The rifles on the Ribot’s deck rang out suddenly; they fired twice; again twice; and were still. Ruth had on warm, dry clothes now; and she ran out with Milicent Wetherell to the deck. While the Ribot had been under shell fire, passengers had been kept from the decks; but now that the sole danger was from torpedoes, the decks had become the safest place.
The gun crews had seen—Ruth was told—what they thought was a periscope and had fired. There was nothing in sight now near the Ribot but the wreckage which had fallen during the fight. Far off to the right, the U-boat which had continued to run on the surface, had withdrawn beyond the range of the Ribot’s guns and was fleeing away to the south, fighting as it fled. The morning light had quite cleared the mist from the surface of the ocean and Ruth could see the low line of the German boat obscuring itself with gun-gases as its rifles fired. But its shells no longer burst aboard the passenger vessel or spurted up spray from the sea alongside. Far, far to the east and north appeared a speck—a gray, sea-colored speck, sheathing itself in the sparkling white of foam every second or so, casting the sheath of seaspray aside and rushing on gray and dun again—the bow of the destroyer coming up. She was coming up very fast—with a marvelous, leaping swiftness which sent the blood tingling through Ruth.
The destroyer seemed hurled through the water, so fast she came; it seemed impossible that engines, turning screws, could send a ship on as that vessel dashed; she seemed to advance hundreds of yards at a leap, hurling the spray high before her and screened by it for a flash; and when she thrust through the foam and cut clear away from it, she was larger and clearer and nearer. And, as she came, she fought. Her guns were going—one, two, three of them! Ruth could see the gossamer of their gases as they puffed forward and were swept backward; she could hear on the wind the resound of the quick firers. Steadily, rhythmically, relentlessly they rang, beating over the sea like great bells booming in vengeance for the Ribot’s dead.
Ruth felt lifted up, glorified as by nothing she had ever known before. She turned to the man who had come up beside her; he was Gerry Hull and, as he looked over the sea at the destroyer, she saw the blood burning red, paling, and burning bright again in his face.
“What ship is that?” Ruth cried to him. “Do you know whether it’s English or French or our own?”
“It’s the Starke!” Gerry Hull replied. “The U. S. S. Starke, she reported herself to us! She made thirty-one knots the hour on her builder’s trial two years ago; but she promised us to make the forty miles to us in an hour and ten minutes! And she’s beating that, if I know speed. God,” he appealed in reverent wonder, “look at her come!”
“The United States Ship Starke!” Ruth cried. “One of our own!”
A wild, wanton, incredible phrase ran through her; “the shame of being an American.” And, as she recalled it, she saw that Gerry Hull recollected it too; and the hot color on his cheeks deepened and his eyes, when they met hers, looked quickly away.
“They’re wonderful, those fellows,” he admitted to her aloud. He spoke, then, not to her, but to the destroyer. “But why couldn’t you come three years ago?”
A cry rose simultaneously from a lookout forward upon the Ribot and from another man in the top. A periscope had appeared; and the guns at once were going again at it. The radio, in the cabin amidships, was snapping a warning to the Starke. The Ribot’s guns and the splash of their shells into the sea gave the direction to Ruth and to Gerry Hull; and they saw, for a flash, a spar moving just above the water and hurling a froth before it, trailing a wake behind. Indeed, it was probably only the froth and the wake which they made out at all certainly; but that was discernible; and it moved, not toward them, but aslant to them and pointed toward the course of the American destroyer as it came up.