CAPTAIN KETTLE ON THE WAR-PATH

BY

C. J. CUTCLIFFE HYNE

THIRD EDITION

METHUEN & CO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET, W.C. LONDON

First Published ... May 11th, 1916 Second Edition ..... May 1916 Third Edition ...... October 1916

Copyrighted in the United States by C. J. CUTCLIFFE HYNE

All rights of translation, dramatic and motion picture rights reserved

TO E.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Marriage of Kettle Firemen Hot Kate Meredith The Escape Agents Adventures of Captain Kettle Mr. Horrocks, Purser The Filibusters The Lost Continent The Little Red Captain The Recipe for Diamonds The Paradise Coalboat Through Arctic Lapland Further Adventures of Captain Kettle Thompson's Progress Captain Kettle, K.C.B. McTodd Atoms of Empire Prince Rupert the Buccaneer Trials of Commander McTurk Emperor of The World

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I The Supply Ship

II The Mine-layer

III Cotton

IV Gun-runners

V The Intervening Wire

VI Rejoining at Once

VII The Lady Killer

VIII An Eye for an Eye

IX That Rhine Tour

X The Inventor of Meltite

CAPTAIN KETTLE ON THE WAR-PATH

I THE SUPPLY SHIP

Captain Sir Owen Kettle, K.C.B., shook his head and sighed. "I have tried everything, sir, from the Flying Corps to Motor Transports and R.A.M.C., and not one of them will have me. They say I've a wooden leg."

"And that's not true," broke in Lady Kettle. "The Captain's is a high-class American limb that cost £26 18s., even with the discount. At least, the one he wore when he tried to enlist was. He still has his old wooden implement (which Mr. McTodd made him), but he only wears that about home here, and when we've no company. Mr. McTodd meant well, but he made the leg of Honduras mahogany, and that's too heavy. It's as good as an extra vest to the Captain when he wears it."

"I'd like to show you our roses, sir," said Kettle, by way of getting rid of a painful subject. "We had mildew on them, but I've syringed them with a patent mixture of my own, and they're as clean now as a well-scrubbed deck. I don't mind owning that the mixture is founded on Quale's Sheep Dip, but I think I shall be able to get Government protection for my adaptation of it. I have always been anxious, Mr. Carnforth, to start in the patent medicine trade, and this is my first opening. 'Try Kettline for mildew on your roses.' It would sound well on the advertisements, especially with a verse or two of poetry added. I've got quotations already for space in the Gardener's Friend."

The big politician looked at the little sailor with a thoughtful eye, and the unprejudiced observer might have jumped to the conclusion that he was going to swear. But Mr. Carnforth knew his Kettle from bitter experience, and passed a cigar case instead, and in his turn talked roses, their diseases, their colours, and their culture, till even Captain Kettle had no further views to offer on the topic. And, at the finish, said he, "Now, my man, if you're fed up on flummery, we'll get down to bed-rock business. Are you open to killing a few Germans?"

"I haven't got a game ticket, sir, but my ten-shilling licence covers the killing of vermin."

Martin Carnforth, M.P., grinned. "You're your little old self. In this case it's the crew of a certain German submarine, number unknown."

"I've a lot of theories, sir, about the way to catch submarines. Our Navy——"

"Never mind the Navy, and never mind your theories for the moment. This is a particular vessel which is to be off Ireland—North or South, I don't know which at present—in a month's time, and I'm not telling the Admiralty about her because they do nothing. I told the Admiralty before about a German submarine which would be at a certain spot within a certain limit of time, and they said my news was of interest, but policy forbade them to act upon it. That submarine got busy. She sank seven big steamers in a week, not to mention four trawlers. We even owned up to four of the steamers and a brace of trawlers."

Captain Kettle was openly shocked. "And you a Member of Parliament, sir!"

"I'm sick and ashamed of it. Parliament talks and does nothing for fear of losing its votes and its salaries, and I'm aching to do something. They won't let me into either of the Services, because they say I'm too old, and can't see, and am touched in the wind, and am liable to pains in the carburettor. So I'm going on my own. I'm going to be a dam' pirate, and if the Navy catches me trying to help Great Britain, I suppose I shall hang. Question is—will you chip in with me?"

"Certainly not," said Lady Kettle. "The Captain's a respectable gentleman, now."

"I'll come like a bird," said the little sailor—his red torpedo beard stuck out aggressively. "By James, Mr. Carnforth, sir, I've been aching to have a bat at those Dutchmen ever since the war started. I've only to get my next Sunday's sermon in our chapel arranged for—

"You can leave me to attend to that, Captain," said Lady Kettle, and there was a distinct gleam of triumph in her eye. "I've never been allowed in the pulpit yet, Mr. Carnforth, but women must do men's work in this war-time, and if there's a drop in the collection I'll know who it is that's short, and she can buy her next week's butter from Skipton, or where she likes. Not another pound does she have from this farm."

We may pass over, then, a voyage across the Atlantic in the next packet that sailed, and a train journey through the United States from Jersey City to New Orleans. In that capital of moist heat and doubtful drainage they put up at a modest and inconspicuous hotel, and I regret to say under assumed names.

"If my name got down here," said Carnforth, "I should find myself in the papers."

"If mine got out," said Kettle rather awkwardly, "I'm afraid I should find myself in gaol. You see, sir, I've been here before. He was only a thief of a stevedore when we had the bit of trouble, but he's a political boss now, and Irish, and they say he's a long memory. But an archdeacon, situated as I was then, couldn't have resisted giving it that man on the nose."

"Very well, I'll be Mr. Martin, and you—let me see—you had better be Colonel Owen. You don't look like a plain mister. And now about this steamer. My cable says she's the Grüda, nominally Norwegian owned, and under charter to a Chicago firm with a German name."

"She's a tanker, sir, about 1,800 tons, twin-screw, loaded, and alongside the levee this minute."

"Then," said Carnforth, who was a business man, "the next thing to do is to get passages on her through the pretence that we've got to leave here in a hurry. Afterwards, when we have found out her rendezvous with the German submarine, we'll take charge." He produced from his pocket an automatic pistol and a glass tube full of small tabloids. "If we can't drug the crew with the chemicals, we'll have to use the cordite."

"I rather object to dope, sir. It leaves an awful head afterwards, as I know, and doping's not quite a white man's trick."

"My good Captain, you mustn't be too nice-fingered. This war with Germany is not run under Queensberry rules—they've seen to that. We've got to win, and you can take it from me we shall have to be all-in to do it."

"Well, sir," said Kettle, with a sigh, "you're a Member of Parliament, and ought to know; and anyway you're, so to speak, my owner on this trip. You give the orders, and I'll see them through."

"Right," said the big man, "that's a bargain. And now, as you've told me many times you're bad at fiction, I'll go and beard the skipper on the Grüda, and bamboozle passages out of him for the pair of us. I expect it will only be a case of being able to pay enough."

To Captain Sir Owen Kettle, K.C.B., who was anxiously smoking his fifteenth cigar for the day, Carnforth returned three hours later, flatly discouraged.

"The captain of that tanker was hopeless. I appealed to his better feelings, and I appealed to his pocket, and one might as well have tried to work on the conscience of an alligator. I tried the agent: he said if I didn't get to hell quick on my own accord, he'd send me there. I rang up the runner who is to supply the crew, and he said he was full already. And the boat sails with to-morrow's daylight."

Kettle took his cigar from his mouth and examined the tip. "And who was the runner, sir?"

"Morrissey. Keeps a flash saloon about two blocks off Canal Street, on the French side."

"That's luck about Morrissey. Well, Mr. Carnforth, we might get shipped still, but the method won't be pleasant."

"I'll stomach anything to get success. What's the scheme?"

But Captain Kettle would divulge no details. Only after they had dined, and put in a couple of hours at a movies show where even a Polar whaling picture could hardly check the perspiration, he led with easy assurance through the crowded traffic of Canal Street to Mr. Morrissey's saloon.

"Seem to know your way," Carnforth commented.

"I've been in New Orleans before," Kettle admitted. "Evening, Mr. Morrissey."

"By the piper! You! I thought, Captain, you'd have died of lead-poisoning ten times over before this. And why are you gladdening N'Orleans? You haven't a ship here, or even down at the quarantine station."

"I want a ship. D'you know of one, Morrissey?"

"That takes a bit of thinking over, and I dare say you don't want to discuss your particular troubles before the beauty and fashion in the bar here. Come to my private room. Will you bring your friend?"

"Please. He wants to ship with me."

"We'll see what can be done. Just shut the door behind you, Mr.—er—Martin, I think you said your friend's name was, Captain? Bourbon or rye? I know you dislike our Scotch, Captain, because of its Chicago accent, though I always drink it myself. You see I've a good memory. Rye for you, eh, and Bourbon for your friend? Help yourselves. Make it a high-ball, if you like. Here's the squirt. Mine for the good old Scotch. You're looking at my nose, Captain, and I tell you it cost me a lot to have it put straight. But that's all past and over now, isn't it? Here's chin-chin!"

The saloon-keeper brimmed with affability, and, to Carnforth's surprise, Captain Kettle was affable also. He let the gross politician suggest rogueries and familiarities unspeakable. He allowed himself to be plied with whisky, and insisted that Carnforth should drink level. And he insisted on obtaining from his host promises of future employment which a child might have known that apoplectic person had not the smallest intention of making good.

From then onwards the evening seemed to fade out.

Carnforth, awaking with a splitting head and a brazen taste in his mouth, tried to reconstruct the details of the orgy without success. One thing he was sure about—he had not been drunk. He knew his capacity to a glass, and had not been within a bottle of it. And he was similarly confident about Captain Kettle. That mariner's iron head could have seen Mr. Morrissey under the table three times over. But who had taken him back to the hotel and put him to bed, and why was the hotel so full of grumbling, rumbling machinery?

At that point Carnforth waked a trifle more, stretched himself gingerly (as he found he was a mass of bruises and aches), and discovered he was not in the hotel at all. He was in a room that was warm and smelt of grease, and he was lying on the wooden floor of a box that reminded him of a coffin. Then he recognized it as a steamer's bunk.

"Glad to see you're coming round, sir," said a voice from the gloom. "Morrissey's done it pretty thoroughly, hasn't he? The swine's even stolen my best leg."

"That you, Kettle? D'you know where we are? Looks to me we're on a steamer."

"We're where we wanted to get. We're on the Grüda, sir, and by the way her wheel engines are clattering we must be navigating that twisty bit below the quarantine station before you get to the Port Edes pass, and the pilot's nervous of piling her up on a sand bar. Drat these mosquitoes. Do you recognize the good old Mississippi smell?"

"Then we've been—what d'you call it—shanghaied?"

"That's right, sir. I guess we asked for it, and Morrissey very kindly did the rest. A man with a good memory, sir, Morrissey, and I must own I did make a bad mess of his nose, that time I attended to him. Great James! but I have a head and a mouth on me! I told you, sir, dope was filthy stuff."

"Well, I've lost my stock of that and my gun as well. It strikes me that now we are here we can't do any good."

"Oh, that'll be all right when the time comes," said the little sailor. "No use looking for trouble on ahead, sir. And now I should advise getting a spell of sleep for as much as we're let, though I don't suppose that will be for long."

It turned out there were five other drugged men in the bunks beside them; the Grüda's errand was not sufficiently popular to enable her to ship a crew by above-board means; and when the pilot was dropped by the Port Edes light, and the steamer lifted to the heave of a brisk Norther in the Gulf outside, the need for hands became apparent, and large-booted mates proceeded to rouse the sleepers after the time-honoured methods.

All grumbled, and all were driven. Martin Carnforth, Esq., M.P., found that his name was Olsen and his destiny the stokehold. He went there, escorted by a volley of kicks. Kettle, after being yanked violently out of his bunk on to the iron deck below, was discovered to be a cripple, and was virulently abused for this misfortune.

"I'll knock the stuffing out of Morrissey next time I see Noo Orleans," said the Grüda's mate, "for charging me for a whole man and only shipping a half one. Get up, you unipod."

Captain Kettle was yanked back to the vertical, and lost the remains of his temper. His skilled fingers shot out and seized a handful of the Mate's shaggy hair, and with that leverage he banged the man's head against an iron stanchion till he howled for mercy.

"Will you promise to treat me decently whilst I'm on this ship if I don't kill you now?"

"Ja——si——yes. What coundymans was you? You're name's nod Schlich."

"Seems that's the name I was shipped under, and therefore it's good enough for you. Where's my jury leg?"

"If it was worth a nickel, Morrissey's got it. An' he's beyond reach. We don' carry no spare legs in our slop-chest, but I'll have Chips make you one right now, and when you've got that shipped, you'll turn to as pantryman. Unnerstan'? Say 'sir' when you answer me."

"Aye aye, sir," said Captain Kettle cheerfully, and the mate, keeping a wary eye on him, backed out of the forecastle.

The Grüda crossed the Mexican Gulf amongst silvery flying fish and islands of amber-yellow weed, rounded Florida with its screw-pile lights, and swirled North with the Gulf Stream. She bellowed her way through the fogs on the Banks, and missed a Miquelon fishing schooner by the short hairs. And then she butted her stolid path across the Western Ocean, exuding smells of petroleum and fried onions.

Her pantryman did his work, and called little attention to himself. His immediate master, the cabin steward, himself an untidy creature, commented on his frequent drawings of clothes from the slop-chest.

"You'll have no wages to pouch at the far end if you put so much on your back," said the steward.

"I know," said Kettle. "But I like to feel clean and neat. Where is the far end? I haven't the muzziest notion of where I signed on to."

"Oh, 'Kjobnhavn or orders,'" said the steward. "Probably 'orders'!"

"I don't believe there's a soul on board knows where we're bound for," said Captain Kettle to Carnforth that night as they sat together on the poop companion.

"What, not even the skipper?"

"Not even the captain, sir. At least he's a liar if he does. According to Mr. Mate, we're heading about for the middle of Ireland—say Limerick. I heard Mr. Mate ask the Old Man at tea to-night if that was our port, and the Old Man said he knew no more than the ship's tom cat."

But next day a new development showed itself. A span of wires was hoisted between the two mast-heads, and presently the crackle and spit of wireless broke out from the chart-house. For another day nothing happened, and the Grüda loafed along at a steady half-speed. Then orders sharp and insistent evidently arrived out of space, and the tanker swung off on to a new course.

"Now we shan't be long," said Carnforth when he came off watch, and the pair were for a minute alone together. "I'm hanged if I can see what we can do. Have you managed to pinch a gun?"

"It's rather astonishing, sir, but I don't think, there's such a thing on board. They're an amazing lot of haymakers. We must tackle them, when the time comes, without that."

"Then you have a scheme?"

"I've ten, sir, but I don't know yet which will come into use. We must 'wait and see,' as you politicians say when your heads are empty of ideas."

"Well, I'm going to do something. I'll set fire to the petrol as the submarine's taking it on board, sooner than she shall go off with it. I suppose we shall get killed, but I'm not going home with nothing done."

"We shall not get killed, Mr. Carnforth, sir, and we shall do in the beastly Dutchmen all right. I make a point, sir, of never getting killed. If you fix in your mind beforehand that you are going to do your job and come through safe, you'll do it. I've proved that a hundred times, so I know. The main thing that's troubling me is Kettline."

"Is what?"

"That mixture of mine that is such death to mildew on roses. Lady Kettle was, as you know, sir, a business lady before I knew her, and she's been a business lady most of her life since. But you know what the sex is when it comes to bucking about gardens. If any one says how clean our roses are, she'll think no more about giving away the recipe than you would about telling your fellow politicians the name of your favourite throat tabloid."

"Well," said Carnforth impatiently. "I don't see that it matters."

"It matters all the time, sir. If that recipe goes to the wrong ear there's my patent jumped before you can say 'slug.' It's taken me ten years hard gardening, sir, to bring that mixture to its present perfection, and now I'm likely to have had all my trouble and chemistry for nothing."

"Better ask the skipper for the loan of the wireless," said Carnforth sarcastically, "and ring up your wife and tell her to take care."

"By James, sir," said Kettle, "that's a sound idea. The minute we've sunk that submarine I'll do it. But, for the time being, the submarine comes first, before," he added regretfully, "before even roses. Curse these Dutchmen. They're always getting in the way of something, and always will, I suppose, till they're all wiped out. Well, sir, there are a lot of wipers knocking about the world just now, that's one comfort."

Carnforth was tired and stiff with his unaccustomed work. He got up rustily. "Well," he said, "wait and see is all right, I dare say, for our tin-pot politics, but it is rather a poor sort of prescription for the serious business of war. Can't you give me something better to go on?"

"Yes, sir, I can. This ship is fitted with iron belaying-pins, and they're many of them loose. Learn to an inch where the loose ones are, so that you can always lay your hand on the nearest, either by night or day, without a wink-time's waste. If you have to hit with one, hit to kill. This is red war we've ahead of us, Mr. Carnforth, and it's either us or them, and don't you forget it, because they won't. Great James, there's my bell. I must go."

Three times the Grüda changed her course in answer to the invisible orders, which gave a hint that the boat they were hurrying towards was not waiting for them placidly. Once all heads were drawn to the rail by the sight of a wrecked trawler's dinghy, and a patch of floating fish-boxes, and another time they steamed through a stinking, hobbling shoal of drowned and bloated mules. Three drowning cattlemen sailed with the mules as a sightless guard.