West Wind Drift by McCutcheon, George Barr, 1866-1928

For months ships of all nations searched for the missing steamer. Not so much as the smallest piece of wreckage rewarded the ceaseless quest. The great vessel, with all its precious cargo, had slipped into its niche among the profoundest mysteries of the sea. Came the day, therefore, when the Secretary of the Navy wrote down against her name the ugly sentence: "Lost with all on board."

Maritime courts issued their decrees; legatees parcelled estates, great and small; insurance companies paid in hard cash for the lives that were lost, and went blandly about their business; more than one widow reconsidered her thoughts of self-denial; and ships again sailed the course of Amerigo Vespucci without a thought of the Doraine.

For months the newspapers in many lands speculated on the fate of the missing liner. That a great ship could disappear from the face of the waters in these supreme days of navigation without leaving so much as a trace behind was inconceivable. At first there were tales of the dastardly U-boats; then came the sinister reports of treachery on board resulting in the ship being taken over by German plotters, with the prediction that she would emerge from oblivion as a well-armed "raider" cruising in the North Atlantic; then the generally accepted theory that she had been swiftlv, suddenly rent asunder by a mighty explosion in her hold. All opinions, all theories, all conjectures, however, revolved about a single fear;--that she was the victim of a German plot. But in the course of events there came a day when the German Navy, ever boastful of its ignoble deeds, issued the positive and no doubt sincere declaration that it had no record of the sinking of the Doraine. The fate of the ship was as much of a mystery to the German admiralty as it was to the rest of the puzzled world.

And so it was that the Doraine, laden with nearly a thousand souls, sailed out into the broad Atlantic and was never heard from again.

CHAPTER I

The Captain of the liner was an old man. He had sailed the seas for two-score years, at least half of them as master. At the outbreak of the Great War he was given command of the Doraine, relieving a younger man for more drastic duty in the North Sea. He was an Englishman, and his name, Weatherby Trigger, may be quite readily located on the list of retired naval officers in the British Admiralty offices if one cares to go to the trouble to look it up.