down with
all hands, leaving for record only a melancholy scrawl on a bit of board
to meet the wondering eyes of a fisherman on the far Cornish coast; of
the Great Queensland, which set out with five hundred and sixty-nine
souls aboard, bound by a route unknown to a tragic end; of the Naronic,
with her silent and empty lifeboats alone left, drifting about the open
sea, to hint at the story of her fate; of the Huronian, which, ten years
later, on the same day and date, and hailing from the same port as the
Naronic, went out into the void, leaving no trace; of Newfoundland
captains who sailed, roaring with drink, under the arches of cathedral
bergs, only to be prisoned, buried, and embalmed in the one icy
embrace; of craft assailed by the terrible one-stroke lightning clouds of
the Indian Ocean, found days after, stone blind, with their crews madly
hauling at useless sheets, while the officers clawed the compass and
shrieked; of burnings and piracies; of pest ships and slave ships, and
ships mad for want of water; of whelming earthquake waves, and
mysterious suctions, drawing irresistibly against wind and steam power
upon unknown currents; of stout hulks deserted in panic although
sound and seaworthy; and of others so swiftly dragged down that there
was no time for any to save himself; and of a hundred other strange,
stirring and pitiful ventures such as make up the inevitable peril and
incorrigible romance of the ocean. In a pause Billy Edwards said
musingly:

"Well, there was the Laughing Lass."
"How did you happen to hit on her?" asked Barnett quickly.
"Why not, sir? It naturally came into my head. She was last seen
somewhere about this part of the world, wasn't she?" After a moment's
hesitation he added: "From something I heard ashore I judge we've a
commission to keep a watch out for her as well as to destroy derelicts."
"What about the Laughing Lass?" asked McGuire, the paymaster, a
New Englander, who had been in the service but a short time.
"Good Lord! don't you remember the Laughing Lass mystery and the
disappearance of Doctor Schermerhorn?"
"Karl Augustus Schermerhorn, the man whose experiments to identify
telepathy with the Marconi wireless waves made such a furore in the
papers?"
"Oh, that was only a by-product of his mind. He was an original
investigator in every line of physics and chemistry, besides most of the
natural sciences," said Barnett. "The government is particularly
interested in him because of his contributions to aërial photography."
"And he was lost with the Laughing Lass?"
"Nobody knows," said Edwards. "He left San Francisco two years ago
on a hundred-foot schooner, with an assistant, a big brass-bound chest,
and a ragamuffin crew. A newspaper man named Slade, who dropped
out of the world about the same time, is supposed to have gone along,
too. Their schooner was last sighted about 450 miles northeast of Oahu,
in good shape, and bound westward. That's all the record of her that
there is."
"Was that Ralph Slade?" asked Barnett.
"Yes. He was a free-lance writer and artist."
"I knew him well," said Barnett. "He was in our