Page:The Wireless Operator with the U.S. Coast Guard.djvu/296

 away. It was two hundred and fifty feet high, and Henry was so astonished at this enormous mass of glittering white ice that he could find no words to describe it, or his astonishment either. The Iroquois worked up close to the berg, a spot was selected by the captain to aim at, high up on the broad side of the monster, the gunner elevated and sighted one of the guns, and a charge of paint went shooting out of a cannon’s mouth. A second later the shell crashed against the lofty berg, and a huge crimson stain began to spread over its side. Then the Iroquois steamed around to the other side of the berg and repeated the dose. “If that doesn’t do the trick,” laughed the commander, “my name isn’t Hardwick.”

They were still calling the commander by that name a week later, however, for when the Iroquois had cruised the length of her beat and was returning, she again came upon the crimson-sided ice mass. A cross current had brought it back close to where it had been painted. Other bergs were tinted with other colors, and there was something new under the sun. The wireless broadcasts now warned vessels to look out for the berg with the green, or the red, or the blue sides. A way had been found to brand these monsters of the deep.

But of all his experiences in the ice fields, nothing so much interested Henry as the destruction