Chapter Six.
A Narrow Escape.
Torpedo boats! Two insignificant smudges of black, lifting and bowing like a couple of dingy sea-birds in a waste of waters, wretched little things that could be stowed away on the promenade deck of a mail steamer, and yet the appearance of one of them among a fleet of heavy ironclads would create as much consternation as a gadfly among a mob of cattle.
On came these mosquitoes of the navy, with nothing to distinguish one from the other but a white number on the black funnel, and the honest merchant seamen on the bridge of the Swift almost shuddered at the sight, recognising in them the incarnation of stealth and mischief. The torpedo-catcher, however, abated nothing of her speed. Was she not, after all, built to destroy these venomous midgets of the ocean? They were her game, and a brawny-armed seaman growled out his opinion of the relative fighting values of the crafts.
“Sink the little brutes,” he said, shooting a squirt of tobacco juice; “run over ’em, blow ’em up, send them to—”
His deep voice swelled from a murmur to a shout, and a melancholy seaman at the wheel nodded his head vigorously in hearty approval.
The first officer winked at Frank and pushed his big oilskin cap over his head.
“What an almighty smash there would be if the Captain gave the word. We’d sink the torpedo boats and the cruiser would sink us.”
Frank began tugging at his small moustache as the unreasoning fighting impulse seized hold of him. He forgot that his own countrymen were the objects of his increasing animosity. Underneath his feet he felt the quiver of the deck as the long vessel darted along, and the speed affected him with the same exaltation that boils through the blood of a cavalry-man when his horse has got into the desperate swing of the charge.