"That's right, sir," said the Gunner, with melancholy calm.
"And the explosion'll rip this bulkhead out of her, and down the fore part will go. Half a ship's better'n none, Mr. Hasthorpe."
Mr. Hasthorpe agreed, but inclined to the view that he'd rather have kept the other half, given a choice in the matter.
"There was a nice li'l drum o' paint aft there we had give us at Taranto, sir, an' some ostridge feathers under my bunk, what I'd promised my old woman."
A long, sleek swell passed beneath them on its unhurried path from Africa to the Adriatic. The dark wreckage beneath the surface stirred like weed in a current, and the deck plating under their feet trembled ominously as the hulk rolled.
"A few more of those," said the youthful Captain, "and down goes the after part. I shall lose my ship." The speaker had rather less than half a ship to lose, but he scrambled down on to the buckled plating of the upper deck, hastily unbuttoning his drill tunic.
"That depth-charge must be set to 'safe,' then it can't explode, however far it sinks."
"It's a couple of fathoms below the surface. I ain't no Annette Kellerman meself," said the Gunner.
His Captain waved the dinghy alongside. "That's nothing. I'll have a shot for it—if I can only find the beastly thing in all that tangle."
"An' if another swell passes when you're in the water, sir, likely as not the stern'll drop off an'——" The sentence remained unfinished, for his Captain had slipped over the side into the waiting dinghy and was busily divesting himself of his clothes.