A long, weird blast from the fog horn, followed by two short, sharp toots, recalled Barry from his morning dream.

"Fog," he grumbled, and turned over to re-capture the enchantment of the Athabasca rapids, and his dancing canoe.

Overhead there sounded the trampling of feet.

"Submarines, doc," he shouted and leaped to the floor broad awake.

"What's the row?" murmured the M. O., who was a heavy sleeper.

For answer, Barry ripped the clothes from the doctor's bed.

"Submarines, doc," he shouted again, and buckling on his Sam Brown, and seizing his lifebelt, he stood ready to go.

"What! your boots off, doc?"

In the orders of the day before had been an announcement that officers and men were to sleep fully dressed.

"Oh, the devil!" exclaimed the doctor, hunting through his bedclothes in desperation. "I can't sleep in my boots. Where's my tunic? Go on, old fellow, I'll follow you."

Barry held his tunic for him.

"Here you are! Wake up, doc! And here's your Sam Brown."

Barry dropped to lace the doctor's boots, while the latter was buckling on the rest of his equipment.

"All right," cried the doctor, rushing from the room and leaving his lifebelt behind him.

Barry caught up the lifebelt and followed.

"Your lifebelt, doc," he said, as they passed up the companion way.

"Oh, I'm a peach of a soldier," said the doctor, struggling into his lifebelt, and swearing deeply the while.

"Stop swearing, doc! It's a waste of energy."

"Oh, go to hell!"

"No, I prefer Heaven, if I must leave this ship, but for the present, I believe I'm needed here, and so are you, doc. Look there!"

The doctor glanced out upon the deck.

"By Jove! You're right, old man, we are needed and badly. I say, old chap," he said, pausing for a moment to turn to Barry, "you are a dear old thing, aren't you?"

The deck was a mass of soldiers struggling, swearing, fighting their way to their various stations. Officers, half dressed and half awake, were rushing hither and thither, seeking their units, swearing at the men and shouting meaningless orders. Over all the stentorian voice of the sergeant major was vainly trying to make itself understood.

In the confusion the cry was raised: "We're torpedoed! We're going down!"

There was a great rush for the nearest boats. Men flung discipline to the winds and began fighting for a chance of their lives. It was a terrific and humiliating scene.

Suddenly, over the tumult, was heard a loud, ringing laugh.

"Oh, I say, Duff! Not that way! Not that way!"

Again came the ringing laugh.

Immediately a silence fell upon the struggling crowd, and for a moment they stood looking inquiringly at each other. That moment of silence was seized by the sergeant major. Like a trumpet his sonorous voice rang out steady and clear.

"Fall in, men! Boat quarters! Silence there!"

He followed this with sharp, intelligible commands to his N. C. O.'s.

Like magic, order fell upon the turbulent, struggling crowd.

"Stand steady, you there!" roared the sergeant major, who having got control of his men, began to indulge himself in a few telling and descriptive adjectives.

In less than two minutes, the men were standing steady as a rock and the panic was passed.

"Who was it that laughed up there in that stampede?" inquired the O. C., when the officers were gathered about him in the orderly room.

"I think it was the Sky Pilot, sir--the chaplain, sir," said Lieutenant Stewart Duff.

"Was it you that laughed, Captain Dunbar?" asked the colonel, turning upon Barry.

"Perhaps I did, sir. I'm sorry if--"

"Sorry!" exclaimed the colonel. "Dammit, sir, you saved the situation for us all. Who told you it was a false alarm?"

"No one, sir. I didn't know it was a false alarm. I was looking at Lieutenant Duff--" He checked himself promptly. "I mean, sir--well, it seemed a good place to laugh, so I just let it come."

The colonel's eyes rested with curious inquiry upon the serene face of the chaplain, with its glowing eyes and candid expression. "A good place for a laugh? It was a damned good place for a laugh, and gentlemen, I thank God I have one officer who finds in the face of sudden danger a good place for a laugh. And now I have something to say to you."

The O. C.'s remarks did not improve the officers' opinion of themselves, and they slunk out of the room--no other word properly describes the cowed and shamed appearance of that company of men--they slunk out of the room. They had failed to play the part of British officers in the face of sudden peril.

In his speech to the men, the C. O. made only a single reference to the incident, but that reference bit deep.

"Men, I am thoroughly ashamed and disappointed. You acted, not like soldiers, but like a herd of steers. The difference between a herd of steers and a battalion of soldiers, in the face of sudden danger, is only this:--the steers break blindly for God knows where, and end piled up over a cut bank; soldiers stand steady listening for the word of command."

If the O. C. handled the men with a light hand, the sergeant major did not. His tongue rasped them to the raw. No one knows a soldier as does his N. C. O., and no N. C. O. is qualified to set forth the soldier's characteristics with the intimate knowledge and adequate fluency of the sergeant major. One by one he peeled from their shivering souls the various layers of their moral cuticle, until they stood, in their own and in each other's eyes, objects of commiseration.

"There's just one thing more I wad like ta say to ye." The sergeant major's tendency to Doric was more noticeable in his moments of deeper feeling, "but it's something for you lads to give heed ta. When ye were scrammlin' up yonder, like a lot o' mavericks at a brandin', and yowlin'

like a bunch o' coyotes, there was one man in the regiment who could laugh. There's lots o' animals that the Almighty made can yowl, but there's only one can laugh, and that's a mon. For God's sake, men, when ye're in a tight place, try a laugh."

For some weeks after this event the chaplain was known throughout the battalion as "the man that can laugh," and certain it is that from that day there existed between the M. O. and the chaplain a new bond of friendship.

As the ship advanced deeper into the submarine zone, the sole topic of thought and of conversation came to be the convoy. Where was that convoy anyway? While the daylight lasted, a thousand pairs of eyes swept the horizon, and the intervening spaces of tossing, blue-grey water, for the sight of a sinister periscope, or for the smudge of a friendly cruiser, and when night fell, a thousand pairs of ears listened with strained intentness for the impact of the deadly torpedo or for the signal of the protecting convoy.

While still a day and a night out from land, Barry awoke in the dim light of a misty morning, and proceeded to the deck for his constitutional. There he fell in with Captain Neil Fraser and Captain Hopeton pacing up and down.

"Come along, Pilot!" said Captain Neil, heartily, between whom and the chaplain during the last few days a cordial friendship had sprung up.

"We're looking for submarines. This is the place and the time for Fritz, if he is going to get us at all."