Page:Barbour--For the freedom from the seas.djvu/238

 The Gyandotte, flags fluttering, siren shrieking once or twice, sped along the edge of the crowd and wheeled into position far back on the starboard, almost touching elbows with a still smaller cruiser, whose graceful, yacht-like lines brought memories of Guantanamo. Twelve transports and six convoys had been the story until the new escort arrived. Now there were but four of the original convoys left, for two were already showing their propellers and hiking back to the west: "Straight for Broadway," as one yearning voice on the Gyandotte phrased it. Altogether the convoy now consisted of three cruisers—one an armored craft—and five destroyers. The "Big Lady" was saturnine looking and forbidding, like a great gray bulldog, and had four ridiculously high funnels and a basket mast forward and a military mast aft and was all broken out with search lights like a child with measles. She was the flagship, and didn't she know it? She signaled orders so fast that the signalmen dripped perspiration in the teeth of a southeast wind, and she gave the impression of being short-tempered and dangerous to fool with, and the result was that in an incredibly short time everyone was in the right place and on the very best possible behavior and the twelve adventurers were plowing 213