"Boat ahoy!" The hail came from a seaman stationed aft. He had been indulging in a surreptitious "few puffs" under the lee of the after 4-in. gun, and in a fateful moment had been trying to light his refractory pipe when a red, white, and green steaming light within twenty yards of the destroyer aroused him into super-activity.
"Guard-boat!" shouted a gruff voice, intensified by means of a megaphone.
"Guard-boat, sir!" repeated the lookout for the sub.'s information.
Accompanied by the quartermaster Terence hurried to the side, there to find a dark grey launch, her outlines barely visible against the leaden-coloured white-flecked sea.
From a diminutive cabin aft, the yellow flicker of a lantern feebly illuminated the bronzed features of an officer muffled in oilskins and sou'-wester.
"Night guard!" announced the officer, without any superfluity of speech. "All correct?"
"All correct, sir," replied the quartermaster.
"P'raps," rejoined the officer of the night guard sourly. Making a ten-mile round in a wet launch in the small hours of a winter's morning tended to make him short-tempered. "Where's the officer of the watch?"
"Here, sir," replied Terence.
"Very good. You might warn your lookout to lookout a little more smartly, and not wait until we were alongside your quarter. Where the dickens would you be now, do you suppose, if it had been a German torpedo-boat? It's not unlikely, you know. Good-night."