Ensign MacMasters made no comment for a moment; then he got the full significance of Whistler's meaning and he briskly demanded:
"Sure her casks were filled, Morgan, and not empty?"
"She had a full cargo of something, sir," said Whistler, nodding.
Mr. MacMasters wheeled to speak to his navigating officer. In thirty seconds the swift craft started.
"Hold on, Mr. MacMasters!" cried Torry. "We've got to get ashore somehow for supper, you know."
The ensign smiled at him. "I am afraid you will have to remain aboard and help eat some of your own fish for supper. No time just now to put you boys on land."
The S. P. 888 was shaking throughout her structure before she came square with the exit of the cove. If a destroyer is "a tin box built around a mighty big engine," the term even more nearly fits one of these chasers.
The four Navy boys from Seacove were amazed by the quickness with which she got under way and the brief time it took to tune her up to top-notch speed.
"She's a hundred and ten feet long," said Mr. MacMasters, "about as wide as a happy thought, and can make her thirty-five knots an hour without any particular effort."
"No effort?" muttered Torry. "And it feels as though she was shaking herself to pieces!"
"She's faster than the _Colodia_," observed Whistler, somewhat as though he felt pained by that fact. That any other craft should be a sweeter sailer than his beloved destroyer seemed to him almost a crime.
"She most certainly is," agreed Ensign MacMasters. "She is some speed boat!"
"Why!" Frenchy cried, "she must be faster than the admiral's hydroboat we saw at Newport."
"No, no!" said the ensign. "Those hydroboats have got every other craft in the Navy beaten to a standstill. And about all they use 'em for is pleasure boats."
"They'll be dispatch carriers maybe?" suggested Whistler.
"What do they want of dispatch carriers in a day of wireless?" returned the ensign, and went about his duty of conning the S. P. 888 as she shot through the breach between the claw-like capes that defended the cove, and so straight out to sea in a southeasterly direction.
The "bone in her teeth," as sailors call the white water under the ship's bows, became a windrow of sea, foamed-streaked and agitated, parted by the knife-sharp bows, and rolling away on either hand. The S. P. 888 traveled so swiftly that at a distance "shark" really was the name for her.