"She may steady for a moment," said the Lieutenant, without conviction. "Choose your time." The gunlayer chose it.
"Bang! A puff of smoke dissolved about the muzzle and the shell sent up a column of foam a yard beyond the preposterous target.
"Try again," said the Lieutenant, and unslung the rifle. "Fire on the downward roll."
The gunlayer fired on the downward and then on the upward roll, and each time the shell went sobbing away into the Channel haze, and the dark, smooth object still bobbed in the fast-fading light amid the waves. The Lieutenant kicked aside his seventeenth empty brass cylinder and snapped the rifle bolt angrily. "There's the smoke of the convoy," he shouted to his second in command, who was firing from aft and swearing in a monotonous undertone that sounded like a litany. "It's right in their track." For the ensuing half-hour they kept up the fruitless fusillade until dusk blotted out the target.
The R.N.V.R. Lieutenant rang down for half-speed. "Secure the gun," he said, curtly, and to the Coxswain: "Close the blighter; we've got to make a rope's end fast and tow it inshore out of the fairway." The Coxswain gave his Commanding Officer a searching, incredulous glance, as if he doubted his sanity, and spun the wheel round, but the Lieutenant was lurching aft on his way to the cabin hatch. He paused en route and thrust a head and shoulders into the engine-room. "Bring a can of lubricating oil aft an' a handful of waste," he shouted to the unseen occupant, and dived into his cabin.
Under direction of the First Lieutenant, a grass line was uncoiled and one end made fast to a cleat; there was no time to be lost, for the dusk was falling fast and the convoy with its attendant escorts was a bare five miles away. The motor-launch circled round the floating mine, visible only by reason of the intermittent whiteness of the broken water about it. The Sub-Lieutenant stared at it half-fascinated, the coils of the line in his hands. For a moment he felt an angry resentment against the minesweepers; this, assuredly, was their business. Then he remembered that they had garnered their grim harvest and returned to port. The motor-launch was only a gleaner.
"Now then!" He turned to see his Captain at his elbow, stark naked as the moment he was born, glistening with oil like a wrestler of old. "Give us the rope's end. Drop down to leeward when I shout—an' stand by with a hot grog."
The speaker knotted the rope loosely over one muscular shoulder and measured the distance to the mine with a dispassionate eye. "If I bungle it and foul one of the horns," he said, "it'll blow the boat to smithereens. You'd better stand by with life-belts for yourselves."
"What about you?" asked the Sub. His Captain gave a little grim laugh. "If that egg breaks, there won't be much of me to put a belt round," and without further ado he slid over the stern into the water.
The crew of the launch watched the receding head and shoulders as their Commanding Officer was carried to leeward on the crest of a wave, and the Sub-Lieutenant, paying out loose coils of rope into the dark water, murmured: "That's a man for you! They had a glimpse of white gleaming body, as the swimmer circled cautiously round the floating mine and the waves lifted or dropped him into their hollows. Then for a moment he vanished and the watching group aft held their breath.