The leader's bows leaped at a charging sea, rose shuddering, and fell away from the wind a couple of points; the drone of the turbines below took on a different, higher note. The Commander turned and glanced along the upper deck with a little grim smile above the turns of his worsted muffler. The Destroyer was stripped for the fight, and at the mid-ship and after guns the crews were blowing on their hands and jesting amongst themselves. The Gunner sat astride the torpedo tube glancing along the sights as the twin tubes trained slowly round like ponderous accusing fingers.
"Your brother ain't going to be long unavenged," said the Commander to his First Lieutenant, as the latter climbed into the fire-control position. "We've caught this party cold!"
The First Lieutenant nodded, unsmiling, as he turned away.
"We'll sink the lot," he said. "But that's too good a death for a Hun. The sea's too clean to drown 'em in. I'd——" He checked the sentence and busied himself about his fire-control instruments.
Then out of the north-west came a stutter of light. It winked suspiciously, and the Commander laughed, with his hand on the fire-gong key.
"There's my answer, Fritz," he said, and before the words were out of his mouth the foremost gun opened fire. "You're dev'lish good at raiding merchant convoys—let's see how you take a hiding." The acrid cordite smoke, as his guns gave reply to the German challenge, caught him in the throat, and his words ended in a cough.
The German Destroyers turned for home, held their course for eight bitter minutes, steaming hell-for-leather and husbanding their ammunition. Their instructions were peculiar, inasmuch as they were ordered to return at all costs to their base. In destroyer warfare the nation that holds command of the seas can afford to omit this bitter clause from its light-craft's sailing orders; but an Admiralty that knows it can send nothing to the succour of its disabled adventurers perforce plays for safety.
The German flotilla leader, bending over his chart and stop-watch, deluged with spray from falling projectiles, made a rapid mental calculation and realised that this was no tip-and-run business. He had played that game twice and brought it off, and played it once too often. In golfing parlance, of which he was entirely ignorant, he was stymied.
He laid a smoke-screen, and turned under cover of it, avoided a long-distance torpedo by six feet, and applied himself to the voice-pipe connecting him with the engine-room. What he said to the blond perspiring engineer at the other end does not concern this story, because a "browning" salvo at four miles' range struck his quivering fugitive command amidships, and beat her into a flaming, smoking welter of flying fragments and spouting foam.
His opponent saw things appearing above the smear of that hasty smoke-screen, things that leaped into view against the grey sky and descended again into invisibility. He lowered his glasses, glanced grinning at his First Lieutenant, and gave another order to the Quartermaster at the wheel.