“There was one ‘ashcan,’” Gerry Hull murmured. “Now for another!”
For the Starke, as soon as the charge had detonated, had put her helm about and was circling back with marvelous swiftness to cross again the spot in the sea where she had dropped the great bomb.
Men were below that spot of sea, Ruth knew—German men, fifty or eighty or a hundred of them, perhaps. They were young men, mostly, not unlike—in their physical appearance, at least—German-born boys whom she had known at home in Onarga or in Chicago. Some of that crew might, conceivably, even be cousins of those boys. They had mothers and sisters in homes at Hamburg or Dresden or Munich or perhaps in that delightful toy town of Nuremberg, which she knew and had loved from pictures and stories; or some of them came, perhaps, from the Black Forest—from those quaint, lovely homely woodland cottages which Howard Pyle and Grimm had taught her to love when she was a child. They were helpless down there below the sea at this moment, perhaps, with the seams of their boat opened by that tremendous shock which had battered even the Ribot so far away; water might be coming in upon them, suffocating them, drowning them there like rats in a trap. The vision flowed before Ruth’s eyes for an instant with horror; then she saw them, not choking and fighting each other for escape which none could find, but crouching safe and smiling in their boat, stealing away swiftly and undamaged to wait chance to rise again to try another torpedo at the Starke or to surprise with gunfire, at the next dawn, another vessel like the Ribot and murder more people in their beds and fill the space below decks with the dead and the agonized dying.
“Get ’em!” Gerry Hull, close beside her, was praying. “Oh, get ’em now! Get ’em!”
No reaction to weakness had come to him; years ago, he had passed beyond that; and Ruth, at once, had recovered.
“Get ’em!” Aloud, without being conscious of it, she echoed his ejaculation; and astern of the Starke, as the few minutes before, another great geyser of seawater arose; another titanic blow, disseminating through the water, beat upon the Ribot. The Starke was turning about short, again; but when she rushed back over her wake, this time she dropped no other depth charge; she slowed a little instead, and circled while she examined carefully the surface of the sea. Then suddenly she straightened her course away to the south; she buried her bow in a wave; with the rush of her propellers, foam churned at her stern; she was at full speed after the U-boat which she first had engaged and which, during this interlude, had run quite out of sight to the south or had sunk or submerged. While she pursued, her radio was reporting to the Ribot; and the Ribot’s rasped in return.
Oil in convincing quantities had come to the surface where the Starke had dropped its charge. Of course, the Germans often pumped oil out of their U-boats, when no damage had been done, for the purpose of deceiving the hunters and making them think they had destroyed a U-boat when they had not. But the officers of the Starke had been satisfied with their findings; they would follow up the other U-boat and then return. They understood that only two U-boats had appeared to the Ribot; if another came or if either of the two reappeared, the Starke would return instantly.
No third enemy came; and neither of the others reappeared. In fact, the Starke failed to find any further trace of the U-boat which, for a time, had fought upon the surface and then run away. Either the gunfire of the Ribot or of the Starke had so damaged it that it suddenly sank, leaving no survivors; or—as the men aboard the Ribot seemed to think was more likely—the crew succeeded in repairing the damage done so that it was able to submerge and escape. In this case, it might venture another attack, by torpedo, upon the drifting Ribot; so the Starke, after abandoning the search, put herself beside the Ribot. An American officer came aboard, bringing with him a surgeon to aid in care of the Ribot’s wounded; he brought also mechanics to assist the engine crew of the Ribot in repairs and he supplied, from his own crew, men to take the places of the Ribot’s crew who had been killed.
Ruth watched the young lieutenant—he was few years older than Gerry Hull or herself—as he went about his business with the officers of the Ribot. If any shame for recreancy of his country had ever stirred him, it had left no mark; he was confident and competent—not proud but quite sure of himself and of his service. She looked for Gerry Hull to see whether he observed this one of their people; she looked to see whether Captain Forraker and “1582” also saw him. And she found that “1582” was the first to make opportunity to meet the American officer and compliment him.
“You chaps might have been blowing up U-boats for a thousand years!”