"If he grabs for the ring bolt and catches hold of a horn——" said the Coxswain, and left the sentence unfinished. The seconds passed. Then out of the darkness came a thin hail. The Coxswain jumped to the wheel; the second in command flung the slack line over the stern, and the launch dropped down to leeward.
The numb, exhausted figure hauled over the side a minute later, to be wrapped in blankets and massaged back to speech, resumed his clothes and clumped forward to the wheel-house as the launch turned inshore with the mine in tow.
He stared into the darkness astern as the line tautened. "God knows if there are any more farther up the coast... But our beat's clear. Full speed, Coxswain!"
2
THE MILLIONTH CHANCE
Three hundred feet above mother earth sat an able seaman of the Royal Navy, reflecting on the strangeness of his profession. For the first eighteen months of the War he had been a loading number of one of a Battleship's six-inch guns; as such he spent most of his waking hours punching a dummy projectile into the breech of a "loader," or, when not at meals or asleep, following critically the fortunes of cinema artistes as portrayed on the Grand Fleet films. There came a day after that when the vagaries of fortune transplanted him to a Dover Monitor, where he grew accustomed to the roar of fifteen-inch shells from the Belgian coast batteries passing overhead, or pitching short of his floating home in a thunderous upheaval of white water. Finally he returned to his depot suffering from gun-deafness, to find himself in due course one of a working party attached to a high-power Naval Wireless Station, and still a little hard of hearing.
No one had consulted him as to his personal inclinations in the matter of these changes; indeed, he never asked himself if it was merely blind chance that ruled his comings and goings, or Fate, far-seeing, omniscient, working to an appointed end. Destiny, as he knew it, always appeared in the guise of a ship's corporal with a Muster List and a stump of pencil. He paid his debts, tucked his "papers" into the lining of his cap, shouldered his bag and hammock, and passed without concern to such future as awaited him.
Whatever the effect of heavy gunfire on his hearing, his nervous system remained unimpaired; so much so that, as he sat swaying in a "boatswain's stool," three-quarters of the way up one of the four hundred and thirty feet wireless masts, slapping creosote on to the wooden lattice work with a brush, he hummed a little tune to himself:
"Laugh while you may,
There's still to-day—
You may be dead ter-morrer!"
He crooned contentedly, and desisted from his labours to survey, like Moses of old, the landscape o'er.