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The smoke was pouring out of the two smoke-stacks of the steamer. Several boats filled with men pulled to the shore, landing the crews of the three vessels. In less than another hour the Sphinx was under way, and soon came alongside the Bronx. As only one of the broadsides of the gunboat was available in the action with the fort, the starboard battery was transferred to the captured vessel.
There, just ahead, was the Great Britain under full way, valiantly striving to hold her record against the oncoming steamer. Sandy sat up and breathlessly watched the champion of the sea, her smoke-stacks black against the wide stretch of shining waters. The Union Jack was flying in insolent security from her flagstaff.
Great volumes of smoke were pouring forth from its smoke-stacks as it majestically glided over the water. Upon its many decks were hundreds of human beings, scattered about in little groups, gaily chatting and enjoying to the fullest extent the delight experienced by an ocean voyage. Among all of the happy faces, however, there was one that appeared sad and forlorn.
The breath of the gale tore the smoke backward from the mouths of the smoke-stacks and scattered it in the wild chaos in which heaven and sea were mingled. Frederick glanced down at the fore-deck. In his burning brain arose a thought of the Jewess and then of the scoundrel, Wilke.
In walking the full length of the deck several times, examining all the passengers with the utmost care and circumspection, he noticed the pretty young Englishwoman, whom he had seen for the first time in the reading-room of the hotel in Southampton. She was wrapped in rugs and furs and snugly settled in a spot shielded from the wind and warmed by the two huge smoke-stacks.
The passengers were huddled about the smoke-stacks and fortified behind ventilators, and all were wrapped in wintry costumes and looking sleepy and unhappy in the pitiless gale and the drenching spray. The island in sight was Flores. It seemed only a mountain of mud standing up out of the dull mists of the sea.
The engines used wood for fuel; the screens of the smoke-stacks must have been very coarse, or maybe they had none at all, and the big cinders would patter down on us like hail. So, when we came to the journey's end, by reason of the cinders and soot we were about as dirty and black as any regiment of sure-enough colored troops that fought under the Union flag in the last years of the war.
The wind of our progress was like a gale a forty-five-mile gale. We could not face it and draw breath without choking and strangling. It blew the smoke straight back from the mouths of the smoke-stacks at a direct right angle to the perpendicular. In fact, we were travelling as fast as an express train.
In Bremerhaven an architect whose acquaintance I had made on the way became my cicerone, and showed me all the sights of the small but very quaint port. I had expected to find the bustle on shore greater, but what a throng of ships and boats, masts and smoke-stacks I saw!
All the difference in the world.... "Oh, Elizabeth!"... The barges had slid farther and farther under the bridge; the woman and the child were out of sight; the steamboat with its folded smoke-stacks slid after them, leaving a wake of rocking, yellow foam; the water splashed loudly against the piers. It was nearly dark there on the footpath, and quite deserted.
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