"We saw one thing right off," said Porky. "The Captain was the whole push, just as if he was king. He sat there with a big revolver beside him on the table, and I can tell you he didn't trust his own shadow. The way Beany, and I doped it out, he was running in hard luck. He had been sent out to sink a certain number of ships before he could report, and all he had torpedoed was just the Firefly. Grub was getting low, two of his men were dead, and another one was curled up on the locker sicker than a pup. Once in awhile the Captain would look at him, and say to us in English, 'About twenty-four hours more, eh? Then he goes through the tube.'"
"He just didn't have any heart at all," shuddered Beany. "Of course that was why they didn't kill us; they couldn't run the boat and tend to the torpedoes and the periscope and the engines all at once in a case of a fight, with three men short. And then they had to fight."
"Tell us about that," said Colonel Bright.
"I don't know when it was," said Porky. "Night and day was all alike down there, but there was one big yellow-haired fellow that ran the engine. He had been ordered to show me about it; and, say, I will say I can run a submarine now. It was what you call intensive training. When I was slow, he gave me a clip on the head. He could just do anything with machinery. But they certainly have got that submarine engine perfected so it will do everything but talk. Any child could run it as soon as he learned the different levers. I don't believe we have anything like it; but we can have now because there's the pattern outside there. You didn't shell it, did you?"
"Certainly not," said Captain Greene. "It is in charge of a picked crew of our men right outside."
"Well, don't let 'em take her down until I get a chance to show them how she works. There is just one lever that controls the diving gear, and that is hidden, so you can't find it if you don't know about it. I came near turning the old thing over. I got beaten up that trip."
"Get to the fight," said Beany.
"The engineer was nutty. He talked all the time and muttered to himself, and it got on the Captain's nerves or what he had left of them. He stared at the engineer half the time; and that made Louie peevish, I suppose. He took it out on me more or less—kept me sweating over that engine every minute he was awake. He wanted a drink too. It was sort of raw the way that Captain would sit there and guzzle and never give the others a bit of it. Louie would watch and watch and swallow hard; and the Captain would watch him back again and grin. They were just like a lot of savage dogs."
"Well, they didn't have enough to eat, to begin with," said Beany, "and then the air was so bad, and they were all cooped up in that little space, and you couldn't hear any outside noises at all. You don't know how funny that is.
"They took our watches, so we couldn't tell the time, and, honest, I thought we must have been there a month. And they all knew that something pretty fierce would happen to them it they went back home without sinking the ships that had been required of them. They have it all down to a system.