"Listen, listen, other ships are coming up," Smith was shouting. "I can hear their propellers. That's the fellow we missed moving off there on our port quarter. You can hear at least two more here in the starboard microphone. We seem to have landed plumb in the nest of a German raiding party," rattled off the electrician glibly as he passed the receivers to his commander for a verification of his report.
McClure snatched the apparatus and clamped it to his ears. For a moment he listened to the mechanical whirr of churning propellers, borne into his senses through the submarine telephone.
"Great!" he exclaimed. "Some more of the Kaiser's vaunted navy trying to sneak away from their home base for a bit of trickery."
As he rang the engine room to shut off power, the American commander added, with flashing eyes:
"If we don't bring down one of these prowlers before this night is over
I'll go back home and ship as deckhand on a Jersey City ferry-boat."
Suspended fifty feet below the surface of the sea, the Dewey floated like a cork in a huge basin while her officers took further observations on the movements of the German warships above them. Now that their presence was known the American officers realized they would be accorded a stiff reception when they next went "up top.".
"I'm going to try it," announced McClure shortly. "We'll take a chance and pay our respects to one of their tubs."
The Dewey forthwith began to rise. At the direction of the navigating officer two hundred pounds of ballast were expelled. Tilting fore and aft like a rocking horse, the submersible responded gradually to the lightening process until at last the depth dial showed only a margin of several feet needed to lift the eyes of the periscopes above the waves. The little steel-encased clock in the conning tower showed ten minutes past one—-just about the right time for a night raiding party to be getting under way.
"Guess we'll lie here and wait for them to come along," whispered McClure to Cleary as the periscopes popped up out of the depths into the night gloom.
"We seem to be right in their path and may be able to get one of them as he shoots across our bow," added Cleary as he took another telephone report from the wireless room.