“He’ll never catch us,” I said to Krüger, who had come up to the conning tower to ask if we were going fast enough, or if he should try to get more speed out of our engines. “Just keep her turning at the same rate, Herr Engineer. That’s sufficient. It looks now as if we were gaining,” I told him.
Our pursuer seemed to realize he could not overtake us and tried to anger us in other ways. Suddenly a gun flashed and a cloud of brown smoke surrounded the small steamer for a second. Shortly after that a small shell splashed into the water about a thousand meters from us and a water spout not higher than a small tree arose from the sea.
We laughed aloud.
“Such a rotten marksman! He wants to irritate us with a shotgun. That’s ridiculous.”
“That’s an insolence without an equal,” argued Lieutenant Petersen angrily, who felt that he had been insulted in his capacity of the artillery officer aboard. “We should not submit to this outrage. May I answer him, Herr Captain?” he asked me with eyes flashing.
“Yes, you may try as far as I am concerned, Petersen, but only three shots. You can’t hit him at this distance, anyway, and our shells are valuable.”
Grinning with joy, Petersen hurried to the guns, leveled, aimed and fired, himself, while the water washed around him up to his waist.
“Too short to the right!” I shouted to him, after I observed the high water spout through my double marine glasses.
The next shot fell close to the steamer. It became too hot for our pursuer. He turned quickly and went back in the same direction from which he had come. But the hunting fever had gotten into our blood. We also turned and pursued the fleeing pursuer. Show us what you can do now, engines!
Shot after shot flashed, roaring from our cannon. The distance was almost too great for our range. We had to set the gun at the highest possible angle in order to have any chance of hitting him. The first shots all fell short, or to the side, but at the eighth we made a hit. A roaring hurrah greeted the dark-brown explosion which marked the arrival of the shell on the trawler.