West Wind Drift | Page 2

missing steamer. Not
so much as the smallest piece of wreckage rewarded the ceaseless quest.
The great vessel, with all its precious cargo, had slipped into its niche
among the profoundest mysteries of the sea. Came the day, therefore,
when the Secretary of the Navy wrote down against her name the ugly
sentence: "Lost with all on board."
Maritime courts issued their decrees; legatees parcelled estates, great
and small; insurance companies paid in hard cash for the lives that were
lost, and went blandly about their business; more than one widow
reconsidered her thoughts of self-denial; and ships again sailed the
course of Amerigo Vespucci without a thought of the Doraine.
For months the newspapers in many lands speculated on the fate of the
missing liner. That a great ship could disappear from the face of the
waters in these supreme days of navigation without leaving so much as
a trace behind was inconceivable. At first there were tales of the
dastardly U-boats; then came the sinister reports of treachery on board
resulting in the ship being taken over by German plotters, with the
prediction that she would emerge from oblivion as a well-armed
"raider" cruising in the North Atlantic; then the generally accepted
theory that she had been swiftlv, suddenly rent asunder by a mighty
explosion in her hold. All opinions, all theories, all conjectures,
however, revolved about a single fear;--that she was the victim of a
German plot. But in the course of events there came a day when the
German Navy, ever boastful of its ignoble deeds, issued the positive
and no doubt sincere declaration that it had no record of the sinking of
the Doraine. The fate of the ship was as much of a mystery to the
German admiralty as it was to the rest of the puzzled world.
And so it was that the Doraine, laden with nearly a thousand souls,
sailed out into the broad Atlantic and was never heard from again.

CHAPTER I

The Captain of the liner was an old man. He had sailed the seas for
two-score years, at least half of them as master. At the outbreak of the
Great War he was given command of the Doraine, relieving a younger
man for more drastic duty in the North Sea. He was an Englishman,
and his name, Weatherby Trigger, may be quite readily located on the
list of retired naval officers in the British Admiralty offices if one cares
to go to the trouble to look it up.
After two years the Doraine, with certain other vessels involved in a
well-known and somewhat thoroughly debated transaction, became to
all intents and purposes the property of the United States of America;
she flew the American flag, carried an American guncrew and
American papers, and, with some difficulty, an English master. The
Captain was making his last voyage as master of the ship. An American
captain was to succeed him as soon as the Doraine reached its
destination in the United States. Captain Trigger, a little past seventy,
had sailed for nearly two years under the Amercan flag at a time when
all Englishmen were looking askance at it and wondering if it was ever
to take its proper place among the righteous banners of the world. It
had taken its place among them, and the "old man" was happy.
His crew of one hundred and fifty was what might be aptly described as
international. The few Englishmen he had on board were noticeably
unfit for active duty in the war zone. There was a small contingent of
Americans, a great many Portuguese, some Spaniards, Norwegians, and
a more or less polyglot remainder without national classification.
His First Officer was a Scotch-American, the Second an
Irish-American, the Chief Engineer a plain unhyphenated American
from Baltimore, Maryland. The purser, Mr. Codge, was still an
Englishman, although he had lived in the United States since he was
two years old,--a matter of forty-seven years and three months, if we
are to believe Mr. Codge, who seemed rather proud of the fact that his
father had neglected to forswear allegiance to Queen Victoria, leaving

it to his son to follow his example in the case of King Edward the
Seventh and of King George the Fifth.
There were eighty-one first-cabin passengers, one hundred and nineteen
in the second cabin,--for the two had not been consolidated on the
Doraine as was the case with the harried trans-Atlantic liners,--and
approximately three hundred and fifty in the steerage. The first and
second cabin lists represented many races, South Americans
predominating.
The great republics in the lower half of the hemisphere were cut off
almost entirely from the Old World so far as general travel was
concerned. The people of Argentine, Brazil and Chili turned their eyes
from the