At this point speed was reduced to eight knots and the “Prince” moved along more moderately.
“What is it ahead?” asked Dave Darrin, who had just turned out and come briskly up to the bridge.
“It’s a one-sided fight,” Dan answered, “but I don’t know the kind of craft. Undoubtedly one is a submarine. She can’t have been very seriously hit, either, or the firing would be ended.”
“You have a searchlight?”
“Yes, but with the strictest orders not to use it except to save ship and crew,” was Dan’s answer.
Soon after, despite the darkness, the chums were able to make out a steamship ahead, heeled well over to port. And the flashes of a gun were so close to the water as to indicate that a submarine was firing, even before its outlines could be made out.
“The cowardly hounds!” blazed Dave, indignantly. “They’ve got that ship sinking, and all they’re doing is terrorizing the poor wretches aboard by slow, systematic murder!”
“I’ll get them as soon as I have light enough for a gunner’s sight,” muttered Dan Dalzell. Calling a boatswain’s mate under the bridge, he directed him to hoist a Norwegian flag at the stern, and to bend and hoist the signal:
“We wish to save crew and passengers.”
“And that’s the truth, too, though perhaps not all of it,” snorted Dalzell, all of whose fighting blood had been aroused by the cowardly proceeding going on ahead.