"News?" The other laughed. "What about?"
"Well," replied Thorogood, "the perishing Hun, let's say."
The Navigator, thoughtfully biting the end of a pencil, came out of the chart-house with a note-book in his hand, in which he had been working out the noon reckoning.
"Pilot," said the departing Officer of the Forenoon Watch, "James is thirsting for news of the enemy."
"Optimist!" replied the Navigator composedly. "News, indeed! This isn't Wolff's Agency, my lad. This is a Cook's tour of the North Sea." He sniffed the damp, salt breeze. "Bracing air, change of scenery: no undue excitement—sort of rest cure, in fact. And you come along exhibiting a morbid craving for excitement."
"I know," said Thorogood meekly. "It's the effect of going to the cinematograph. All the magistrates are talking about it. They say Charlie Chaplin's got something to do with it. I suppose, though, there's no objection to my asking what the disposition of our Light Cruisers happens to be, is there? It's prompted more by a healthy desire to improve my knowledge before I take over the afternoon watch than anything else."
"They're out on the starboard quarter," replied the late Officer of the Watch. "You can't see them because of this cursed mist, but they're there."
"Strikes me this afternoon watch is going to be more of a faith cure
than a rest cure as the Pilot suggests," grumbled Thorogood.
"Battle-cruisers somewhere ahead, Cruisers invisible in the mist, Light
Cruisers——"
The report of a gun, followed almost instantly by a loud explosion, came from far away on the port bow. A Destroyer that had altered course was resuming her position in the Destroyer line on the outskirts of the Fleet. A distant column of smoke and spray was slowly dissolving into the North Sea haze.
At the report of the gun the three men raised their glasses to stare in the direction of the sound. "Only one of the Huns' floating mines," said the Navigator. "She exploded it with her 8-pounder. Pretty shot."