“Just as unpleasant,” I replied, “as it is pleasant to be shipmates with a man who could.”
After thus rising to the occasion, I was emboldened to ask the captain to tell me a little more about that “luckily-planted depth-charge” he had referred to so casually, and its train of consequences.
“Here is the result,” he said with a smile, handing me several small kodak prints from his pocketbook.
“What little yarn there is to tell I’ll rattle off for you with pleasure after I’ve been up to the bridge for a bit of a ‘look-see.’ Seems as if she is banging into it harder than she ought for this course and speed.”
The light went out as the automatic switch cut off the current with the opening of the door, and when it flashed on again, as the door was slammed shut, I found myself alone, with the prints lying in the middle of the chart of the North Sea. Two of these showed a thin sliver of a submarine that might have been of almost any type. A third, however, showed an unmistakable U-boat, heeling slightly, and with a whaler alongside, evidently in the act of taking off some of the men crowded upon the narrow forward deck. And in the background of this print was lying a long slender four-funneled destroyer that I recognised at once as either the Flash or another of the same class. On the back of this print was written “Quarter view of U.C.—at 14.10. Flash’s whaler transferring prisoners; Splash’s whaler’s crew clearing decks of wounded.”
A fourth print, similar to the third but much covered with arrows and writing, appeared to be a kind of key to the latter. An angling sort of bar, which appeared as a black line above the bows in the photograph, was labelled “Nut Cutter,” and several other characteristic U-boat devices were similarly indicated. These all established points of great technical value, doubtless, but a keener
human interest attached to the legends penciled at the feather ends of arrows pointing to two figures on the deck of the submarine, just abaft the conning-tower. Opposite the one that appeared to be leaning over a light rail, with one arm extended as though he was in the act of giving a command, was written, “Deceased captain of submarine.” Against the other, a sprawling inert heap huddled up against the conning-tower, appeared, “Man with both legs shot off (alive).”
There was a lot of history crowded into that scrawled-over print, and I was still gazing at it with awed fascination when the opening door winked off the light, and then closed again to reveal the captain, dripping with the blown brine of the wave that the Flash had put her nose into at the moment he was coming down the ladder.
“Rather more of a sea than I expected to-night,” he said as he pulled his duffel-coat over his head and sat down to kick off his sea-boots; “so I’ve slowed her down a few knots and we’ll jog along easy till daylight.” Then, as he recognised the photo in my hand, “Rather a grim story that little kodak tells, isn’t it? You’ll find just about all of the yarn you were asking for down there in black and white.”
“Not quite,” I replied hastily, recognising from long experience the forerunning signs of a modest man trying to side-step going into details respecting some episode in which he happens to have