A quarter of an hour later the pilot extended a gauntletted hand and pointed to the rim of the horizon. A faint smudge of smoke darkened into a trailing cloud, and presently they saw ahead of it the forepart of a ship, driving through the water at a speed which clove a white, irregular furrow across the surface of the sea. She was swerving from side to side like a hunted buck, and as the dirigible dipped her nose and the hum of the wind redoubled to a roar in the ears of the crew, they saw away to the west a tiny cigar-shaped object. At intervals a spurt of flame shot from it, and a little pale mushroom-shaped cloud appeared above the steamer as the shrapnel burst.
The Blimp swooped at eighty miles an hour upon that cigar-shaped object. The observer braced his feet and grasped the bomb release lever, his jaws still moving about the piece of chewing-gum. The sea, flecked with little waves, rushed up to greet them. They had a glimpse of the submarine’s crew tumbling pell-mell for the conning-tower hatchway, of the wicked gun abandoned forward still trained on the fleeing merchantman. The next instant the quarry had shot beneath them. A sharp concussion of the air beat upon the fragile car and body of the airship as her nose was flung up and round. The dirigible’s bomb had burst right forward on the pointed bows, and the submarine was diving in a confused circle of broken water and spray.
The Blimp turned to drop another bomb ahead of the rapidly vanishing wake, and then marked the spot with a calcium flare, while the wireless operator jiggled a far-flung “Tally ho!” on the sending-key of his apparatus.
The tramp disappeared below the horizon, and they caught disjointed scraps of her breathless tale while they circled in wide spirals above the watery arena.
Three motor launches were the first upon the scene, each with a slim gun in the bows, and carrying, like hornets, a sting in their tails. They were old hands at the game, and they spread out on the hunt with business-like deliberation under the directions of the Blimp’s Morse lamp. The captain of the inshore boat (he had been a stockbroker in an existence several æons gone by) traced a tar-stained finger across the chart, and glanced again at the compass. “Nets—nets—nets,” he mumbled. “The swine probably knows about those to the northwest ... He daren’t go blind much longer. Ha!”
“Feather three points on your port bow,” winked the Blimp. Over went the motor launch’s helm, and the seaward boat suddenly darted ahead in a white cloud of spray. Bang! a puff of smoke drifted away from the wet muzzle of her gun; half a mile ahead a ricochet flung up a column of foam as the shell went sobbing and whimpering into the blue distance.
“Periscope dipped,” waved a pair of hand-flags from the boat that had fired. And a moment later, “Keep out of my wake! Am going to release a charge.”
For an hour that relentless blindfold hunt went forward, punctuated by exploding bombs and depth charges, and the crack of the launches’ guns as the periscope of the submarine rose for an instant’s glimpse of his assailants and vanished again. Twice the enemy essayed a torpedo counter-attack, and each time the trail passed wide. Then, crippled and desperate, he doubled on his tracks, and for a while succeeded in shaking off the pursuit. Nets, as he knew, lay ahead, and nets were death; safety lay to the southward could he but keep submerged; but the water, spurting through the buckled plating and rivets started by the bursting depth charges, had mingled with the acid in the batteries and generated poison gas, which drove him to the surface. Here he turned, a couple of miles astern of his pursuers, and manned both guns, a hunted vermin at bay. As his foremost gun opened fire, a heavy shell burst a few yards abeam of the submarine, and the captain of the nearest motor launch raised his glasses. It was not a shell fired from a motor launch.
“The destroyers,” he said. “Now why couldn’t they have kept away till we’d made a job of it?” On the horizon the masts and funnels of a flotilla of destroyers appeared in line abreast, approaching at full speed, firing as they came. The next instant a shell from the submarine burst on the tiny forecastle of the launch, shattering the gun, gun’s crew, and wheelhouse. The coxswain dropped over the wrecked wheel and slowly slid to the deck like a marionette suddenly deprived of animation. The lieutenant R.N.V.R. who had once been a stockbroker stood upright for an instant with his hands to his throat as if trying to stem the red torrent spurting through his fingers, and then pitched brokenly beside the coxswain.
The captain of the submarine counted the approaching destroyers, opened the seacock to speed the flooding of his doomed craft, gave a swift glance overhead at the Blimp swooping towards them for the coup-de-grâce, and ordered Cease Fire. Then he waved his hands in token of surrender.