She expected to lurk along steamship lanes, like a wolf crouched in the underbrush beside a forest path; and like that wolf, too, she was relentless. Yet, her treatment of captured ships thus far had been more humane than most, as shown by her use of the Que Vida’s crew and passengers.
“Still, she’s a regular pirate,” Whistler Morgan said in speaking of this. “See how her men robbed those poor sailors, and even the women.”
“Ah, you said something then, boy!” Al Torrance agreed.
“I wonder,” George Belding said reflectively, “if the war should end suddenly, and some of these U-boats are out in the various seas, if their commanders won’t become veritable pirates?”
“How’s that?” cried Frenchy Donahue. “It’s pirates they are already!”
“But to go it on their own hook,” put in Ikey. “I see what Belding means. Just think of a new race of buccaneers! Wow!”
“Begorra!” murmured the Irish lad, his eyes shining, “they might infest certain seas like the old pirates of the Spanish Main.”
“I hope you see what you’ve started, George,” growled Whistler with mock anger. “Those kids are off again.”
The friends from Seacove were not alone excited by the renewed chase of the super-submersible. That day, too, there were two messages about the German craft. She had sunk a small freight boat and a fishing sloop. It was evident that she had run somewhere for supplies, and had now come back to the island waters.
How many Canary fishermen’s sloops and turtle catchers she sank during the next few days will never be known. Mark of such vessels could not be taken until their crews rowed ashore—if they were fortunate enough to get to shore. The tales the Colodia got by wireless, however, showed that the Germans were robbing all crews, as they had the people from the Argentine ship.