Another jar, the roar of a detonation, a burst of flame from the forecastle, and a whining and whirring of splinters! Another, close beside the foremost funnel, and a sound of splintering and crashing as some object fell and went overboard! Something red-hot and sharp grazed Wooten's cheek. He put up his hand to brush it aside, and his fingers came down sticky and wet.
A hideous metallic explosion in the air and a fiendish rattling of bullets upon steel, as a shrapnel burst and sent its contents flying on board. Willis, the coxswain, hit through the left shoulder, released his hold on the wheel and fell to his knees; but in an instant he was up again, steering the ship with his uninjured right hand.
Wooten suddenly felt a burning sensation in his left arm as if a red-hot knitting-needle had been passed through the flesh. The shock of it sent him staggering backwards, and he gritted his teeth with the pain. His left arm seemed numbed and useless, and a little trickle of blood ran down inside his coat-sleeve and pattered to the deck. The air was full of the sickening stench of explosives.
They were very close now. The enemy seemed to be nearly on top of them, and their huge blurred shapes, almost invisible in the glare of the searchlights and the vivid gun-flashes, seemed literally to obscure the horizon. But the destroyers still drove on. They had not been stopped.
The lights of the nearer ship suddenly went out, and a column of water and smoke shot into the air at her side. It hung there for a moment, glistening in the ruby and orange flashes of the guns, and then there came the thundering reverberation of a heavy underwater explosion quite close at hand. It seemed to compress the air, and caused the destroyers to stagger in their stride. A torpedo from the leading destroyer had gone home.
Wooten instinctively looked aft, and as he did so a little puff of dull flame flickered out amidships. It was followed by a loud, snorting hiss and a heavy splash as a torpedo left its tube. Another came almost instantaneously with the first.
The enemy's fire, though still furious, became very wild; and two minutes later, with the sound of a couple more thudding explosions ringing in their ears, the destroyers were out of danger. The roaring of the guns gradually died away, and then ceased altogether.
'Good God!' muttered Wooten, trembling in his excitement.
Daylight found the Mariner and her leader some distance across the North Sea, steaming slowly homewards. They were battered and leaking, while the Mariner was badly down by the stern and listed slightly to starboard. Her funnels were riddled through and through; there were gaping holes in her side and her deck where shell had penetrated, and many smaller punctures where splinters had struck and gone through. A large projectile, bursting on the forecastle, had torn the deck and the ship's side, and had flung the foremost gun off its mounting, killing or wounding every member of the gun's crew except one. The wardroom and one mess-deck were open to the sea; boats were splintered and useless; and the topmast, taking with it the aerial of the wireless telegraphy, had been shorn off and had gone overboard. The mizzen-mast also had disappeared, and a brand-new white ensign now fluttered from an improvised flagstaff in the stern. It was the only respectable-looking thing in the ship.