Captain McGill gave a nod to show that his orders had been issued.
As Lieutenant Parry, the boys and old Tom vanished, he gave a sharp order.
“Astern, Mr. Stark.”
The submarine began to glide backward once more.
“Stop her. Now, Mr. Lockyer, keep the searchlight on her while I get the range.”
With a range-finding instrument the range was soon gauged.
“Now, Mr. Stark, you will drop to a depth of ten feet, if you please. I think that will be about her draught?” asked Captain McGill, turning to the other officers. They nodded. In backing from the derelict, a careful line had been kept, so that as she dropped, her nose was trained directly amidships on the peril of the seas. Before the submersion began, of course, the searchlight had been drawn in.
“Like the horns of a snail,” was the way one of the onlookers expressed it afterward.
In the meantime, down in the torpedo room, some active work had been going on. By lantern-light, for her electric connections had not yet been repaired, the boys and Tom Marlin, under Lieutenant Parry’s direction, had slid one of the big, heavy, fourteen-foot Whiteheads from its shelf into a sort of conveyor. This carried it to the firing tube, the inner end of which the officer already had swung open.