“He was a good deal of a character, this freight clerk. Although well educated, he had led a free and easy existence in various parts of the world. For a year previous to the war he had been a cowboy, and some queer trait in his character made him still cling to the poncho, or shoulder blanket, and baggy trousers, which are the main features of the Argentine cow-puncher’s rigout. It was the Wild West rig that made me notice him when he was knocked down by the bomb and later by the machine-gun fire.
“He was scarcely more hurt the second time than the first, but the bullet which had grooved the outer covering of his brain-box seemed also to have put a new idea inside it. I saw him pull himself together in a dazed sort of way after the seaplane had passed, and then shake off the hand of a man
who tried to help him, and dash off down the ladder, tumbling to cover, I thought.
“It must have been a minute or two later that I saw him, legs wide apart to keep his balance, pumping back at the Hun (who had swung close again in the interim) with a rifle—a weapon which I later learned was an old Winchester, which had been rusting on the wall of the freight clerk’s cabin. He appeared to have had the worst of the exchange, for when I looked again he was sitting, with one leg crumpled crookedly under him, propped up against a bitt.
“He looked still full of fight, though, and seemed to be replenishing the magazine of the rifle from his bandoliers.
“The skipper sent me below to stir things up a bit in the engine-room at this juncture, and I did not see my cowboy friend until he had fought two or three more unequal rounds and was squaring away, groggy, but still unbeaten, for what proved the final one.
“I don’t know whether he ever got credit for it or not, but the Old Man’s plan of action at this juncture must pretty nearly have marked a mile-post in merchant ship defence against aerial attack. We had been instructed in, and had practised the zigzag before this, but that was about the limit of our resources in this line. ‘Squid’ tactics—smoke screening—had hardly been more than thought of for anything but destroyers. Yet the
wily old skipper, literally on a moment’s notice, brought off a stunt that could not have been improved upon if it had been the result of a year’s thought and experience.
“The instant the Hun ‘stumbled’ when he struck the cloud of smoke that was pouring ahead of us, the skipper’s ready mind began evolving a plan still further to besmudge the atmosphere. Today, with special instructions and special stuff ready to hand, a merchant captain, if he needed it, would simply tell the chief engineer to ‘make smoke screen.’
“On this occasion the Old Man meant the same thing when I heard him yelling down the engine-room voice-pipe to ‘Smoke up like hell!’