When the Race Was to the Swift

THE war scare was first heard of in the summer of 1913. Then everybody talked about it and nobody seriously believed in it. Even the market, after one acute attack of the ague, regained its normal steadiness. People had talked before and Washington had safely tided the matter over. All through the hot months the corridors of the State, War, and Navy Building hummed with unusual business; in September the perspiring clerks shared the general optimism. The State would hold in leash war dogs and sea lions. Diplomacy would win. Nevertheless, all due precautions were taken. While the Secretary of State smiled urbanely and wrote notes, he of the War Department quietly strengthened the coast defenses, and he of the Navy ordered rush work on the new battleships. In the event of war, the navy would bear the brunt, declared newspaper oracles. Those editors who had formerly preached from the text, Economy and a Small Navy, now congratulated the country on its possession of a magnificent body of up-to-date fighters. They even went so far as to point out the advisability of sounding the Italian government in regard to a possible sale of its four new submarines.

Early in December the battleship Virginia was launched; the old Virginia had met with a disabling accident three years before. By that time the entire East was confident of peace. Only California, persuading itself that it might wake any morning to find a hostile fleet dropping anchor off the Golden Gate, still clamored for more adequate protection. The Navy Department tacitly acknowledged that in case of war the first blow would in all likelihood be struck from the Far East; it ordered the strengthening of the Pacific fleet. Four of the newest battleships in the Atlantic Squadron coaled for the long trip around Cape Horn. The Virginia received orders to follow as soon as she could be made ready to put to sea. Later, Admiral Dowling himself left Washington by rail for San Francisco to take command of the enlarged fleet. Before starting he announced that the Virginia would be his flagship.

All the while work was being rushed on the Panama Canal. Already that gigantic enterprise had cost more than the entire appropriation and it was not yet half done. Already the “creeping Johnny” had tucked Americans and halfbreeds alike into thousands of narrow beds, and medical science had not yet found its conqueror. Hitherto it had been thought advisable to slacken work from May to December, but this year the rainy season saw no rest for engineer or workman. “War,” chorused the editors at home, “may become inevitable in the course of a few years, but if it can be staved off until the Isthmian Canal is completed, that, in its turn, will have wide influence in still further removing the event of conflict. A nation will hesitate long to make war on the United States when her eastern and her western coastlines are more closely connected than by Cape Horn.”

So the work at the front went on, and the deadly miasma, that in the wet season rises like a white ghost from turned earth on the Isthmus, found no gaps in the ranks of the toilers. Americans, engineers, clerks, draughtsmen, common diggers, crowded to fill vacant places. The mail of the Canal Commission grew heavy with applications for positions. Into the feeling of men generally there had entered an element of patriotism. It had come to be esteemed as honorable to hold an appointment for work on the Isthmian Canal as to have one’s name on the roll of a regiment in war time. It was an enterprise as hazardous. And the young man leaving his home for Panama was sent off with much the same adulation and honor that is wont to attend the soldier going to the front. As in the case of the soldier, the odds were against his coming back; but, like the soldier, he would have done his country service.

In the midst of this apotheosis of labor, in the thick of these ante-bellum preparations, Professor Ithuriel Pennypacker, Ph. D., S. D., made ready his kit, and himself engaged passage for Panama. Not that he was urged on by the motives that swelled out the chests of younger men.

“If we had spent half the energy that has already been sunk in this canal project,” said the professor, inadvertently grasping his own instead of the hand held out to him, “in studying how to harness the forces of Nature, to the end that she should do our work for us, all this waste might have been prevented.”

“But, sir,” cried the embryo geologist earnestly, “we are not equal to that yet. And think, when it is done, this, the greatest engineering feat of the world, greater than ” —

“Too small, too small,” interrupted the professor. “In ten years it will be found to be too small. And then what will it amount to ? ”

“ It will have prevented war, or at least greatly diminished its chances,” glibly recited the neophyte.

A gleam lightened the density of Professor Pennypacker’s usual abstraction.

“War, young man,” he said solemnly, “war will be at our doors before ever that canal is dug through.”

“Then why go now, professor?”

“I see no reason,” returned Professor Pennypacker calmly, “why wars or rumors of wars should interfere with my researches into the tertiary fossils of the Isthmus of Panama. The scientist who allows ephemeral considerations to hinder his pursuit of eternal truth, whether that truth open her books to him in limestone rock or in colorless vapor, is unworthy of his calling.”

But before he reached the scene of his intended labors, Professor Pennypacker found himself called upon to begin researches in a more lively field than tertiary fossils offer. Miss Helen Bowles,for reasons neither patriotic nor scientific, announced her intention of taking the trip to Panama.

“I have made up my mind,” said that young woman, forestalling an expostulatory chorus of relatives. “Of course, you may say all you like and I ’ll be polite about it. I’ll listen. But I’ll advise you not to waste your breath. If you argued till Doomsday, it would n’t make any difference with my plans. Jim is not well, I’m sure. I’ll confess I’m worried about him. And when one’s only brother is in Panama, and does n’t write very frankly about his health, and one is worried, why, the only thing to do is to go down there and see for one’s self. Besides, the rainy season is over now, so there’s no danger.”

After much vain remonstrance, the relatives subsided. They always did. Miss Bowles declared they reminded her of the ancient Hebrews, so devoted were they to a regularly recurring formula of action.

“ It runs like this,” said the girl wickedly: “surprise; expostulation; weakening; acquiescence; lamentation.”

Discovering the date of Professor Pennypacker’s sailing, the relatives, singly and in couples, took him aside and tearfully or cheerfully, according to their temperaments, commended their niece to his patriarchal protection.

“Just keep an eye on her, Pennypacker, will you ?” said Uncle Ezra. “If anything goes wrong, cable me.”

“Oh, dear Professor Pennypacker,” murmured Aunts Ellen and Ella, in duet, “it is such a consolation to know that poor, dear, brave child will have some one to depend on in case anything should happen; and so much might very easily happen, you know.”

“I was saying to Ellen just now,” went on Miss Ella, “ how much it will relieve all our minds to know you are with her ” —

“Indeed, indeed,” supplied Miss Ellen, “to know she is not absolutely alone, — getting into that horrible mosquito-fever country, among the boa-constrictors, — I’m sure they have boa-constrictors there, Ella,— and all the other horrid beasts.”

And the ladies’ volubility ran on and on, until Professor Pennypacker, whose acquaintance with the gender feminine was limited to observations of a certain species of monkey upon which he had written a monograph years before when he came home from Central Africa, and to the dissertations of Virgil and Horace, dumbly wondered whether his selection of this particular winter for his longplanned visit to the Isthmian region were not ill-timed.

But when he found himself on board the Aspinwall, steaming southward with a cargo of machinery in the hold and the single exception to the masculinity of the passenger list under his protection, he gave to the subject all the careful scientific scrutiny which he expected in the near future to bestow upon fossils of the tertiary period. Miss Helen Bowles was certainly no fossil of the tertiary or any other period. She was a very wideawake and much-alive young woman. The professor had always been a little afraid of young things; but this girl was young in a whole-souled way that did not frighten even an absent-minded old scientist. And she was pretty, in a bewitching fashion that claimed more of that old gentleman’s attention in a day than he was wont to devote to the whole human race in a month. It did not take the professor long to reach a general conclusion in regard to her character, — a conclusion which he never afterward saw reason to modify. One could not predict in regard to an action of Miss Bowles with the least degree of that certainty with which one could speak of the qualities of fossils. Any hypothesis built upon previous observations was likely to prove erroneous. To the professor’s surprise, he found himself enjoying this element of unexpectedness. The kindly timidity with which he had at first approached this new subject melted to a less wary consideration. Professor Pennypacker was sometimes observed to smile at the adroit way in which Miss Bowles disposed of superfluous young men about her steamer chair.

On her part, Miss Helen Bow les did not share the professor’s view of his attitude toward her. Instead, she looked upon herself as a human manifestation of his guardian angel. When he was about to salt his tea, she deftly substituted the sugar bowl. When he made as though to turn into the first door he came to, she gently enticed him to his own stateroom. When he looked vaguely dissatisfied in regard to his toilette, she delicately hinted that generally one wore a tie. It was entirely due to her efforts that, when the Aspinwall, on the fifth day out of New York, steamed up to the wharves at Colon, Professor Pennypacker stood on deck, his hat on, his tie straight, his umbrella grasped in one hand, and a full instead of an empty suit case at his feet.

Jim was the first man on board, Jim, big-boned and pale, with a look of fever about him that made his sister heartily glad she had come. There was another abreast of Jim, a man who gave place to the brother at the last, and the warmth of whose greeting from Miss Bowles earned for him the concentrated glares of the men on the steamer. Only Professor Pennypacker regarded with mild benevolence this curly-haired youth with the cheerful cast of countenance.

“ Why, Dick Dole,” cried Miss Bowles, “I did n’t expect to see you so soon!”

“Didn’t you?” returned the young man. “I’m surprised. I’d credited you with more penetration.”

The professor, too, was surprised. He knew himself to have the reputation of being, except in the case of fossils, no very observant man; yet even he, now that the subject was presented to him, considered it eminently natural that this civil engineer should have appeared on the deck of the Aspinwall. Given Miss Bowles and the engineer, what else could be expected ? And Miss Bowles was a bright girl, an exceptionally bright girl. The professor shook his puzzled head. It would appear that women have no reasoning power, he thought. Or were the subtleties of Miss Bowles’s character indeed unsearchable? When the engineer suggested that he might find board with their party on the heights of Culebra, he accepted the invitation with alacrity. The region was rich in limestone. Undoubtedly it was filled with fossils dating from tertiary times.

So the two engineers, Miss Bowles, and Professor Pennypacker, as a reward of much patience with the eccentricities of the Panama Railroad, climbed upward toward Culebra, putting behind them swamps and cone-shaped hills, still lagoons and running streams, little settlements and scattered native huts, always up, up to the top of the divide. Once there, and settled in the American-built and American-run Culebra Inn, Miss Bowles set to work to cure her brother. Incidentally she did mischief among the forces in the employ of the Canal Commission. And the professor lost no time in making the acquaintance of his beloved fossils.

It was not many weeks later that a finely dignified young officer registered at the Culebra Inn, and, turning away from the office, ran directly into the engineer named Dick and Miss Helen Bowles.

“Why, Ned Lee! ” cried the girl; “where did you come from ? ” She held out a cordial hand.

“Straight from the Virginia, Miss Helen,” with a side glance at the engineer. “She’s on her way around the Horn, you know; put in here at our new coaling-station. When I got your letter saying you reckoned you’d be down, I laid my plans right quick for a furlough. And the fates were kind.”

“They generally are, to you, are n’t they ?“asked Miss Bowles. “I think you have never met Mr. Dole.” The young men greeted each other with painful politeness. “Mr. Lee, Dick, is a junior lieutenant on the Virginia.” The engineer glowed pleasantly at the sound of his name. The officer looked black. He wished he had not tried to impress the other man by saying “ Miss Helen.” Miss Bowles had ways of revenging herself — and others. “So the Virginia is coaling here. How fine for us! I suppose you are just spoiling for a fight. Sit down and tell me all about yourself. You will be back to dinner, of course, Mr. Dole.”

The engineer perforce took himself off.

“Don’t bite, Ned,” said Miss Bowles gravely. “There, now you two are even. Let’s go back to the status quo.”

“ I suppose you see a lot of that fellow down here.”

“Of Dick Dole? Oh, yes, he’s Jim’s chum, you know. Older than Jim, but that’s all the better for Jim. Now tell me about the Virginia.”

When the professor and Jim came to dinner, they found the atmosphere in a state of ignored tension. Miss Bowles, fresh and cool, sat between the officer and the engineer, and attempted to carry off the situation by means of impartial smiles and a distracting dimple. The two men leaned toward her, each manœuvring to get the bigger share of her ammunition directed toward himself. The perfect courtesy of their manners did not extend to the expression of their eyes. After dinner Jim, with brotherly forethought, went off “to work,” as he said; the professor hid himself among the shadows on the veranda, and Miss Bowles suggested a walk. It was a little futile ramble, distinguished only by the lieutenant’s vain attempts to lose the engineer.

“ I feel as though I were walking on the crater of a volcano,” thought the girl. “When will it go off, I wonder?”

Coming back to the seemingly deserted veranda, the engineer suddenly grasped the horns of the situation. And for a moment Miss Bowles, who had always advocated frankness with a warm championship, felt that there were things to be said in favor of more devious ways.

“Mr. Lee,” said Dick Dole, “this looks to me like a good time for a little straight talk.”

“So?” drawled the officer.

“We’ve never happened to run into each other before,” the engineer went on, “but I fancy we both know pretty well that the other has seen a good deal of Miss Bowles, and — excuse me, Miss Bowles, but we might as well come out fair and square — that we both think a lot of her. We’ve glared at each other all the evening, until we’ve succeeded in putting a stop to most of her pleasure, I presume, as well as our own. I suggest that we come to some sort of an understanding on the matter.”

“That’s fair.”

“Now I’ve proposed to Miss Bowles several times already.”

“So have I !” “Did she tell you she liked you very much, but was n’t ready to marry you ? ”

“Oh, hush!” cried Miss Bowles.

“Yes. Did she say that to you, too ?”

“Then we’re pretty near even.”

“I reckon we are.”

The girl flushed very pink.

“Miss Bowles,” said the engineer, “here we are. We’ve proposed to you singly, and now we do it together. Would you mind telling us which one you like the better?”

“To be very frank, Mr. Dole,” said Miss Bowles, in her turn grasping the horns of the dilemma, “that, is what I don’t know.”

“You can’t make up your mind?”

“No, I can’t. I like you both very much, but when it comes to trying to decide on which of you I’d prefer to marry,

I just can’t do it. First it’s one of you, and then it’s the other. I have tried honestly and very hard, and I’m ashamed of myself to think I don’t know my own mind.”

“Don’t feel cut up about it,” said the lieutenant gallantly. “It isn’t your fault.”

“We ought not to be so equally charming,” murmured Dick Dole.

Miss Bowles began to pull to pieces a spray of jasmine blossoms. Mr. Lee looked at Miss Bowles. Mr. Dole stared at his boots. “The point is how to settle this thing,” he muttered.

“We will have to leave that to Miss tvA Bowles.”

“ Well, I’d like to help her. If we could think of some kind of a scheme — I have it! How’d you like to count out? Children do it, you know. ‘Eny, meny, miny, mo.’”

“I don’t think that would quite do,” objected Miss Bowles.

“It would settle it, and we’ll all feel better when it’s settled. There’s a tossup,” he hazarded. “Heads,” —he nodded at the officer, —“tails, your humble servant.”

The girl shook her head.

“I suppose you would n’t care for regularly drawing lots ? Then I don’t see ” —

Miss Bowles rose decidedly.

“Let’s sleep on it,” she said.

When she came downstairs in the morning, she found the two men eagerly awaiting her. She smiled, and nodded an assured answer to the one question asked by the four eyes.

“Did you dream it out?”

“No, it popped into my head when I waked.” The girl looked from one to the other of the clear-cut faces with pride and satisfaction in her glance. “It seems the very fairest way I can think of. When the canal is done, and the war is over, — if there is a war, — I will marry ” — she blushed — “whichever gets to me quickest.”

Mr, Dole and Mr. Lee looked at each other.

“But,” said Mr. Lee, “when a fellow is under orders, Miss Bowles ” —

“Yes, I know. But, in a way, so is Mr. Dole. And after the war you can get a furlough, you know. Anyhow, it is the best I can do. And I rather think,” she meditated, “there’s some deep psychology in it. I have n’t studied it out very carefully yet, but I’m going to. He wins, you see, who can overcome obstacles, bend fate to his will, if you please, — yes, there’s a good deal in it. Pretty soon I shall wonder how I ever came to have such a bright idea.”

“But, the deuce!” exploded the engineer. “Beg pardon, Miss Bowles, but I’m feeling strongly, — it’s such a long time to wait! Why, it will be years before this canal is done.”

The girl raised her eyes to the young man’s face.

“Why, Mr. Dole, that is one beauty of the plan. I’m in no hurry to get married.”

“I am,” objected Mr. Dole.

Miss Bowles paid no attention. “Now,” she announced, “you two must shake hands on this.”

The officer held out a hand. “Looks like we ’ll qualify for a school in patience,” he drawled.

The engineer directed a keenly critical glance at the navy’s long legs. “What’s your pace?” he asked. “A hundred yards in two and a quarter seconds ? I’m going to aim at a mile a minute. It looks to me as though legs would count for most in this game.”

So Professor Pennypacker found them, and to him, as to one of his own fossils, Miss Bowles confided the terms of agreement. Solemnly the professor shook hands with both the young men.

“You have,” he said, “my best wishes equally. The ways of a woman appear to be, like the ways of science, long. But the end, sirs, in this case, at least, is worth waiting for. If I could help to shorten this — er — period, I would gladly do it, but that hardly seems possible. Now if we knew how to harness Nature” —

As the professor’s voice trailed off into his favorite dissertation, Mr. Richard Dole slipped away.

“Do you know,” said Miss Bowles meditatively to the engineer some hours later, “Ned Lee was awfully nice to the professor this morning. Why, they really got almost chummy, and the professor had a beautiful time telling him all about those volcanic theories of his. I never liked Ned Lee as much as when I saw how good he was to that dear, enthusiastic, absent-minded old dreamer.”

After that, Mr. Richard Dole paid marked attention to Professor Pennypacker. His reward was not confined to the smiles of Miss Bowles. Many were the evening hours spent, when that young woman was not available, in listening to the old man’s scientific discourses. One hobby the professor had, aside from his rightful field of geology. This was what he frequently referred to under the phrase, “harnessing Nature to do our work for us.”

“It is, indeed, outside of my province,” Professor Pennypacker would say, “and I have no right to speak authoritatively on the subject, but it is allowable to have theories. You will agree to that, Mr. Dole?”

“Certainly, certainly. By all means,” Dick Dole would aver.

“I have discovered many things lately,” the professor would continue, “in regard to the feminine persuasion. It may be cajoled, but never commanded, and even when started in a desired direction, it is likely to keep on too far for comfort. Eh, my boy ? ” Professor Pennypacker rubbed his hands together over his little joke. “Now I have always said in regard to this canal project that, if men only knew how to manage her properly, Nature would do the work. All this Isthmian region ” —the professor spread out his hands generously — “ is volcanic in character, seemingly dead volcanoes everywhere. But perhaps they are not dead after all, only asleep. You know what that means. A power of hot vapor that is immeasurable. You fellows build your little boilers on the crust of the earth. I tell you, we are living on top of a gigantic boiler. If we knew how to connect it with the work we want done, it would mark a revolution in engineering. How to do it, that is the question. There was Krakatoa. The sea water, entering, cooled the surface of hot lava superimposed over this steam. Result, an unparalleled upheaval. Immense energy, incalculable power gone to waste. The same with Mont Pelée. Vesuvius is a great dynamo of wasted energy. My boy, if we humans knew enough to bend forces like those to our schemes, where would be a paltry Niagara or two ? We would harness the volcanic earth-core till it lit our streets, ran our cars, throbbed in our mines, rattled in our factories. There is no limit to the enterprises we could carry on with a power like that. We would not be wasting years and men and millions on this canal, for instance. We would have run it through in sixty days.” The professor had been gesticulating with one of his numerous pairs of eyeglasses. Now he threw out his hands with a free sweep.

“More likely to have run us through,” muttered Dick Dole, as he bent to pick up the pieces.

“What’s that? Yes, ah, yes. Nature is always unruly. Semper femina. But when we know enough to use such forces, we shall likewise know enough to control them. You understand it is outside my particular field of research, quite outside. I would not claim any authoritative voice on the subject. But you are a young man and an engineer. It is worth your while to look into the matter. Here is a great field for some young man, for undoubtedly volcanic energy is the coming power.”

“He is crazy, stark crazy,” Mr. Dole confided to Miss Bowles. “Only mildly so, of course. He goes around chipping off rocks with his hammer and poking into fissures in the earth, — oh, I’m not such a fogy as to call those necessarily signs of insanity. But all the boys think he’s a little touched. He may be sound enough when it comes,to tertiary fossils, but he’s got a mania now for finding water. Wanders around with one of those divining rods. Told me yesterday he thought he’d discovered an underground river; fancied its taking to the underworld might explain the disappearance of the connection that for centuries everybody supposed existed here between the oceans. And he talks the veriest tommy-rot about‘the power of the future,’ everything run by the ‘volcanic earthcore, ’as he calls it. As if in fifty years,— or in five hundred, for that matter, — anybody’d be able to have volcanoes on tap, and turn out an isthmian canal, or any little thing like that, ‘while you wait!'”

“The professor may be a little queer,” said Miss Bowles, “but, queer or not, be is a dear old soul.”

It was not long after expressing this opinion that Miss Bowles made ready for departure from Panama. This move was not entirely of her own volition. The war scare was increasing. Her ministrations and the dry season had together secured again to Jim his birthright of sound health, and there was really no cogent reason to urge against the ever-multiplying demands that she go home. For a month her mail had been weighted wdth commanding and beseeching epistles from uncles, aunts, and cousins pointing out the advantages of the United States in war time. An extravagant letter-telegram came from an officer in the Pacific Squadron, begging Miss Bowles to take to the United States while she could. Even Mr. Richard Dole heroically assured her that he agreed with the aunts, that there was no place like home, and Jim took matters into his own hands and engaged one first-class passage from Colon to New York on the steamer Atrato, sailing in three days.

Professor Pennypacker accompanied her no farther than Colon. After all, his heart was back in tertiary times. “Tell them, my dear child,” — he beamed a benevolent good-by, — “ that I took excellent care of you. It was excellent, was it not ? ” he asked anxiously.

And the girl carried away a picture of the old professor standing on the wharf between the two engineers, and, as the narrow ribbon of water widened out, vigorously shaking a fragment of limestone he had taken from his pocket under the mistaken notion that it was his handkerchief.

So it came about that Miss Bowles found herself on a New York pier when word of the enemy’s great coup d’état startled her ears, and it was in the midst of a group of nervous metropolitans that her eyes first fell on the eight-inch headlines, “ War Declared. Atlantic Coast Threatened. New York May Be First Point of Attack.”

Everybody was talking at once, and everybody was undeniably frightened.

“Oh, my dear, my dear,” gasped one of the aunts, “to think that I should live to be shelled out of my home by a pack of foreign invaders!”

“Their fleet is really on the way, you know,” chattered a voluble cousin, with a frightened glance over her shoulder out to sea. “And across the Atlantic, when everybody thought of course the first blow would be struck on the Pacific. They’ve massed their best fighters in a perfectly invincible fleet, sneaked off their newest ships from their Eastern Squadron, and got them nearly through the Suez Canal before anybody found out about it. And now they’re coming to prey on our coast, and of course they’ll have everything their own way. There’s nothing strong enough to oppose them over here. And to think of that splendid fleet just wasted on the Pacific!”

“Admiral Dowling and five of his strongest battleships are ordered to make a race for this side,” put in an uncle.

“Just like the Oregon, you know, fifteen years ago. But they’ll be too late. Think of the distance they have to come! ”

“They will get here just in time to find us all murdered and pillaged,” wailed an aunt. “But I shall never live to be killed; I shall die of fright first. Think of New York in smoke, my dear! Oh, it is by the veriest miracle you reached here safely, Helen. I’m expecting any minute to see their ships in the harbor.”

“The forts will have something to say about that, auntie; and there is the fleet.”

“Oh, but, Helen, there are so many unprotected places, and nobody knows just where they will strike. To be sure, the government thinks they will aim for Cuba and the southern coast, and the Atlantic Squadron is strung out around Key West; but what does the government know about it? I am sure that New York will be the first place to be attacked. I always come straight to New York myself; why shouldn’t those foreigners ? The Atlantic Squadron ought to be up here this minute, protecting us.”

That, Miss Bowdes soon discovered from the papers, was the opinion of every port, big and little, on the Atlantic coast. And because the fleet, even if strung out, could not possibly stretch from Maine to Mexico, panic was in the air. All along the seaboard, houses were being deserted. The cities were busy sending portable valuables inland; banks hastily transferred bonds and money to vaults hundreds of miles from the coastline; private families gathered plate, papers, jewels, and deposited them with concerns in Worcester, Cincinnati, Chicago. Railroad lines, freight and passenger traffic, were threatened with congestion. And morning, noon, and night, and far into the night, the hot newspaper presses poured extras into the hands of an already fearstricken nation of readers. All eyes turned hopelessly to the race of Admiral Dowling and his captains. The battleships detached from the Pacific Squadron and summoned around Cape Horn were the five finest ships of the new navy. Each had a speed of twenty-three knots an hour. The papers, harking back to the Spanish War, printed half-page views of the old Oregon, and recalled the details of her famous dash for the eastern coast.

“If only the Panama Canal were done! ” men groaned.

It was the 10th of March, and the enemy’s fleet was passing Port Said, when the Secretary of the Navy telegraphed Admiral Dowling to proceed at once with the Virginia, the Dakota, the Washington, the New Mexico, and the Arizona, to join the Atlantic Squadron. On the 12th word came from the admiral that he was leaving San Francisco. Two days later the enemy steamed past Gibraltar, and war was declared. Immediately traffic began to die out on the Atlantic seaboard; shipping fled the coast; steamship lines announced their temporary discontinuance. West Indian waters were cut only by long, gray-painted hulls.

One day, two days, three; the Virginia touched at Acapulco, and the Isthmian Steamship Company docked its vessels. Another day; all communication with Panama, even wireless, suddenly ceased. Two days, three, four, five days; still no news from the Isthmus. People who were wont to look for signs spoke of an unusual brilliance in the glory of sunrise and of sunset. A fine dust fell in various parts of the country. Six days; strange smokestacks swam into view of a lookout scouting off Porto Rico, and disappeared. Seven days; Admiral Dowling was due at Valparaiso. Eight; the country was in a ferment, the strange smokestacks developed low-lying gray hulls, and the Virginia and her sister ships were yet unheard from. Nine; maledictions fell on Admiral Dowling’s head, reduction in grade and reprimand threatened him from high places. The fleet was two days late out of Valparaiso.

That afternoon the despatch boat Columbia put into Havana with a message for Washington. When she left the Atlantic Squadron it was steaming out to engage the enemy. In the early morning of the next day the Great American Reading Public tumbled out of its bed to devour, with staring eyes and uncomprehending brain, a cable that in heavily leaded type blackened the whole front of the city extras.

HAVANA, CUBA, March 25.
SECRETARY OF THE NAVY, Washington.
Joined the Atlantic Squadron at 12 M. Engaged the enemy at 2.30. By 6.00 enemy’s entire fleet captured or destroyed. Losses on our side, destroyer Wasp missing, battleships Arizona and Iowa damaged. No heavy casualties.
DOWLING.

The Atlantic seaboard drew a long breath. In a second censure changed to praise, abuse to glorification. The country was saved. The names of the admiral, of his captains, of his ships, were on all tongues, together with a question: “How did he get there ? ” As hours passed, and no further message came from the victorious admiral, the wonder grew. The whole country was nonplussed. Surmise rang the changes on absurdity. Where the fact itself seemed incredible, no explanation could be too foolish to be sane.

In the midst of this riot of groundless speculation there fell another thunderbolt in the shape of a wireless message to the head of the Isthmian Canal Commission. It came from Chiriqui Bay, and was sent by one Richard Dole. So strange was its import that the distinguished commissioner at once put himself into communication with Mr. Dole. A lengthy wireless conversation ensued.

The engineer informed the commissioner that something in the nature of a mighty earthquake-eruption had taken place on the Isthmus nine days before, March 17. The configuration of the canal zone had apparently been radically changed, and, so far as could be judged, the work of the commission had been obliterated. The fact of the eruption’s occurring at night, when the major part of the men were not at work, Mr. Dole said, might account for the safety of some of them, though the uprush of hot steam from the centre of the earth, which was the salient feature of the eruption, would warrant little hope of finding many survivors. He and his companions owed their escape to the fact that they had gone on a hunting expedition back into the hills; yet even there the effects of the eruption had been felt with great force.

Turning in about eleven, the men were awakened several hours afterward by rumbling noises followed by several distinct earthquake shocks. About twenty minutes later, without warning, came a mighty explosion. Rushing out of the shack, Mr. Dole and his friends saw what looked like a great wall of steam and dust shoot into the air from the direction of the canal zone. It rose, as they watched it, straight up for perhaps four thousand feet, and then began gradually to spread out in a pine-tree shape, obscuring the stars. The men turned and made for the side of the hill against which their shack was built, thinking to climb to the top and get a wider view. Hardly had they gained a sheltering stony spur, before, prefaced by several sharp detonations, another mighty explosion occurred. The shock flung the young men against the rock.

When Mr. Dole came to his senses, it was still dark, and a warm rain was falling. As he sat up, and his eyes grew more accustomed to the lack of actual light, — a dim twilight, rather than pitch blackness, — he saw that over everything, — the bodies of his friends, himself, hands, face, clothes, — lay a soft mud. He drew out his watch, and found it still ticking. The hands registered half an hour after twelve. This was a twilight, not of morning, nor of evening, but of middle day.

After the whole party had regained its feet, preparations were made to set out at once for the coast. First Mr. Dole made an ascent of the hill, but in the semidarkness he could see little. To the east new elevations seemed to waver mistily, and stretched before his eyes was a strange phenomenon. The slopes of the hill in all directions but the one from which he had come were completely stripped of their green forests, and stretched bare and brown, covered with a thin mud coating denuded stems of trees that lay in serried rows with their heads pointing away from the canal zone. Mr. Dole reported this peculiar condition as extending to the coast. Where tangled forests had waved tropical barriers to travel, the way now lay over hill and through valley floored with prostrate tree trunks, arranged neatly, head to head, trunk to trunk, with only a few naked stems left standing, “bare as telegraph poles beside a country road,” said the engineer. It was as though a mighty tornado had swept out from the canal zone, stripping and flattening the forests, leaving only here and there in some sheltered place an oasis of green.

The difficulties of the way and the scarcity of food had greatly retarded the party’s passage to the coast. Only after days of hazard had they succeeded in reaching Chiriqui Bay. Mr. Dole volunteered to secure supplies, and at once to return to the scene of the disaster and discover the extent and nature of the eruption.

The newspaper account ended with the names of the men in the escaped party. The third on the list was that of James Redding Bowles.

The records of the navy office covering those few days make interesting reading. But if one must pick and choose, after Admiral Dowling’s first despatch there are just two that the student of things new and strange cannot afford to miss.

The one reads: —

WASHINGTON, March 26. DOWLING, Atlantic Squadron.

My heartiest congratulations to you and to the officers and men of your fleet. The country applauds your action. How did you get there ?

Secretary of the Navy.

And the other: —

HAVANA, CUBA, March 26.
SECRETARY OF THE NAVY, Washington.
Accept thanks for your message. Found strait through Isthmus from ocean to ocean: apparently opened by eruption. Explored by second-lieutenant Edmund F. Lee in cutter and found navigable for battleships. Passage accomplished safely.
DOWLING.

On the publication of these despatches the country gasped and rubbed bewildered eyes. It was not accustomed to such opportune miracles; it did not know how to receive an Americanized twentiethcentury version of the Arabian Nights, Immediately it demanded particulars, and eventually it got them. The Times, in securing the first authentic interview with the admiral and with Mr. Lee, recorded the biggest, “beat” of a decade. Reduced to simple facts the story even now reads like a fairy tale.

Steaming southward at full speed from Acapulco, bent on making Valparaiso a day early if possible, the Virginia and her companion ships entered, while still off the Mexican coast, under a grea t cloudlike canopy of dust drifting at a height of some thousand feet above the ocean. The usual brightness of midday dimmed to a dull ecliptic light. At the same time peculiar atmospheric disturbances were observed. As the ships passed further south, heavy storms retarded their speed. Keeping strictly to the course, as the officers supposed, what was their amazement to find themselves one morning steaming along a bare and desolated coast. Knowing that something was radically wrong, the admiral at once ordered the engines reversed and an exploring party sent ashore. Returning, the party reported the country to be barren of vegetation, naked forests lying cut like swaths of grain, everything covered with a coating of volcanic dust, and the whole land bearing every mark of a recent and peculiar eruption. If the ships had been veering to the east instead of keeping to their course, they should now be in the vicinity of the Isthmus, but this country bore no resemblance to Panama. The officer further reported no sign of life, but a broad inlet apparently penetrating the interior, — whether an estuary of the sea or the mouth of a river he was not prepared to state without further investigation.

Here Mr. Lee, who, according to the admiral’s account, had, at the first mention of this curious inlet, listened with even closer attention, requested a word with his chief.

“Supposing this to be indeed Panama,” said the young officer, “the body of water noted may be some sort of continuation of the partially completed Panama Canal, or, at least, it may lead to some connection with the further ocean. I volunteer, sir, to conduct an exploration into it.”

So imbued was the young man with a belief in the navigability of this waterway, and of its coextension with the Isthmus, and with such semblance of probability did he quote the theories of a certain famous scientist, to the effect that just such a result might follow just such an eruption as this appeared to have been, that the admiral against his saner judgment gave Mr. Lee permission to take a cutter with a picked crew and investigate as he desired. The officer was absent twenty hours. On his return he reported the inlet to be a natural canal, thirty miles long and at points half a mile wide, navigable throughout for the largest battleships, having a depth greater than he was able to ascertain by soundings. As far as Mr. Lee could judge, this canal partly followed the direction planned by the commission for its water route, but it cut across the Isthmus in a straighter line and entered the ocean at a point outside the zone controlled by the United States. All traces of the artificial canal had vanished, together with all traces of the cities and settlements that had marked its course. At its further end, which observations located as west of its Pacific entrance, the canal merged in a great sea. This had been indubitably defined as the Caribbean. The peculiarity of the strait’s orientation, concluded the lieutenant, was in perfect agreement with the plans of the canal commission, since at this point the curve of the Isthmus throws the Pacific Ocean to the east of the Atlantic. The admiral then called a council of his captains, to whom Mr. Lee repeated his observations. After serious consideration it was agreed to attempt the passage of this natural canal. The success of the essay had enabled the flag-ship and her attendant battleships to reach Cuban waters in time to change the odds of battle and to secure to the American fleet an overwhelming victory.

As for the ship’s peculiar position off the Isthmus, Mr. Lee’s explanation has come to be generally accepted. He argued that the peculiar electric currents in the atmosphere, which induced the storms encountered far out at sea, also affected the compass, deflecting the needle from the pole in such a manner as to throw the ships out of their course to the eastward; an error impossible to discover while the dust clouds obscured the sun.

The ink was scarcely dry in the accounts of how all this had happened before the public was clamoring to know why it had happened. “What was the cause of this strange eruption ? ” demanded the newspapers, and each called to its aid in answering the question learned men and casual travelers, publicists and story-writers, engineers and correspondents. Scientists journeyed to Panama to study the conditions and try to read the barren face of the canal zone. Men and women with active imaginations went there, too. And the scientists came home and propounded scientific theories, and the people with imaginations came home and let loose their fancies. And none of them ever came near the root of the matter.

Professor Pennypacker’s name was never mentioned in these connections. It was never set up in huge type in newspaper headlines. Richard Dole’s was, and so was Lieutenant Lee’s. Certain deeply scientific journals printed paragraphs commenting on the work of Ithuriel Pennypacker, Ph.D., S. D., and on his loss to the cause of tertiary fossils.

But Richard Dole wrote to Miss Helen Bowles, “ I fancy if we could get a word with the old professor now we’d find out a thing or two. Of course, you know I don’t run on in public about him or his theories, though there seems to have been something in them, does n’t there ? But the poor old chap was right when he said you can’t bet on what Nature ’ll do when you get her started. And, mind you, I don’t say he started her off, — I know he did n’t set out to, anyhow But he went off one morning two days before the grand blow-out, and one of our fellows went with him to fix a drill. The professor wanted to get into the inside of a big chunk of limestone. Well, he did. Everything worked all right. When the professor came home, he said he guessed the explosion had queered that underground river of his, it seemed to be moving on further. (Of course he did n’t put it just like that, but I’m giving you the sense.) I was starting off on that little hunting trip, and I confess I did n’t pay much attention. Now I get to wondering sometimes. There were fissures in that region; one of ’em looked deep enough to lead to the ‘ earth core, ’ if it stopped anywhere this side of China. I wonder whether the professor’s underground river took that road. You know his theories about cold water ‘superimposed’ on his big natural ‘ boiler.’

“But anyhow, if he had anything to do with it, I for one bless his old soul. The canal is done, and you bet I’m letting no grass grow under my feet in settling up affairs dowrn here.”

Miss Bowles gave a little gasp as she read the last lines. She was sitting in a sunny breakfast room of that inland city whither a worried aunt had hurried her at the first outbreak of war. That journey, weeks ago, the girl remembered well. She had sat at her car window, and with unseeing eyes had watched the familiar landscape race past to the pace of unfamiliar thoughts. All through that ride the window sashes had framed for her two pictures; one of a young man pacing the deck of his speeding ship, the other of a young man at work on a great canal. And in both she had been equally interested. Now the war was waged; the morning paper she had just laid down spoke of the first overtures toward peace. It had assumed proportions hardly greater than those of an international episode. The canal, too, was done, and —

Miss Bowles blushed. Such suddenness bewildered her. She felt hurried; the play had not been quite fair. Then she turned to the paper again. Three columns devoted to New York’s gigantic preparations for the reception of the Virginia stared up at her. Admiral Dowling and his officers were to be given the freedom of the city. The account ran on in glowing terms. Miss Bowles stirred her coffee thoughtfully. She was glad she had not tried to decide herself. They were both so nice that it really did not matter which.

The maid laid two telegrams by her plate. Miss Bowles picked up the top one, and tore it open. It was dated at Norfolk, Virginia.

Furlough at New York expect me Wednesday 4.15.

E. F. LEE.

Mechanically she tore open the second. It was sent from Miami, Florida, and had been delayed.

Coming hurrah see you Wednesday at 4.30.

R. DOLE.

Miss Bowles sat back in her chair with a little cry. Then she looked again at the telegrams.

“Mary,” she said, “will you get me the N. Y. C. timetable on uncle’s desk? Thank you.” She ran over the pages hurriedly. “I knew it,” she declared aloud; “he had the old schedule. Both those trains are due now at 4.30!”

Thirty-three hours later Miss Bowles was pacing the walks of her aunt’s garden, in the company of a happy-faced young man.

“I wonder my hair did n’t turn gray in a night,” she said plaintively. “I expected nothing less. You see, until the telegrams came I did n’t know, and then — I was so afraid it would n’t be you.”

As for the Panama Canal, the question of its ownership is still a mooted point in the hands of the Hague Tribunal.