Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/42

 nose, unmindful of the rain that beat in from the northeast as the Laminian plowed her way down through the Narrows and the Lower Bay. His red-rimmed, many-wrinkled eyes were still on the horizon, and his massive, russet hand was still clamped on the white awning-stanchion as Sandy Hook was passed and Atlantic Highlands melted down into a vague monotone of rain-swept loneliness.

Beyond the ship's officers, who fretted uncertainly back and forth along the bridge, his figure was the only one on the deserted deck. As the mist shut off the last dull line of Navesink, and the nose of the steamer swung southward, rising and dipping in the long ground-swell of the open Atlantic, the watching man gave vent to an involuntary sigh of relief.

But he still stood there, in the slanting rain, while the deck beneath his feet shook with the purposeful throb of the engines under their "full steam ahead," and the pulsating and ponderous thing of steel, "carrying a bone in her teeth," shouldered her way on through a ghost like world of sea and rain. She seemed, for all her pitted and rust-stained plates, dignified with some new-found sense of mystery, of austere and unknown missions, as she sought out her predestined path through the grey loneliness of her universe. She seemed humanised, endowed