Coxe, George Harmon "Smoke on the Horizon."
Joe Bronson, an American who believes that everybody’s got an “angle,” has landed himself an “essential job” as wireless operator aboard a Panamanian (i.e., neutral) vessel which will keep him out of the War. The story opens as his ship, the freighter PENNDARA, is traveling out of convoy trans-Atlantic from the Caribbean bound for England In addition to her cargo the ship carries 12 passengers: several missionaries, a technician or two “bound for Suez” and a group of French nationals en route to signing up with General de Gaulle’s Free French forces in England. French-born U.S. citizen Henri Martin, now a successful Hollywood film producer, is amongst the latter group. He and Bronson discuss patriotism several times during the voyage, with Bronson never quite believing Martin’s willingness to give up a cushy (and lucrative) job in the United States to fight against Hitler. Several days out into the Atlantic the PENNDARA is stopped by a German sea raider and the freighter’s officers, crew and passengers are ordered to abandon ship. They are additionally ordered to maintain radio silence and Bronson is all too willing to obey if it m. But Martin and the Free French have other ideas. Even though it may cost them their lives, they attempt to send a wireless message to an English naval cruiser that they’d observed in the vicinity recently. Martin loses his life in the attempt, and Bronson, having been impressed with the Frenchman’s courage, risks his own life to get the message sent. The PENNDARA is immediately sunk and among her survivors (the Germans know that the cruiser will have picked up the wireless message and waste no time leaving the scene) is Bronson, who had just acted altruistically for perhaps the first time in his life. Cox ends his story with a look at this “new” Joe Bronson, adrift in a life raft and waiting rescue in the mid-Atlantic:
"Only then, as he sat on the raft, did he begin to think about what he had done, and now there came upon him a curious tingling sensation that he had never felt before, a strange inner warmth that had nothing to do with the sun or wet garments."