“Shall we?” she asked.
“What?”
“Climb the rocks.”
“Yes! Yes. Yes, let’s.”
They started along the path, brushing shoulders where it narrowed. Every time they touched, he felt an electric shock, and he was thoroughly smitten by the time she asked, “Do you still work for the captain?”
“Oh, yes.”
“I seem to recall that you told me something about cannons.”
r /> “They call them guns in the Navy. Not cannons.”
“Really? I didn’t know there was a difference. You said ‘they.’ Aren’t you in the Navy?”
“No, I work in a civilian position. But I report to Captain Falconer.”
“He seemed like a very nice man.”
Lakewood smiled. “ ‘Nice’ is not the first word that comes to mind for Captain Falconer.” Driven, demanding, and daunting came closer to the mark.
“Someone told me he was inspiring.”
“That, he is.”
She said, “I’m trying to remember who said that. He was very handsome, and older than you, I think.”
Lakewood felt a hot stab of jealousy. Katherine Dee was talking about Ron Wheeler, the star of the Naval Torpedo Station at Newport who all the girls fell over. “Most of them are older than me,” he answered, hoping to get off the subject of the handsome Wheeler.
Katherine put him at ease with a heartwarming smile. “Well, whoever he was, I remember that he called you the ‘boy genius.’ ”
Lakewood laughed.
“Why do you laugh? Captain Falconer said it, too, and he was a hero in the Spanish-American War. Are you a Boy Genius?”
“No! I just started young, is all. It’s such a new field. I got in at the beginning.”
“How could guns be new? Guns have been around forever.” Lakewood stopped walking and turned to face her. “That is very interesting. But, no, guns have not been around forever. Not like they are now. Rifled guns can fire tremendous ranges no one ever imagined before. Why, just the other day I was aboard a battleship off Sandy Hook and-”
“You were on a battleship?”
“Oh, sure. I go out on them all the time.”
“Really?”
“On the Atlantic Firing Range. Just last week the gunnery officer said to me, ‘The new dreadnoughts could hit Yonkers from here.’ ”
Katherine’s pretty eyes grew enormous. “Yonkers? I don’t know about that. I mean the last time I sailed into New York on the Lusitania it was a clear day, but I couldn’t see Yonkers from the ocean.”
The Lusitania? thought Lakewood. Not only is she pretty but she’s rich.
“Well, it’s hard to see Yonkers, but at sea you can spot a ship that far. The trick is, hitting it.” They resumed walking, shoulders bumping on the narrow path, as he told her how the invention of smokeless powder allowed the spotters to see farther because the ship was less shrouded in gun smoke.
“The spotters range with the guns. They judge by the splashes of shot whether they’ve fallen short or overshot. You’ve probably read in the newspaper that’s the reason for all big-guns ships-all the guns the same caliber-so firing one in fact aims all.” She seemed much more interested than he would expect of a pretty girl and listened wide-eyed, pausing repeatedly to stop walking and gaze at him as if mesmerized.
Lakewood kept talking.