on account of the presence of the patrol boats, which had evidently been close enough to come to her immediate assistance, we could have been of small use, we had steered directly for the one point where it was most desirable we should make our appearance at that psychological moment: for the point, in short, at which the coolly calculative skipper of the U-boat responsible for the outrage, after running submerged for an hour or more and doubtless figuring he had come sufficiently far from the madding crowd that would throng the immediate vicinity of the wreckage to be at peace, had come up to smoke his evening pipe and cogitate upon the Freedom of the Seas.
It was just as it began to become apparent that we were badly adrift as regards the point where the Marmora had gone down that a whine from the lookout’s voice-pipe reported to the bridge that it had sighted a “sail—port, ten.”
“What is it?” asked back the captain.
“Looks like subm’rine,” came the reply; and with one quick movement the captain had started the alarm-bell sounding “General quarters!” in every part of the ship. With every man knowing precisely what he had to do, and how to do it, there was incredible speed without confusion. Tumbling to their stations like hounds on a hot scent, they yet managed to avoid getting in each other’s way, even in the narrow passages and on the ladders. The
loom of the conning-tower was plain to the naked eye, now that one knew where to look for it, but only for a few minutes. Even as a swiftly passed shell was thrown into the open breech of the forecastle gun, came the look-out’s whine through the voice-pipe, “She’s going down, sir; she’s gone!” The breech of the gun spun shut, but the eye of the sightsetter groped along an empty horizon.
“Never mind,” muttered the captain grimly. “Couldn’t have croaked him with one shot anyhow. Got something better’n shells for him. Now for it,” and his hand went back to pull the wire of a gong which gave certain orders to the men standing-by with the depth-charges. That, a word down the engine-room voice-pipe, and a fraction of a point’s alteration in the course—and there was only one thing left to be done. The time for that had not quite arrived.
Because a destroyer’s engine-room telegraph-hand points to “Full speed!” it does not necessarily mean that there are not ways of forcing more revolutions from the engines, of driving her still faster through the water should the need arise. Such a need now confronted the Zip, and, like the thoroughbred she was, her response was instant and generous. The pulsing throb of her quickened till it was almost a hum; the quivering insistency of it struck straight to the marrow of the bones, drummed in the depths of one’s innermost being.
If there is anything to stir the blood of a man like a destroyer beginning to see red and go Berserk, I have yet to encounter it.
There must have been something like three miles to go from the point where the U-boat had been sighted to the point where the inevitable patch of grease would mark the place where it had submerged, and rather less than twice that many minutes had elapsed when the cry of “Oil slick—starboard bow!” came almost simultaneously from the look-outs in the foretop and on the bridge. Over went the helm a spoke or two, and the executive officer, in his hand a thin piece of board with a table of figures pasted on it, moved up beside the captain. Straight down the wobbly track of iridescent film drove the Zip, and when a certain length of it had been put astern, the captain turned and drew a lever to him with a sharp pull.
Three, four seconds passed, and then, simultaneously with a heavy knocking thud, a round patch of water a hundred yards or so astern quivered and fizzed up sharply like the surface of a glass of whisky-and-soda after the siphon has ceased to play on it. Following that by a second or two, a smooth rounded geyser of foam boiled up a dozen feet or so, and then gradually subsided. That one, plainly, was a deep-set charge, whose force was expended far beneath the surface. A second one threw a geyser twice as high as the first, and a third, which fizzed and spouted almost simultaneously,