missed her there.  On to her next stop, Punta Arenas in Magellan Straits, the minister forwarded it, but the flying battleship, with her stops three thousand miles apart, was moving along faster than the mail steamers, which were stopping every few hundred miles.  So they missed her in the Straits, and again at Callao.  Not till she lay to anchor in San Francisco Bay did they overtake her, and then her commander had only to say that he didn’t know where the hose came from originally; but he didn’t see that it mattered, as the necessity for the use of the hose no longer existed.

“I might say that the captain’s yeoman, having by now come to understand his skipper, drew up that particular endorsement, and he thought it pretty hot stuff”, and that it would end the whole matter.  And so did the new commandant back in the yard when he got it, and he shipped it on to the Bureau of Heavy Jobs with a flourish.  But did it?  Not much.  Down there the swivel-chairs revolved a few more hundred times and they discussed it over a few dozen lunches, and then back it came with a new touch.  Why did the necessity no longer exist? they asked, and shipped it by mistake to the new commandant.

“‘And how the hell do I know?’ says the new commandant, but not in writing, and passes it on to the old Savannah captain, who was now rear-admiral, with a division in the East waiting him to come and hoist his pennant.  And so again it was a chase of the Texarkhoma, which was on her way to the Philippines via Honolulu and way ports.  They were too late for her at Honolulu, and at Guam, and again at Yokohama; but they overhauled her at Hong-kong, where she’d been lying at anchor for a week.

“The admiral had a lot of mail that morning in Hong-kong harbor, but nothing to speed up his brain till he came to the hose-pipe thing.  ’Twas then he went up on the quarter-deck and did a Marathon for an hour or so, while the officer of the deck and every blessed marine and flat-foot on duty stepped softly till he ducked below again.

“By and by, in his cabin, the admiral presses the buzzer, and in comes his trusty yeoman, the same he’d carried from the days of the Savannah, and to him the admiral says:  ’Willoughby’—­call him Willoughby—­’ Willoughby, how long you been in the service?’

“‘Nineteen years, sir.’

“’Nineteen?  H’m!  Then by this time you probably know a little something of the ways that shore-going departments invent to worry us poor fellows to sea,’ He held up the hose-pipe thing.  ’You’ve seen this before, Willoughby?’

“‘Oh yes, sir,’ says Willoughby.”

“’I dare say, and so have I, and if there’s a sea-going or shore-going officer in the service that hasn’t bumped into it, then he must have been on the sick-list for the last few dozen years.  Well, Willoughby, do you take it, this nightmare—­that I thought was dead and buried a dozen times—­take it and study it over, from alow and aloft, from for’ard and aft, inside and outside and topside and ’tween-decks, from mast-head to keelson, from figure-head to jack-staff; study it and stay with it, and from out of your nineteen years’ experience—­and you’re no green apprentice-boy, Willoughby—­see if you can’t construct an endorsement that will lay the damned ghost of it for good and all.’