"You've got good eyes an' quick ears. Lay out as far forrard as you can, an' pass the word for steerin'."
Hozier obeyed. The discordant bleat of a foghorn came again, apparently right ahead. In a few seconds he caught the flapping of a propeller, and silenced the launch's engines.
"We are close in now," he said to Coke, after a brief and noiseless drift. "Why not try a hail!"
"Ship ahoy!" shouted Coke, with all the force of brazen lungs.
The screw of the unseen ship stopped. The sigh of escaping steam reached them.
"Holla! Wer rufe?" was the gruff answer.
"Sink me if it ain't a German!" growled Coke, sotto-voce, "Norrie, you must stick here till I sing out to you. Then open your exhaust an' unscrew a sea-cock.… Wot ship is that?" he vociferated aloud.
Some answer was forthcoming—what, it mattered not. The launch bumped into the rusty ribs of a twelve-hundred ton tramp. A rope ladder was lowered. A round-faced Teuton mate—fat and placid—was vastly surprised to find a horde of nondescripts pouring up the ship's side in the wake of a short, thick, bovine-looking person who neither understood nor tried to understand a word he was saying.
These extraordinary visitors from the deep brought with them a girl and three wounded men. By this time the captain was aroused; he spoke some English.
"Vas iss diss?" he asked, surveying the newcomers with amazement, and their bizarre costumes with growing nervousness. "Vere haf you coomed vrom?"