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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Also By James Gary

CHAPTER 1 | An Introduction to Java and Its History

Who This Book Is For

How This Book Is Structured

Conventions

When Java Was Owned by Sun Microsystems

Why Is Java Portable?

Sun Microsystem’s Java Versions

Oracle Takes Over

What the Future Holds

Prerequisites

CHAPTER 2

Preparing Your Development Environment

Installing Java

The JAVA_HOME Environment Variable

JAVA_HOME on Windows

JAVA_HOME on macOS

JAVA_HOME on Linux

Installing Gradle

Installing Git

Installing a Java IDE

Summary

CHAPTER 3 | Getting Your Feet Wet

Using JShell

Java Fundamental Building Blocks

Access Modifiers

Introducing Modules

Configuring Modules
Determining the Structure: A Java Project

The HelloWorld! Project in IntelliJ IDEA

The HelloWorld! Project Compiled and Executed Manually

Putting the HelloWorld Class in a Package

Configuring the com.sandbox Module

Java Projects Using Build Tools (Mostly Gradle)

Explaining and Enriching the Hello World! Class

Summary

CHAPTER 4 | Java Syntax

Base Rules of Writing Java Code

Package Declaration

Import Section

Java “Grammar”

Java Identifiers

Java Comments
Java Object Types

Classes

Fields

Class Variables

Encapsulating Data

Methods

Constructors

Abstraction

Enums

Interfaces

Default Methods

Annotation Types

Exceptions

Generics

Java Reserved Words

Summary

CHAPTER 5 | Data Types

Stack and Heap Memory

Introduction to Java Data Types

Primitive Data Types

Reference Data Types

Java Primitive Types

The Boolean Type

The char Type

Integer Primitives

Real Primitives

Java Reference Types

Arrays

The String Type

Escaping Characters
Wrapper Classes

Date Time API

Collections

Concurrency Specific Types

Summary

CHAPTER 6 | Operators

The Assignment Operator (=)

Explicit Type Conversion (type) and instanceof

Numerical Operators

Unary Operators

Incrementors and Decrementors

Sign Operators

Negation Operator

Binary Operators

Relational Operators
Bitwise Operators

Bitwise NOT

Bitwise AND

Bitwise Inclusive OR

Bitwise Exclusive OR

Logical Operators

Shift Operators

The Elvis Operator

Summary

CHAPTER 7 | Controlling the Flow

if-else Statement

switch Statement

Looping Statements

for Statements

while Statement
do-while Statement

Breaking Loops and Skipping Steps

break Statement

continue Statement

return Statement

Controlling the Flow Using try-catch Constructions

Summary

CHAPTER 8 | The Stream API

Introduction to Streams

Creating Streams

Creating Streams from Collections

Creating Streams from Arrays

Creating Empty Streams

Creating Finite Streams

Streams of Primitives and Streams of Strings

A Short Introduction to Optional

How to Use Streams

Terminal Functions: forEach and forEachOrdered

Intermediate Operation filter and Terminal Operation toArray

Intermediate Operations map and flatMap and Terminal Operation

collect

Intermediate Operation sorted and Terminal Operation findFirst

Intermediate Operation distinct and Terminal Operation count

Intermediate Operation limit and Terminal Operations min and max

Terminal Operations sum and reduce

Intermediate Operation peek

Intermediate Operation skip and Terminal Operations findAny,

anyMatch, allMatch, and noneMatch

Debugging Stream Code

Summary

CHAPTER 9 | Debugging, Testing, and Documenting

Debugging

Logging

Logging with JUL

Logging with SLF4J and Logback

Debug Using Assertions

Step-by-Step Debugging

Inspect Running Application Using Java Tools

jps

jcmd

jconsole

jmc

Accessing the Java Process API

Testing

A Small Introduction to Testing

Test Code Location

Application to Test

Introducing JUnit

Using Fakes

Using Stubs

Using Mocks

Documenting

Summary

CHAPTER 10 | Making Your Application Interactive

Reading Data from the Command Line

Reading User Data Using System.in

Using Scanner

Reading User Data with java.io.Console

Build Applications Using Swing

Introducing JavaFX

Internationalization
Build a Web Application

Summary

CHAPTER 11 | Working with Files

File Handlers

Path Handlers

Reading Files

Using Scanner to Read Files

Using Files Utility Methods to Read Files

Using Readers to Read Files

Using InputStream to Read Files

Writing Files

Writing Files Using Files Utility Methods

Using Writers to Write Files

Using OutputStream to Write Files

Serialization and Deserialization

Binary Serialization

XML Serialization

JSON Serialization

The Media API

Using JavaFX Image Classes

Summary

CHAPTER 12 | The Publish/Subscribe Framework

Reactive Programming and the Reactive Manifesto

Using the JDK Reactive Streams API

Reactive Streams Technology Compatibility Kit

Using Project Reactor

Summary

CHAPTER 13 | Garbage Collection

Garbage Collection Basics

Oracle Hotspot JVM Architecture

How Many Garbage Collectors Are There?

Working with GC from the Code

Using the finalize() Method

Heap Memory Statistics

Using Cleaner

Preventing GC from Deleting an Object

Using Weak References

Garbage Collection Exceptions and Causes

Summary

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Also By James Gary

 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Navy boys to the
rescue
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: Navy boys to the rescue

or, Answering the wireless call for help

Author: Halsey Davidson

Illustrator: Clare Angell

Release date: January 15, 2024 [eBook #72723]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: George Sully and Company,

1919

Credits: Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading

Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced
from images made available by the Library of
Congress)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NAVY BOYS

TO THE RESCUE ***
 NAVY BOYS TO THE RESCUE

With her smoke trailing behind her and the guns barking
in rapid succession, the Colodia raced toward the scene.
 NAVY BOYS TO THE RESCUE
OR
ANSWERING THE WIRELESS CALL FOR HELP
BY
HALSEY DAVIDSON
Author of “Navy Boys After a Submarine,” “Navy
Boys Chasing a Sea Raider,” etc.

NEW YORK
GEORGE SULLY AND COMPANY
 BOOKS FOR BOYS

NAVY BOYS SERIES

By Halsey Davidson
12mo, cloth, illustrated.

NAVY BOYS AFTER A SUBMARINE

Or Protecting the Giant Convoy
NAVY BOYS CHASING A SEA RAIDER
Or Landing a Million Dollar Prize
NAVY BOYS BEHIND THE BIG GUNS
Or Sinking the German U-Boats
NAVY BOYS TO THE RESCUE
Or Answering the Wireless Call for Help
NAVY BOYS AT THE BIG SURRENDER
Or Rounding Up the German Fleet

GEORGE SULLY & COMPANY

Publishers New York

Copyright, 1919, by
GEORGE SULLY & COMPANY
Navy Boys to the Rescue
Printed in U. S. A.
NAVY BOYS TO THE RESCUE

CONTENTS
I The Friendly Grip
II The Hun in His Fury
III The Missing Man
IV The Paper Chase
V The Trickster
VI Work Ahead
VII On the Grey Waters
VIII The Yankee Way
IX “Schmardie”
X The Terror of the Seas
XI Action
XII Wireless Whispers
XIII The Super-submersible
XIV The Mirage
XV Combing the Sea
XVI Stations
XVII The Spitfire
XVIII “Ghost Talk” Again
XIX A Difference of Opinion
XX Too Late Again
XXI The Mystery Message
XXII The Wireless Call for Help
XXIII The Sea Pigeon in Sight
XXIV The Blind Chase
XXV A New Convoy

NAVY BOYS TO THE RESCUE

 CHAPTER I—THE FRIENDLY GRIP
“And yonder’s a snap-dragon; and that’s a buttercup. That is
feverfew growing over there; and there’s foxglove right there in that
swampy place. Those are cowslip blossoms—the English cowslip is
different from ours.”
“Whew!” blew Phil Morgan, unpuckering his lips and breaking off
the haunting little air he had been whistling. “I wouldn’t believe you
knew so much about the flora of this strange land, Frenchy.”
“Oi, oi! Is it Flora he’s bragging about? Then Frenchy’s got a new
girl!”
“Sounds to me,” mumbled Al Torrance, who lay along the flower-
bestrewed bank with his hat over his eyes, “that he was discussing
the fauna of the country—with his snap-dragons, and fox’s gloves,
and cows slipping.”
“Ignoramus that you are!” scoffed Michael Donahue, otherwise
“Frenchy.” “I am talkin’ to Whistler. He knows something and
appreciates the profundity of me learnin’.”
“Ye-as,” drawled Torrance, otherwise “Torry,” as their leader began
droning away, his lips puckered again. “He knows just enough to
whistle the same awful tune for an hour. What is it, anyway, Phil?”
“The tune the old cow died on, I guess,” suggested Ikey
Rosenmeyer.
“It’s a tune Phoebe was playing on the piano a good deal the last
time we were home,” said Whistler with some gravity. “Wish I’d hear
from the folks again. I am worried about Phoebe.”
He spoke of his eldest sister, who during the last few months had
not been well. Although, like many brothers and sisters, Philip
Morgan, by his chums usually called Whistler, and Phoebe had their
differences, now when far from home, “the folks” seem nearer and
dearer than ever in his mind.
Philip Morgan lay with his chums on a bank beside a tiny trickle of
water called a brook in that shire, although it was nothing more than
a rill. They were high up on “the downs,” overlooking a port in which
the American destroyer Colodia lay at anchor amid a multitude of
naval vessels of three nations.
Over the sea a thick haze, on land the yellow sunshine, so
welcome when it is seen in England that it seems more beautiful
than elsewhere. The boys had forty-three hours’ shore leave, and for
that brief space of time they desired, as most sailors do, to get just
as far away in spirit and in surroundings from the ship as possible.
They had tramped into the country the day before, spent the night
in four wonderful beds in an old inn that might have harbored some
of Sir Francis Drake’s men at the time of the Armada, and were now
due at the wharf in a few hours.
Life aboard a destroyer or an American submarine chaser in
foreign service is not very pleasant if it is exciting. The space for
sleeping, for instance, on these fast vessels is scarcely greater than
that assigned to the crews of submarines. As Ikey Rosenmeyer, who
possessed a riotous imagination, had said at the inn:
“Oi, oi! sleeping in a real bed again is better than bein’ at home in
Ireland, and Frenchy says that’s heaven ’cause his mother came
from there. Why, it is better’n heaven! You could spread out your
legs and wiggle all your toes without havin’ the master-at-arms down
on you like a thousand of brick.”
Frenchy, in a dreamy and poetic mood, not infrequent when the
romantic Irish blood in his veins was stirred, was gazing off over the
sea at the fogbank.
“Think of it,” he murmured, “How many hundred an’ thousan’ of
ships have sailed out of this harbor into just such a fogbank as that
—”
“And never came back,” interrupted Torry. “Some tough old gobs,
the ancient British seamen, boy.”
“‘Tough’ is right,” chuckled Frenchy, his poetic feelings exploded.
“And they haven’t got over it yet. They’ve got old-timers in the British
Navy now that can remember when the cat was used on the men’s
backs, reg’lar.”
“And every British sailor had tar on his breeches—that’s why they
used to call ’em ‘brave British tars,’” scoffed Torry. “Can it! These
English chaps are all right. They aren’t much different from us
garbies.”
 “Is that so?” exclaimed Ikey, whose sharp eyes allowed little to
escape them. “What kind of a deep-sea crab do you call this comin’
down the road right now, I want to know?”
Phil Morgan paid no attention to what his mates were talking
about. The peaceful English landscape charmed his eye.
Down the gently sloping road which, after a mile or so, led into the
Upper Town, as it was called in distinction from the port, or Lower
Town, the stone cottages—some almost hidden by vines—stood
sentinel-wise along the way.
One rather larger house was a schoolhouse. Nothing at all like the
schoolhouses in America in appearance. But Phil Morgan knew it
was a schoolhouse, and that the school was in session, for he had
seen the children filing in not long before and their voices had been
raised in song just before Frenchy had begun to note the different
flowers.
The excited chatter of the other boys finally aroused Morgan from
his contemplation of the peaceful scene. In the other direction,
toward which his mates were looking, the outlook was not so
peaceful. At least, not at one particular spot in the hedge-bordered
road. It did not need a sailor’s weather eye to see that the situation
was “squally.”
The “deep-sea crab,” the presence of which Ikey had announced,
proved on further examination to be two individuals, not one. But
they were closely attached to one another and the way they “wee-
wawed,” as Torry said, from one side of the road to the other,
certainly would lead to the supposition that intoxication was the
cause of such tacking from hedge to hedge.
“And one of ’em’s one of our own garbies,” declared Frenchy. “Isn’t
that a shame?”
“But look at that big feller, will you?” gasped Ikey. “Why, he must
weigh a ton!”
“You’re stretching that a bit, Ikey,” admonished Whistler, breaking
off in his tune to speak. “But he is a whale of a man.”
“Biggest garby I ever saw,” breathed Torry, amazed.
It was the big fellow only, it proved, who was partly intoxicated. He
was a British sailor. His companion was both perfectly sober and
perfectly mad. His face was aflame as he and his unwelcome
companion approached the four Navy Boys.
The big fellow gripped him by the collar of his blouse, and it was
utterly impossible for the Yankee lad to get away from “the friendly
grip.”
“Talk about this ‘hands across the sea’ stuff,” murmured Torrance.
“Here’s a case where it is going too far. We’ll have to rescue a
brother garby, won’t we?”
“Believe me, that’s a reg’lar mamma’s boy Johnny Bull has got his
grip on, too,” chuckled Frenchy.
“Hush up, you fellows,” advised Phil Morgan, with sudden interest.
“I believe I know that fellow.”
“Not Goliath yonder?” cried Ikey Rosenmeyer. “I didn’t know you
sailed with such craft.”
“The other chap,” Morgan explained.
“If he’s a friend,” began Torrance, commencing to roll back his
sleeves suggestively.
“Sit down!” advised the older boy, sharply. “We’d look nice piling
onto that big fellow, wouldn’t we?”
“And the whole of us couldn’t handle him,” murmured Frenchy.
“You never know till you try,” said the optimistic Torrance.
“This is a case for strategy,” stated Morgan. “Now, don’t any of you
fellows lose your heads.” Then he hailed the two tacking along the
road:
“Ahoy! Hey, you!”
The American lad who was held in durance by the British sailor
looked up and showed something besides the red flag of annoyance
in his countenance.
“I say, you fellows!” he cried. “Help me out of this, will you?”
At this the huge British seaman for the first time appeared to see
the four boys on the bank beside the road.
“My heye!” he bellowed, standing still, but wagging his head from
side to side in a perfectly ridiculous way. “My heye! ’Ere’s a ’ole
bloomin’ ship load of ’em. Ahoy, me ’earties, let the heagle scream!”
and he led off in a mighty cheer that awoke the echoes of the
heretofore peaceful countryside.
 Frenchy and Ikey, in great glee, sprang up and cheered with him.
But the expression in the countenance of the giant’s captive caused
the two older Navy Boys to smother their amusement.
“That’s the way he’s been going on for four hours—and more,”
groaned the captive. “Why! he hung on to my collar all the time we
were eating dinner up there at that inn. Made the barmaid cut up his
victuals for him. Paid her a shilling for doing it.”
“Say, is her name Flora?” Ikey asked, at once interested. “Is that
the girl Frenchy was just talking about?”
But Torrance quenched him with a hand on his mouth. The
situation of the Yankee youth in that giant’s hands seemed more
serious than they supposed. The grip of the big hand never relaxed.
“’Ere we are, all together, me ’earties,” rumbled the giant. “Hi’m
glad to know yuh. Hi’m Willum Johnson, ’im that ’ad a barrow hin the
Old Kent Road before the war. Hand jolly well knowed Hi was to the
perlice,” confessed the man frankly.
“Hit allus took six bobbies to take me hin, lads. Hand now one o’
the bloomin’ hofficers makes me walk a chalkline, haboard ship. Hi
tell yuh, ain’t this war terrible?”
“That’s what it is,” admitted Frenchy, staring at the man with wide-
open eyes.
“Come over here and sit down—and tell us all about it,” Whistler
Morgan said, beckoning.
“Hi’ll go yuh!” declared the giant seaman. “Hand so wull me friend
—one o’ the nicest little Yankees Hi ever come across.”
The strange Yankee sailor was too much disturbed by his situation
to look very closely at Phil and his comrades. The viselike grip of the
semi-intoxicated giant on his collar was the principal thing in the
victim’s mind.
Almost as soon as the British seaman sprawled on the grassy
bank his head began to nod and his eyes to close.
“He’s going off,” whispered Al Torrance.
“You’d think he would,” returned the victim of the over-friendly
seaman, in the same tone, “if you could have seen him eat and
drink. You never saw such an appetite! He had everybody at that inn
standing around and gaping at us.”
 It was evident that the young sailor felt his position deeply. He was
a nice looking fellow, very neat in his dress, and with delicate
features.
“How did you come to fall in with him in the first place?” Al asked,
as the giant began to snore.
“Why,” explained the stranger, “I started to walk down to the port
because it was so pleasant. He was sitting outside the place where I
stopped for tea and muffins after I’d walked a way. I had no idea he
was so—so far gone. But he must have been drinking for days,”
casting a disgusted glance at his close companion whose hamlike
hand never relaxed. “He learned where I was going, and he at once
got a grip on my collar. He hasn’t let go since—I never saw such a
man!” concluded the stranger morosely.
“His hand will drop off when he gets sound asleep,” Whistler said
comfortingly. “Then we’ll sneak.”
“Don’t you believe it!” whispered the other in vast disgust. “He fell
asleep after dinner, but his fingers are just clamped on to my collar.
When I tried to wriggle away, he awoke. See!”
He tried to pull away from the friendly grip. At once the British
seaman half aroused; but his fingers never relaxed.

“William Johnson his my nyme—

Seaman’s my hav-o-cation!
Hi’m hin this war for a penny-bun—
Hand so is hall my nation!

Hoo-roo!” mumbled the gigantic sailor, and fell asleep again.

“Now, what do you know about that?” demanded the victim of
brotherly love. “And me—Well, I’m due aboard the Colodia to-day.”
“The Colodia!” exclaimed the four Navy Boys in chorus.
None of them wore a designating mark, for they had on their white
service caps. But the Colodia was the Yankee destroyer to which
Morgan, Torrance, Donahue and Rosenmeyer belonged. The four
gazed on the stranger with increased interest at his statement.
“Say,” Whistler asked, “aren’t you George Belding? Didn’t you and
your folks come up to Seacove from New York five or six years ago
and spend the summer in the old Habershaw House? I’m Phil
Morgan. We lived right next to the Habershaw House.”
“My goodness!” exclaimed the strange youth, sticking out his hand
to grab Whistler’s. “And your father, Dr. Morgan, and mine went to
college together. That’s what brought us up to Seacove. Sure! My
mother wasn’t well. We all got fat and sassy up there. I declare I’m
glad to see you, Phil Morgan!”
“Me long lost brother!” whispered Frenchy to the others. “Have you
still got the strawberry mark upon your arm?”
But Al Torrance was quite as serious as Whistler and the newly-
introduced George Belding.
“Say, fellows,” Al said, “if he’s going to be one of us on the old
destroyer, we’ve got to help him out of this mess.”
“Go ahead! How?” demanded Ikey.
Al produced a pocketknife which he opened quickly. It had a long
and sharp blade. He approached the snoring giant on the bank.
“Oi Oi!” gasped Ikey Rosenmeyer. “Never mind! Don’t kill him in
cold blood. Remember, Torry, it’s Germans we’re fightin’, not these
Britishers.”
“What are you going to do?” demanded Belding.
“Cut your collar away,” said Torrance. “That’s about all you can do.
If he wants to hang on to the collar, let him.”
“It’ll spoil his shirt,” objected Ikey.
“Sh! Go ahead,” murmured Belding. “It’s a good idea. I couldn’t get
at my own knife and do it, with him hanging on to me so tightly.”
“Take care, Al,” advised Whistler. “And you other fellows stand
aside. Be ready to run when George is free.”
His advice was good. The giant seaman still snored, but it would
not take much to rouse him.
The five boys were now so much interested in the attempt to get
Belding free that they took no heed of anything else. So they were all
shocked when a chorus of steam whistles and sirens suddenly broke
forth from the port below them. A gun boomed on the admiral’s ship.
Pandemonium was let loose without warning.
“Oh, my aunt!” groaned George Belding, “what is that?”
“Willum Johnson” awoke with a start and a grunt, and, sitting up on
the bank, demanded of everybody in general, “’Oo’s shootin’ hof the
bloomin’ gun?”
But Whistler and Torry had whirled to look out to sea. They had
heard a similar alarm before. Out of the blue-gray fogbank over the
sea, and high, high up toward the hazy sky, whirled a black object,
no bigger at first than a bird. But how rapidly it approached the port,
and how quickly its outline became perfectly clear!
“A Zep, boys!” cried Al Torrance. “There’s a raid on! That’s a
German machine, sure’s you are a foot high!”
“Are you sure?” murmured Belding, who had been dragged quickly
to his feet by the giant.
“Hit’s the bloomin’ ’Uns—no fear it ain’t!” ejaculated the big British
seaman. “Ah! There goes the a-he-rial guns.”
Splotches of white smoke sprang up from several shoulders of the
hill that overlooked the port. The watchful coast-defense men were
not unprepared; but the enemy airship, rapidly growing bigger in the
boys’ eyes, winged its way nearer to the land, boldly ignoring the
shells sent up to meet it.
“She’s going to drop her bombs right over the town!” gasped
Whistler, grabbing Belding, who was nearest.
 CHAPTER II—THE HUN IN HIS FURY
Wheeling up from behind them on the higher shoulder of the hill, an
airplane spiraled into the upper ether, in an attempt to get above the
huge machine that had, two minutes before, appeared out of the sea
fog. But this attempt to balk the Hun, like those of the anti-aircraft
guns in their emplacements about the port, promised little success.
The fog had made the close approach of the huge Zeppelin
possible, and now the rumble of the motors of the enemy machine
could be heard clearly by the four Navy Boys on the hillside and their
two companions.
“Oh, cracky!” gasped Al Torrance. “She’s coming!”
“And right this way!” gulped Ikey Rosenmeyer. “If she drops a
bomb—”
“Good-night!” completed Frenchy in a sepulchral tone.
“Let’s get under cover!” cried George Belding, striving again to get
away from the “friendly grip” of the British sailor, Willum Johnson.
“Hold on!” commanded Whistler Morgan. “No use losing our heads
over this.”
“If one of those bombs lands near us we’ll likely lose more than
our heads,” grumbled Torry.
“Wait! If we run like a bunch of scared rabbits, we are likely to run
right into danger rather than away from it.”
“Those horns down there say ‘Find a cellar!’” whispered Frenchy.
“Oi, oi!” added Ikey. “There ain’t no cellars up here on this hill yet.”
“Keep cool,” repeated Whistler. The other boys were used to
listening to him, and to following his advice. He was a cautious as
well as a courageous lad, and his chums were usually safe in
following Philip Morgan’s lead.
These four boys, all hailing from the New England coast town of
Seacove, had begun their first “hitch,” as an enlistment is called, in
the United States Navy as apprentice seamen, several months
before America got into the Great War, and some months before the
oldest of the four was eighteen.
 They had now spent more than a year and a half in the service,
and their experiences had been many and varied. After their initial
training at Saugarack, the big Naval training camp, the four chums,
with others of their friends and camp associates, had been sent
aboard the torpedo boat destroyer, Colodia, one of the newest,
largest, and fastest of her type in the United States Navy.
The Colodia’s first two cruises were full of excitement and
adventure for the four Navy Boys, especially for Philip Morgan; for he
fell overboard from the destroyer and was picked up by the German
submarine U-812, and his experiences thereon and escape
therefrom, are narrated in the first volume of this series, entitled:
“Navy Boys After the Submarines; Or, Protecting the Giant Convoy.”
The second of the series, “Navy Boys Chasing a Sea Raider; or
Landing a Million Dollar Prize,” relates the experiences of these four
friends on a longer and even more adventurous cruise of the
Colodia. Under the command of Ensign MacMasters, the Navy Boys
as members of a prize crew, took the captured Graf von Posen into
Norfolk; and their experiences on the captured raider made a
dramatic and exciting story of the day-by-day work of the boys of the
Navy.
Through their kind friend Mr. Alonzo Minnette, who was holding a
volunteer position at Washington in the Navy Department, the four
chums obtained a chance to cruise with the superdreadnaught
Kennebunk, a brand new and one of the largest of the modern
American fighting machines launched during the first months of the
war. The Colodia having gone across the Atlantic while the boys
were with the captured raider, they with Ensign MacMasters were
very glad to join the crew of the huge superdreadnaught in the
interim.
The third volume of the series, “Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns;
Or, Sinking the German U-Boats,” took our heroes into perils and
adventures which they will long remember, for they included work in
the gun turrets of the Kennebunk, a wreck that threatened the lives
of all four chums, a mix-up with German spies, and finally a record
trip across the Atlantic by which the huge superdreadnaught arrived
at the rendezvous in time to take part in a naval engagement which
put a part of the Hun navy to flight.
 Now the four friends were back on the Colodia which was doing
patrol duty off the English and French coasts, and convoying troop
and food ships through the submarine and mine zones. The base of
the squadron of which the destroyer was a member was at this
English port, on the hillside above which Philip Morgan, Alfred
Torrance, Michael Donahue and Ikey Rosenmeyer have been
introduced just as they met the American sailor lad, George Belding,
and his doubtful friend, the giant ex-coster, “Willum” Johnson.
“Keep cool,” Whistler urged again, as the Zeppelin sailed inland.
“There is no use running——”
His further speech was smothered by a terrific explosion from the
port below. A lurid burst of flame, stronger than the sunlight, shot into
the air where a wharf and warehouse had been. Smoke followed,
instantly hiding the mark the bomb from the Zeppelin had found.
This daylight raid was the boldest the Germans had attempted.
The enemy must have supposed the fog was over the land as well
as the sea, or he would never have risked the attack.
Again a nerve-racking explosion following a flash of light that
seared their eyeballs, and the middle of the town—the market place
—was shrouded by thick smoke.
“The dirty ’ounds!” bawled the British seaman, suddenly finding his
voice. “The dirty ’ounds! They’re killin’ women an’ kids down there!
Lemme get my bloomin’ ’ands on ’em!”
He dropped George Belding’s collar at last and would have started
in a clumsy run down the hill. It was Whistler who stopped him, with
a two-handed grip on the Englishman’s collar now.
“What good would you be down there, man?” the American youth
demanded. “You’d only get yours, too, maybe. Those bombs are
falling two or three thousand feet.”
“Argh!” growled Willum Johnson, shaking his huge fists in the air,
his face raised to the coming Zeppelin. The growl was animal-like,
not human. “Argh! Lemme get ’em——”
A third bomb exploded. A big house below them, half way down
the hillside, disappeared. It was as though a monstrous sponge had
been wiped across that spot and erased the building!
“Oh! Look out! Look out!” sobbed Frenchy, and covered his eyes
with his hands.
 His chum Ikey shook beside him, but could not close his eyes to
the horror.
The Zeppelin was curving around, evidently determined to make
for the sea and the fogbank again. Beneath it, on either side, even
above it, the bursts of white smoke betrayed the explosion of aerial
shells the defense guns were firing at the enemy machine. And all
the time the single British airplane on duty was climbing skyward.
“If that thing can only get above the Zep.!” murmured Al Torrance.
Suddenly the airplane darted toward the sea, in a sharp slant
upward. Bravely the pilot sought to cut off the Zeppelin’s escape into
the fogbank out of which she had burst five minutes before.
Guns from the Huns’ airship began to bark. They were firing on the
British plane. The latter’s guns made no reply as she continued to
mount into the upper air.
The course of the Hun machine was changed again. In
approaching the hills surrounding the port the Zeppelin was brought
much nearer to the earth.
The ship was indeed a monster! Swung landward to escape the
mounting airplane, the Zeppelin, its motors thundering, came closer
and closer to the spot where the American sailor boys were
standing.
“Bli’me!” roared the apparently fast-sobering Britisher. “They are
goin’ to drop one o’ them blarsted buns on our bloomin’ ’eads!”
“‘Buns’ is good,” groaned Al. “Here she comes!”
It seemed as though the great airship was directly above them.
The boys actually saw the bomb released and fall!
There was no possible mistake on the part of the brutal crew and
commander of the Zeppelin. They knew very well the bomb would
fall upon no warship in the harbor, or any possible storage place of
munitions. Up here on the hillside were nothing but little dwellings
and—the schoolhouse!
As though it were aimed at that house of instruction, the great
shell fell and burst! If teacher and pupils had descended into the
cellar at the first alarm of the horns and guns, it would scarcely have
availed to save them. The shot was too direct.
One moment the green-tiled, freshly whitened walls of the
schoolhouse stood out plainly against the yellow and green