Argosy All-Story Weekly, July 11, 1925 — page 20: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

174 Just across the passage from the ad- miral’s cabin was the admiral’s dining room, also not in use except for certain State occasions in port. At the end of it, as he passed, Cyrus got a glimpse of a shelf of books. He was hurrying along, under convoy, as it were, of the captain’s orderly, but he could not forget that shelf of books. The ship’s library, to which he, with all other enlisted men, had easy access, had grievously disappointed him. Nothing but novels and books of travel, and such read- ing—sterling stuff, to be sure, but of small service to an inventor. The admiral’s dining room was open to all. Officers and men passed through it con- stantly. Always on duty, of course, and hurrying somewhere, but it did not seem to Cyrus that there could be any great breach of discipline in going there. So-he slipped in at the first opportunity and looked at those books. What a find! A gold mine would have interested him less. A textbook on trajectories; a series of German works on ordnance; English analyses of deep-sea shooting of emplaced rifles; a bound American essay on fire con- trol; and—a French work on ballistics. He wanted to devour this, but the strange language halted him. There was an English- French dictionary in the library, and now his problem was—how to get the two to- gether. He was too timid to send word to the captain asking permission to borrow the book. He returned to his desk abaft the smokestack, between decks, puzzling over some way to get hold of the book while - he also could have the dictionary. The very next day fortune favored him. The Kansas dropped anchor in Hampton ~Roads for a ten days’ stay close to Nor- folk, and all the officers except those neces- sary to maintain discipline and carry on the watches took shore leave. This left the after part of the upper decks, near the admiral’s cabin and dining room, deserted. Cyrus got the dictionary from the li- brary and ensconced himself in the far cor- ner of the admiral’s dining room with the tome on ballistics. Here he became so con- _centrated in tracing out the meaning of the a F rench words and “absorbing the technique ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. of gunnery, which until now he had lacked, that he became utterly unconscious of the flight of time or of the passage of persons. An unusually attractive person ‘ came along: feminine, young, and of course pretty. The gangplank had been down for hours, and the launches had had a chance to ply back and forth, and more than one bit of fluffery was already on board. This one glided along the passageway as if she rather belonged there, not a bit awed by the austerity of her location near the living quarters of the very live captain and the supposititious domicile of the possible ad- miral. 3 She went boldly right into the captain’s cabin, and the audacious young thing rum- maged brazenly in his wardrobe until she came on his dress hat, the long wavy one with the white ostrich feather, which the captain wore only at New Year’s receptions or when the President or the Secretary of the Navy reviewed the fleet. Then she tiptoed—“ sneaked ” would be almost the proper word—out the captain’s door, along the passage to the admiral’s cabin, and popped in there. The reason for this effrontery was presently appar- ent. The admiral’s cabin held the only full- length mirror on the ship, and a very €X-° cellent one it was, of beveled plate, in a mahogany frame. And there, framed in the austere ele- gance of an admiral’s surroundings, this young, pretty, and decidedly feminine per- son posed and puttered and primped, try- ing on the captain’s dress hat frontways and sideways, and in rakish fashion—obliquely, with the ostrich feather sweeping across the slender left shoulder. Until a movement across the passageway —the rattle of leaves followed by the drop to the steel deck. of a book hastily placed— caused her to look up. Wherewith she screamed—just a trifle—and slammed the admiral’s door. The scream disturbed Cyrus, and be- wildered him too. He got the merest glimpse of skirts and a feather in the ad- miral’s cabin. He had a sudden vision of Comic 200 CS: (e()