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The steamer was gliding along, with slackened headway, close in under the headland, when a breath of air opened out the folds of the tattered white flag. Meggs had been watching it through his binoculars. He lowered the glasses, and remarked knowingly: "Thought so. That's no ship's canvas. It's linen or duck A woman's skirt ripped open." "What! Then at least one of the women got ashore!" "Aye.
The Chief, in his pet post of vantage upon the roof of Nixey's Hotel, lowered his binoculars as the persistent whistle kept open. The lines about his keen eyes and mouth curved into a cheerful smile. The sound was coming nearer, and presently Engine 123 backed into view, a mile or so from waiting, expectant Gueldersdorp, and snorting, raced at full speed for her home in the railway-yard.
"Object off the port bow," called the lookout. "Looks like a periscope," reported the quartermaster. Frank snapped his binoculars on a bobbing black spar. "Buoy and fishnet," he decided after a quick scrutiny. Frank kept the late watch that night. At 4 a.m. he turned in.
He had been under the impression that I was still in hospital, and would probably not be able to get to work for a week or more. Yet there I was, as large as life, in a picket boat, with my head still swathed in a bandage, superintending operations, and clearly recognisable with the assistance of a pair of binoculars.
Looking down through the binoculars it was as if he sat on the topmost bough of a tall tree in the immediate neighborhood of the cabin, although he was fully half a mile distant. He could see each garment of a row on a line. He could distinguish colors a blue skirt, the deep green of salal and second-growth cedar, the weathered hue of the walls.
Looks like an armored cruiser o' the first class." "Armored cruiser o' the first class?" muttered the captain, as he carried his binoculars to the weather rail and looked ahead. "More 'n I can make out with the glasses." If three funnels, two masts, two bridges, and two sets of fighting-tops indicate an armored cruiser of the first class, Johnson was right.
When he came to within twenty feet of the oak beneath which he had seen the stranger, he stood erect, and as though avoiding a live wire, stepped on tiptoe to the wall. The stranger still sat against it. The binoculars hung from a cord around his neck. Across his knees was spread a map. He was marking it with a pencil, and as he worked he hummed a tune.
Excitedly we took turns focusing the binoculars on it, and after a little as we drew fairly near Tommy, with a puzzled look, asked: "Who are those people on your Colonel's dock?" "My father, maybe. I wired him to come." "Boy, I mean the petticoats! Look at 'em there're two!" "Can you make out their faces?"
We saw the schooner away out, running to leeward, with ten pairs of binoculars sweeping the sea, no doubt on all sides. I advised the governor to give her time to beat back again before we made a start. So we stayed up that creek something like ten days, as snug as can be. On the seventh day we had to kill a man, though the brother of this Pedro here. They were alligator-hunters, right enough.
He first used the binoculars in order to scan the heavens as well as they could be covered when he was so surrounded by those strange mangrove islands and discovering no sign of any cruising, spying crate, he bade Perk goodbye and taxied in the direction of the open gulf, which he knew lay due west.
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