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It was late that night when Ned said good-by to his father, and it was like pulling teeth to let him go, but there was no help for it, as the sailing of the supply-ship could not be delayed. Ned was once more alone in Mexico, and it took all his enthusiasm for his expected army life to reconcile him to the situation.
In the meantime, the cold brine is being pumped through the pipes in the hold of the ship, where it extracts the heat from the air and the rows of sides of beef and then returns to the cooling-tank. In the refrigerating plant, then, of the supply-ship, there were two heat-extracting circuits, one of ammonia and the other of brine.
The inhabitants of Cobequid had fled; but Lewis reported that he had laid their habitations in ruins. Neither the needed transports nor the provisions had arrived. Winslow chafed and groaned. He longed to be rid of the painful and miserable business. At last, on the evening of September 28, came the belated supply-ship; but where were the transports?
The hold of the supply-ship mentioned at the head of this chapter was a vast refrigerator, but no ice was used except that produced mechanically by the power in the ship. To produce the cold in the hold of the ship it was necessary to extract the heat in it; to accomplish this, coils ran round the space filled with cold brine, which, as it grew warm, drew the heat from the air.
It was too rough to tie her up to the supply-ship, so the sub was anchored they carry anchors too a short distance away, with three men left on her for an anchor watch, the idea being to take them off later for a hot meal.
It was 9.30 that night before they could safely be taken off. They were a moderately good-natured lot; but that was the blear-eyed trouble with making sub trial trips with bad weather coming on a man never knew about his regular meals. The supply-ship was quite a little institution herself.
They were only 50 miles apart and still closing in. By that time the twilight band of Earth's surface was nearly at the center of the planet, and night filled more than a quarter of its disk. By that time, too, even to the naked eye through the ports of the supply-ship the enemy rockets had become visible. They were a thin skein of threads of white vapor which seemed to unravel in nothingness.
The sky was cloudless, and the tropic sun shone so fiercely on the decks that the bare-footed Jackies had to cross the unshaded spots on the jump to save their feet. An hour before the quavering mess-call sounded for the midday meal, when the sun was shining almost perpendicularly, a boat's crew from one of the cruisers were sent over to the supply-ship for a load of beef.
The K-2 attacked immediately, revealing her periscope for a minute as she took her observations. Then she launched a torpedo at a big German supply-ship not more than a thousand yards away. "Good-bye, ship!" said Palmer, and we watched with fascinated interest the swift white line that marked the course of the torpedo.
A supply-ship, finding the sea at the Wadi Sukerier too high to permit of stores being landed, went on to Jaffa, found the breakers impossibly high there and returned to Sukerier. This amusing pastime went on for three days, when the waters abated somewhat and the stores were safely landed.
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