The Coxswain nodded to the boy messenger and reached for his cap.
"All right, my lad—'ook me down that lammy. What's the panic, d'ye know?"
"No, I dunno. Sez 'e, 'Tell 'im to come up. I want 'im at the wheel,' 'e sez. An' I come along an'——"
"All right—'ook it, and don't stand there blowin' down my neck."
The Coxswain jerked his "lammy" coat on, and clumped heavily out of the mess, chewing a section of ship's biscuit (carefully and cunningly—for the shortage of teeth among torpedo coxswains amounts almost to a badge of office) as he went.
"What's up, Jim—steam tattics?" asked the Torpedo Gunner's Mate—another Lower Deck Olympian—looking up from a three-day-old 'Telegraph.'
The Coxswain grunted in response. It is not the custom of the Service to answer silly questions. The reason the question was asked at all may be put down to the fact of the 'Telegraph' being not only old but empty of interest.
As he reached the upper deck he buttoned his coat and felt in his pockets for his mittens. It was very cold—a cold accentuated by the wind of the Destroyer's passage. There was no sea, but it was pitch-dark, with a glint of phosphorus from water broken by the wakes of six "war-built" T.B.D.'s running in line ahead at an easy twenty-four knots. The Coxswain could never, in all probability, have explained his reasoning, though the fact that the speed had been increased was noticeable; but he knew, as he swung up the ladders to the unseen fore-bridge, that he had not been sent for a mere alteration of course. His brain must have received some telepathic wave from the ship's hull which told him that the enemy had had something to do with the break in his watch below.
His sea-boots ceased their noisy clumping as he reached the bridge, and he was standing by the helmsman with a hand on the wheel before the man had noticed his arrival. With an interrogative grunt he stepped to the steering pedestal as the man moved aside, and he stood peering at the dimly lit compass card, and moving the wheel a spoke or two each way as he "felt" her.
"North Seventy East—carryin' a little starboard," said the dark figure beside him, and he accepted the "Turn-over" with another characteristic growl—