On she came; you heard the mutter of her engines. He couldn't bring himself to look at the girl. For fear of meeting her eyes with knowledge in them at last Newcomb found himself turning dizzily away from all those stricken faces. In the teeth of death he remembered staring round the black half-circle of the heavens.
The very cloud-wrack was seized by fear ... it ran scudding away from the scene. It left naked the shivering stars. Two little sounds alone in all that silence: a sobbing of water against the sides of the boat; and that other, the low mutter of the oncoming doom.
In that final rush, the blackness in which the submarine moved, curled up and fell away from her bow like black earth on either side of a ploughshare—now like earth snow powdered.
That was the last thing Newcomb remembered—of the curling white lip of the bow wave as the engine of death came rushing at the lifeboat. That and voices in the extremity of horror that cried: "Jump! Jump!"
Those who didn't were not seen again.
CHAPTER XXVII
So long it takes to tell these things. So brief a time to happen. In eighteen seconds the submarine had gone a thousand yards, and men struggling in her wake had crowded a lifetime into a span.
Horrible as were the cries of the drowning, Newcomb's crowning fear was that they would cease. He clung to his broken grating, and strained his eyes in the changing light. Off there to left of him—not again the submarine! She had checked her course and swung round. As quickly as she had shot away after her murderous work was done, here, describing a half-circle, she was rushing back.
Almost at the instant of recognition of the changed course there, only a few yards off, a head, two heads, showed above the water. Newcomb remembered crying out a warning, "She's coming back!" as the swift seconds brought the swifter U-boat and the sound of renewed firing nearer. Newcomb could see the figure of the commander jumping about grotesquely on the narrow platform of the conning-tower, and heard him calling down to the armed sailors on the deck. And all the while the commander himself kept firing, like a madman, down on the water at every head he saw. Hit or miss and on to the next. As the submarine raced by, he shot even the bits of wreckage; he shot the shadows. "Ha! da ist eins. Und da—siehst du? Noch eins—!"