"If you'll believe me, sir," he said, clambering up on to the bridge and touching his cap for all the world as though Bill were a full-blooded skipper, "if you'll believe me, young feller, there's Jim, your chum, and his mates, working those Germans at the boilers as if they were slaves. Not a-drivin' of 'em—oh, no! Only encouragin' of 'em like. You see, now that the tables are turned, and there's Jim and Charlie Pipkin and Joe Bent and two others—boys as I know of well—a-standing over the Germans with rifles, instead of the Germans a-standin' over them as they was a little while ago, the Hun's sort of lost all his spirit. If it had been the other way about, from what I seed of 'em—those chaps what talks about 'Kultur' and raves about the Kaiser—they'd have pushed the muzzle of a rifle under your ear, and they'd have made you move slippy. But, bless you, it only wants a look from that there chap Jim; and as for Charlie, when he just cocks his eye across one o' them Huns, the chap shrivels—fairly shrivels."
Jack burst into a roar of laughter which was hardly suppressed even by the scream and flick of a shell which crossed the trawler a little in front of them. He held his sides and bent back till his stout body formed an arc, and then set to work mopping his eyes, which were streaming. "It's a fair turn about, this," he said.
Larry cocked an eye at him in return, just as Charlie down below was described as doing to the Germans in the engine-room.
"It was. Yep," he lisped; "only—eh? Look over yonder!"
Jack looked, Bill looked, and in spite of himself blanched just a trifle. As for Jack, the colour surged to his bearded face and he gripped the rail.
"Oh! Ah! I——" he spluttered.
There was good reason, too, for his exclamations, for the mist which had been hanging over the sea when this brilliant little action opened, and which, as it were, had clouded the scene for a while and indeed had assisted Bill and his friends not a little, was now whisked aside by a fresh breeze which had got up in the meanwhile and was now rippling the surface of a sea of dull green colour on which the rays of the sun were reflected in every direction. Looking towards the German coast there was a haze, though no mist. The bright sun rays and the glittering reflection from thousands of ripples seemed to have cast up there an opaque haze, out of which the pursuing trawler emerged every now and again, a curtain which was rent asunder every odd minute by her gun, when a splash of flame, followed by a cloud of smoke, filled in the gap and then subsided and was replaced by the opacity.
Towards the ocean, however, one could see a long distance, and there, but a dot yet, though visible to all eyes, was a low-lying, queer-shaped vessel—one of the greyhounds of the ocean, about whose bows foamed a white crest of water and from whose deck streamed black billowy clouds of smoke which formed, as it were, a huge screen behind her, against which her smoke-stacks and the crest of white stood out silhouetted sharply. It was a torpedo-boat destroyer.
"Huh!" grunted Larry.
"Hum!" coughed Bill, shielding his eyes.