THE WRAITH OF THE NINE-POINT-TWO.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 6120, 5 March 1898, Page 2

THE WRAITH OF THE NINE-POINT-TWO.

[By Captain W. P. Drury, R.M.L.I.] (Army and Ifavy Gazette.) "Canon and firearms are cruel and damnable machines ; I believe them to have bean the direct; I suggestion of the devil."— Martin Ijljtheb. "Go to blazes !" roared the big white Nine-point-two gun on the quarterdeck as ho vomited a common shell at the target three thousand yards away — and missed. " Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tat \" chuckled the squat little Maxim on the. superstructure. A jet of steam hissed from his nostrils, he was winking redly in the darkness, like sheet lightning from a tropic thunder-cloud, and his voice suggested the brisk tapping by an invisible giant ■upt<a a.colo3sal side-drum. The Nine-point-two slowly trained his long body round till his electric night sights, which burned like a couple of glowworms on a snow bank, were in line with the pigmy's projecting and very brazen muzzle. "I wish," he said wearily, "you would take something for that irritating stammer of yours * It is impossible to get on to the target with such an infernal chatter going on behind one." " For shooting like yours," retorted the Maxim contemptuously, " a poor excuse is better than none at all. You .know perfectly well that not one of my family can talk without stammering — we're built that way." ; - In illustration of his words he addressed himself for a quarter of a minute or so to the distant target, whose whereabouts the search lights had just revealed. "And anyhow," he resumed cheerfully, " I shall still be stammering round the world when you lie rusting among the weeds of some dockyard waste land. I needn't remind you that a Maxim's life, calculated in rounds, is immeasurably longer than a Nine-point-two's." " I would rather be a Nine-point-two all the same," broke in a cringing voice from the battery. "He makes far more noise in the world while he does live than a whole squadron full of Maxims, and his range of influence is so much wider than any mere machine gun's. Oh! decidedly our good shipmate Nine-point-two, with his long reach and his big projectiles and his twenty-two tons of calibre, is the gun for my money." The owner of the cringing voice was a certain six-inch quick-firer who had been socially ostracised by the rest of the gunfolk for developing that loathsome complaint, the " red rust." In so virulent a form had he taken it, moreover, that it had necessitated his being placed by the gun doctor, or armourer, on the sick list. Now, of all the ailments to which the heated, perspiring gun folk are liable, " red rust " is the most repugnant, since it is due primarily to laziness and neglect. No allowance was made for the fact that this especial quick-firer Bweated through his jacket more than any other gun in the battery, or that out of his crew of seven valets four were in cells for leave-breaking. " Red rust " is the one unpardonable sin in spick-and-span guudom, and hence the imhappy quick-firer's consuming anxiety to curry favour with the powerful Nine-point-two. "Keep your sights on the target and mind your own business," barked the directing gun of the broadside brutally, while the Nine-point-two deliberately turned his breechblock on the sycophant and looked the other way. The diminutive Decimal-four-five Nordenfeldt peered down at them over the edge of the fighting top. " I'll give yon iellows the tip," he babbled. "The range is two thousand seven hundred yards." "How the misfire do you know," demanded the Maxim. " It's easily worked out," cackled the other. "The master mind who controls me has just sighted me for two thousand five hundred, and I've been steauily spitting a couple of hundred yards short of the target for the last hour." " Jam your mechanism and sell the fool," counselled the Maxim, who occasionally practised what he preached. For the next five minutes or so the steaming of the ship past the target kept everyone busy. When the din had subsided the Maxim hailed his small fivebarrelled chum in the top. "What did the master mind do when VOU jammed?*' he inquired. "Somethingth.it rhymes with it, returned the Decimal^four-five shortly, as he tenderlv nursed his wrenched lever. Now it was not often that the gunsi£l ™»v on which the conversation could the year on wmc . f L 6 s£ "Ire coined exclusively to the sharp-ton^ed Hotchkiss six-pounders on snarp-con "» fa naturally far the mess deck, ana « about too much ot tne a table eifcher ft^J&SEt on the* quarterdeck + sensitive little Decimal-four-S r - *K fighting top. Then, again, the five in thefigiy J^ g that f d :*X- monopolising the talk and muzzle-loader, J ofl^ se f( * an hour 8o ■ 5S I SSE» wastrue, certainly, thatj

the frequent "tube-cannon" practice was one in which nearly evory nature of Run participated. But, as the majestic hnn-dred-and-ten tonuer in the foi's turret oiicideigned to observe, "When you have v ridiculous Morris tube thrust down your gullet, and your voico is reduced thereby to the feeble crack of a magazine rifle, nt self-respecting piece of ordnance has uiiv stoi):aih left for gunly conversation." But; to-night the ship was at target practice, and there seemed to be a disposition among the gun folk to make the most of their opportunity. Some person, are endowed with the uncanny gift of "second sifrht;" to me has bceu vouchsafed the equally eerie sense of "second hearing." That is why I was enabled to discern amid the din of gun talk — which to other me \ vas a deafening uproar only — a noisy, t) ough perfectly intelligible, conversation. And so it was that I presently heard the Nine-point-two's own explanation of that curious apparitiou or wraith, which on more than one occasion the awe-stricken crew had pointed out to one another in the great gun's rolling Bmoke. A former tauut of the Maxim's had given rise to a discussion on the duration of life among modern gunkiud, and a three-pounder Hotohkiss had laid down the axiom that at least one per cent of macgane-.e was essential to a sound steel constitution. " Undoubtedly," agreed the Nine-point-two. "If only to overcome that vicious tendency to ferreous oxide, wo all need the virtue of manganese. But talking of manganese," he went; on musingly, " I nni probably the only gun in the Service with pure, unadulterated wan in his composition as well." " Unadulterated what?" A dozen metallic tongues shouted the question in deafening chorus, and with 1 such, energy that the tai-get was shot away. Then the " cease fire " sounded, and everyone was kept with raised sights and elevated muzzle, which is the equivalent among gun folk for." the tiptoe. of expectation," until a. new' target had been dropped astern and the firing resumed. V. ,' " '•' Man, I said," repeated the Nine-poihtV two quietly— quietly for a twerity-two-tori gun, that is— as soon as .the " commence " had blared out from the bugle' on' the bridge ; " man, the animal who smothers \is up in tarpiiuliu every night, and. burnishes our lives out twice a day, and rams food into us twice a quarter till we occasionally burst ; who one minute elevates us and the next depresses us; who drives us this way and that with a winch, and then pulls our tails to make us roar." This grave indictment was felt by the gunfolk generally to be a little beside the truth, though the hundred-aud-ten-tonner in the fore turret sighed hydraulically, and the search light on the after bridge even went to. the length of hissing. " I suppose I must tell you the whole story," went on the big gun resignedly. " It as not a long one, although to make it clear I must begin at the very beginning, and that was before I was born. A war scara had produced an exceptionally, high birth rate that year among the gun folk ; and, owing to the continual arrival of new infants, the pandemonium at the great gun nurseries of the kingdom never ceased night or day. In the black northern town where I first saw the light the outcry of beaten metal aud the clamour of the men folk were as great at midnight as at noon ; and it was by night that the red-hot fireclay crucibles which contained me in my molten state were carried to the teeming pit. "Now, among those who bore me thither were two men, having a crucible between them ; and it so befell that one of the pair very greatly desired the death of the other. Twice a day. for many years past I have listened, to th^e talk of the tarry breeks who burnish me, and I have learnt that at the bottom of nine-tenths of their troubles is an incomprehensible creature called woman. Of this sof fc-voiced mate of the men folk we villainous saltpetrefed hell hounds know nothing ; and yeb I have frequently marked from my position on the quarber-deck the honour paid her by her masters. Why they should thus regard her who is admittedly the source of nearly all their ills is best known to these master minds themselves. To me, I confess, it is inexplicable ; it is also beside the point, which is that the cause of trouble between the two crucible carriers was also woman. "Not being fully born at the time, I naturally could know nothing myself of the thing that was presently done on the brink of the teeeming pit. It was related to me in a hollow whisper one gusty Sabbath afternoon long afterwards by a converted smooth-bore at Woolwich Arsenal, who happened to have witnessed the affair in his unregenerate days. "It so chanced," said he, " that these two men who loved the same woman were the last of the line of carriers, and, being unwilling yoke-fellows, had lagged by the way. By the time they reached the brink of the pit their comrades were already hastening back to the melting furnaces, for the Government contract necessitated the utmost despatch in the carrying ou of tbe work. No one, therefore, had leisure to note that the laggard pair, after emptying their crucible, still lingered in the intense heat on the edge of the seething gehenna. " Now, from out that place," so said the converted smooth-bore, "there straightway cauie a devil into the black heart of one of these men and showed him where, in the fitful glow of the surrounding furnaces, a face smiled from the molten steel ; and, as the man peered with aching eyeballs into the heat, lo ! he saw that it was the fair mockingf ace of the woman. Then the devil who had conjured this vision out of the pit turned and rent him with a blind fury of jealousy, so that ho leaped of n, sudden upon his rival, who had turned to go, and tripped him backwards and headlong into the great mould of molten metal ! " For no more seconds than elapse between the flash of a gun and the bursting of its 3hell the agonised wretch palpitated stiffly in the white-hot, slowly congealing mass. In half as raany minutes again no vestige remained on the earth, save a grey, fast disappeai-ing scum on the pit's surface, of what had been but a dozen breaths before a man in the flower of his youth and drunk with the still warm caresses of the woman. A gun could scarce have been sponged and: reloaded in the interval between his coming to the pit brink and the dreadful end. Yet, so intense was the j heat of the fluid steel that when in a few moments men again gathered about it, the pool was as unremarkable as Bethesda's before the troubling of the angel. " The man being presently missed, search was made for him, wherein none was more diligent than his quandara mate. But, since there remained in existenoe not so much as a single hair of his head, the search was of necessity fruitless. No one dreamt of the horror that had befallen, save only the conscience-stricken wretch who dreamt of it nightly ever afterwards, and the silent smooth-bore who lay hard by awaiting his conversion." With the close of the Nine-point-two's grim tale a shuddering silence fell for a while upon the gun folk. But when he next spoke, not only they, bnt the superetitious tarry breeks also, felt something akin to panic ; and, indeed, ill-omened enough was his deep-voiced utterance. " Since the man's assimilation that fatal night into my quickening, unborn body," it ran, " twice already has his wraith appeared in the clouded breath of my nostrils. For, except the men folk be buried in their mother earth, or in the dim depths of the sea, true it is that they cannot rest. Now, mark me well ! The next and third appearance will also be the last, and following close upon its heels will come disaster !" And lo leven as he spake, the rays of the search light fell for an instant athwart the great gun's thick white smoke ; and there writhing and twisting amid the prismatic colours, with a horrible semblance of agony, and plain for all the ship to see floated the shadowy form of a man ! ' If you ask me where this wraith-ridden Nine-point-two, the gun folk, the tarry breeks, and the foredoomed Bhip herself are to be found, I will bring you the chart of a distant and very blue sea, and, layine my finger upon a spot marked seventy , fathoms m the Bhadow of a jjrea* < }e d ar .

sprinkled mountain, I will answer you, "Alas! ihoie." For the prophecy of the Nino-point-two iias bc«u iui/iilod these five long years, and his wraith is laid for ever !