nhood.

When orders came, he stopped at her home, kissed her good-by, and went
to Annapolis, leaving her sad-eyed and with quivering lips.

And he did not come back.

CHAPTER I

She was the largest, fastest, and latest thing in seagoing destroyers,
and though the specifications called for but thirty-six knots' speed,
she had made thirty-eight on her trial trip, and later, under careful
nursing by her engineers, she had increased this to forty knots an
hour--five knots faster than any craft afloat--and, with a clean bottom,
this speed could be depended upon at any time it was needed.

She derived this speed from six water-tube boilers, feeding at a
pressure of three hundred pounds live steam to five turbine engines
working three screws, one high-pressure turbine on the center shaft,
and four low-pressure on the wing shafts. Besides these she possessed
two "astern" turbines and two cruising turbines--all four on the wing
shafts.

She made steam with oil fuel, there being no coal on board except for
heating and cooking, and could carry a hundred and thirty tons of it,
which gave her a cruising radius of about two thousand miles; also, with
"peace tanks" filled, she could steam three thousand miles without
replenishing. This would carry her across the Atlantic at thirteen
knots' speed, but if she was in a hurry, using all turbines, she would
exhaust her oil in two days.

When in a hurry, she was a spectacle to remember. Built on conventional
lines, she showed at a mile's distance nothing but a high bow and four
short funnels over a mighty bow wave that hid the rest of her long,
dark-hued hull, and a black, horizontal cloud of smoke that stretched
astern half a mile before the wind could catch and rend it.

She carried four twenty-one-inch torpedo tubes and a battery of six
twelve-pounder, rapid-fire guns; also, she carried two large
searchlights and a wireless equipment of seventy miles reach, the
aerials of which stretched from the truck of her short signal mast aft
to a short pole at the taffrail.

Packed with machinery, she was a "hot box," even when at rest, and when
in action a veritable bake oven. She had hygienic air space below decks
for about a dozen men, and this number could handle her; but she carried
berths and accommodations for sixty.

Her crew was not on board, however. Newly scraped and painted in the dry
dock, she had been hauled out, stored, and fueled by a navy-yard gang,
and now lay at th